Comment by bscphil
4 years ago
That's fair. On the other hand, if there's a single issue with modern phones that gets HN users raging more than their size, it's the lack of a headphone jack. I don't think I've seen a single issue that's been more complained about. The dominant narrative on HN seems to be that even if one doesn't use headphones personally, the removal of the jack served no purpose other than to pad the pockets of Apple. (Someone even managed to modify their iPhone to add an internal jack without breaking it, so it was definitely possible for Apple to do so without compromises.)
This is a bias in what you notice, not what people care about. Some people care strongly about headphone jacks, but until you have data indicating that some==most, you shouldn't let that feeling turn into a population-based argument.
That's entirely possible, but this whole thread is based on exactly the same perception! The claim, possibly false, is that a sizable portion of HN users want small phones. That could be just visibility bias as well!
My comment is asserting that if we're assuming that the narrative on HN around small phones is not just sampling bias, then it's also good to assume that the narrative around a headphone jack is not just sampling bias. That means we have to believe that a large percentage of users looking for a small phone are also looking for a headphone jack - basically, what I called a "2015" design.
> The claim, possibly false, is that a sizable portion of HN users want small phones. That could be just visibility bias as well!
All you need to do is look at iPhone sales metrics. The iPhone 12 mini and SE2 collectively were 10+% of iPhone sales in the second half of 2020 and first half of 2021. 10% of iPhone sales is 24 million phones per year.
> if we're assuming that the narrative on HN around small phones is not just sampling bias
_We_ aren't. You shouldn't be assuming anything about some supposed narrative on HN at all, and you definitely shouldn't trust your own perceptions of such a narrative when you've already shown that you mentally translate "I and also I saw some comments some times" into "90+% of everyone here".
Such a narrative not only doesn't really exist, even if it did exist it still wouldn't matter, because, again, we have sales numbers for small iPhones that prove that people buy tens of millions of them annually when available.
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