Comment by mattgreenrocks
3 hours ago
What “the market wants” is a maximally addictive device. It’s a really low bar even if highly profitable. Bigger screens make it more exciting and addictive.
Just profoundly weird to me that small manufacturers can’t make small phones because they’re small and can’t pay for it, and large manufacturers can’t make it because…(checks notes)…they’re large and don’t want to pay for it even if there’s demand.
My guess would be that all those people that wanted small phones had an iPhone SE and now all their data is locked into Apple's walled garden and that's why they will begrudgingly buy a larger phone, even though they would have preferred a smaller one.
In short: Apple can get away with ignoring what those customers want.
I mean, I would assume most folks who liked the SE still have one. The SE 3 just stopped production this year and should have several years of software updates left (the SE 1 just ended software support this year, 7 years after it was discontinued.
The 3 is not really an SE. It's an iphone 8
When people say SE in the context of wanting skaller phones they generally mean SE 1, which has about the same form factor as iPhone 5.
Not hard to take your data anywhere you wish.
Not hard only when you know exactly what you need to do already on both sides.
There is zero chance I could convince any of my in-laws to switch away from iOS. Data isn't what they care about. It's all about blue bubbles and a decade of familiarity with iOS (and it's irrelevant that the UX between Android and iOS have drifted to be so similar).
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> Just profoundly weird to me that small manufacturers can’t make small phones because they’re small and can’t pay for it, and large manufacturers can’t make it because…(checks notes)…they’re large and don’t want to pay for it even if there’s demand.
Large and small companies sell smaller Android phones.
It's very difficult to find something around 140 grams and 140x80 even giving them some slack about the thickness. The Samsung S25 [1] is about there but I currently still use an A40 [2] because of the size and weight. I'd give away a couple of cm of height. A zero bezel 120mm phone would be ok. 120 grams are a dream.
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s25-13610.php
[2] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_a40-9642.php
Your weight requirements are more restrictive than your size requirements. GSMArena's phone finder found foldable or rugged phones which satisfied size but not weight. And Unihertz phones appear well known where small phones are discussed but are not in GSMArena's database for some reason. The Unihertz Jelly Star satisfied your requirements. But the screen is smaller than the 1st iPhone's even.
The problem is Apple's monopoly on devices that run iOS. In an alternate reality, Apple licensed out iOS, and alternative designs could flourish. The Android ecosystem still has keyboard phones a la Blackberry. Caterpillar makes an Android phone with a FLIR camera. It's a gimmick, unless you work somewhere where it's not.
In this alternate history, there's a tiny design firm out of Carmel, south of Cupertino, doing bespoke runs of an iPhone 4 with A18s and eSIM capability and they're always sold out.
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Can Apple lock-in those people who definitely want small phones by some prepaid arrangements which the users can't back out? That would be market working. Is there a reason why they don't do this?
It's not that they can't. They want to make money. When given the choice between making more money and less money, they'll generally choose more. They think making a smaller device would make less money. The sales numbers for previous attempts back this up. There's an enormous fixed cost for developing a new model, and it's not worthwhile unless that results in enough additional sales. There's demand, for sure, but how much? They think not enough, and I suspect they know what they're doing here.
Can you write down the actual detailed argument?
Just opining that it’s weird can’t possibly be convincing against a consensus amongst all the large smartphone manufacturers.
That's a weird take. Large screens aren't primarily more "addictive", they're primarily more productive. They work as a better e-reader, a better text editor, better for watching a movie on a plane, better for reading maps, I could go on and on. (And if a company were incentivized to truly make an "addicting" phone, it would be Meta that would benefit from the social media ads, or TikTok. Not Apple.)
Large manufacturers can make them. But there isn't enough demand to make them profitable enough. It's not a question of whether they "want to pay for it", it's just simple economics. They're businesses, not charities. I like small phones, but I understand manufacturers are doing what's economically rational given market preferences and I don't blame them for it.
There are studies that show that engagement with smartphones is higher when the screen is larger. Seems like Apple's been doing their homework.
> However, a follow-up phantom model analysis using 10,000 bootstrap samples at 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals revealed that the overall magnitude of the hedonic path (i.e., LS→PAQ→AT→IU; B=0.14, SE=0.06, p<0.01) was larger than that of the utilitarian path (i.e., LS→PC→PEOU→PU→IU; B=0.07, SE=0.03, p<0.01) even though participants were given a task-oriented, rather than entertainment-oriented (e.g., gaming, movie watching), assignment during the experiment. This implies that users are likely to put greater emphasis on the affective dimension of the technology than on its utilitarian dimension, despite the practical, purposeful nature of the assigned task. Given that user affect (e.g., positive or negative feelings) toward a technology is typically attributed as the central characteristic of the technology (regardless of the accuracy of the attribution),55 the practical implication of this finding is that smartphone manufacturers ought to take full advantage of the positive effects of the large screen on PAQ when designing their products. However, the more challenging design implication is that the optimal level of screen size that does not jeopardize the anywhere–anytime mobility of smartphones should first be identified, since screen size cannot be indefinitely increased in the mobile context. Thus, the remaining question to be addressed in future research is the optimal size of the mobile screen.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4080862/
> they're primarily more productive.
But why are we needing a phone to be productive? And they were already a distraction from the world around us when they fit in a single hand.
I know I'm probably abnormal, but my phone is a phone first, camera second, and "work" device fifth.
As a society, our boundaries around communication and instant contact to anyone have collapsed. Now if you don't respond to a message within a few minutes, you get multiple follow ups. If you don't pick up the phone when a friend calls you, they don't leave a message, they text, then call again, then text again.
We've gone from being able to leave the house, and no one can contact us for a few hours, to no matter where we are people are trying to contact us. So they may be more "productive" with larger screens, but we never asked whether they SHOULD be more productive.
Why do you need an iPhone for that? Wouldn’t any old phone work then?
Why do you need phones to not be productive?
Being able to instantly communicate via photo and video makes a lot of people’s lives easier. For example, getting quotes for a house repair to save on travel time and energy getting estimates, showing before and after pictures to document performed work, and myriad more examples.
If someone is contacting you too much, that’s a problem solved by asking them not to harass you, not by putting limits on the device for everyone else.
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There is a number of small Android phones, so apparently there is demand in that niche, and smaller companies can address it and make money.
But this is because Google is a software / service company, so it keeps Android open.
Apple is a hardware company, and always has been. They have a relatively narrow lineup of devices which they support for a very long time, compared to Android devices. So Apple are not interested in fringe markets; they go for the well-off mainstream mostly.