Comment by stetrain
5 hours ago
Which is perhaps why Apple tried the iPhone Mini, to go back and see if they were missing a large market segment. Their answer was that some people bought it, but not enough to justify the product at Apple's scale.
There isn't a grand conspiracy to make everyone sad with big phones they don't want.
> Their answer was that some people bought it, but not enough to justify the product at Apple's scale.
This is the key thing. It’s not that no one wants it. But it’s a lot of engineering to produce another distinct hardware model and the market is tiny compared to the larger models.
Anecdotally, I, personally, know several people who bought the iPhone mini, some of them still using it.
I still blame Apple for considering that 3% of total iPhone sales is a failure. And then launching the iPhone air, as if it will do any better...
And I know several people who bought and are passionate about small, lightweight 2-door cars with manual transmissions.
Sometimes that isn’t enough to justify dedicating a mass production line to that product.
But it somehow is enough to do that for things like the Mac Pro or the Mac Studio that are clearly niche products compared to the rest of the Mac lineup?
I'm not sure it's fair to compare cars to phones or other tech products. Phones are not very repairable these days, but even if you manage to keep a 15-year-old phone working, the unnecessarily ever-changing protocols, APIs, and standards will render it unusable for most practical purposes. So you're kinda forced to upgrade every now and then. A 15-year-old car though? It takes the same fuel and drives on the same roads as brand-new ones. And spare parts are most certainly still available.
2 replies →
Apple will have like 15 macbook skus but a small iphone is the straw that breaks the camels back.
They don't have 15 different Macbook chassis sizes. Most of those SKUs are swapping SoC and memory configurations on the same board and chassis design.
By that logic the iPhone 17 (base model) is at least 24 SKUs.
If for example the 15" MacBook Air ended up being less than 3% of Mac sales, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple killed it off.