Comment by nikanj
2 months ago
Every now and then some phone manufacturer mistakes online sentiment for actual demand and gets burned making a mini phone that won’t sell
2 months ago
Every now and then some phone manufacturer mistakes online sentiment for actual demand and gets burned making a mini phone that won’t sell
I've been IT operations for years, and when I order laptops I sometimes do a little experiment. If I ask people if they want a 15.6" laptop or a 13" laptop, they always say 15.6. If I don't give them a choice and just start buying 13" laptops, everybody tells me how much they love the smaller laptop, and people still on the 15.6" models start looking around asking when they can get the smaller one.
People don't know what they want unless you give it to them.
I never understood big laptops (at least for work, where you walk around with them), there's always a screen to plug into.
At home, ok, at the kitchen table it can be handy to have some more real-estate, but again just for "light work" and entertainment I'd say.
My eyes want a 19" laptop these days.
Exactly. I rather miss the 15.6" Toshiba Satellite Pro A300 I had when I emigrated, a decade back.
It wasn't very portable, no, but around the house, it was great. Good sized full-travel keyboard, numeric keypad, lots of ports, and a nice big clear comfortable eye-friendly screen. Two SATA bays, so I could have the affordable combination (a dozen years ago) of a small fast SSD for the OS and a huge big cheap HDD for the data. Tiny trackpad, but I used a mouse.
There is a 17" classic Thinkpad before they went to nasty thin fashion-follower keyboards, but they only seem to be available in the USA and even given my fondness for old Thinkpads, I am not willing to pay £1000 for a second-hand decade-old one.
What 5-ish inch screen phone has even been released within the past 5 years? The only ones I can think of are the Unihertz phones, and those don't get a single update after getting shoved out the door, not to mention that they're probably full of Chinese backdoors. I'd buy that exact phone in a heartbeat if it didn't have those problems, and all the other ones I've seen have similar dealbreakers.
The Phonemax R4 GT uses a 4.3" screen and was released this year.
There are not many, but there are not zero either.
If 5-ish includes 5.7", then the Librem 5 that I'm typing this on would qualify. It's still borderline too big for my tastes though.
iPhone had the 12 and 13 mini, but they didn't sell, so there was no iPhone 14 mini and hasn't been one since. That was a 5.4" display.
> but they didn't sell
What do you call "didn't sell" ? In numbers.
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I skipped that one because my SE 2 was less than a year old and I didn't want to go up a size.
I cherish my iPhone 12 Mini and treat it with great care as it is the form factor I want and I want it to last as long as possible.
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iPhone SE 3 was released in 2022
Very fair. I skipped it because my SE 2 was still going strong when that came out, which I kind of regret now, since I can't get a new SE 3 anymore.
Yeah...like Apple: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...
As someone holding onto their iPhone mini 13 for dear life, I hope they will release a one off in a few years once support for the 13 mini ends.
Yeah I feel like putting it closer to the SE lifecycle is must be a better decision than fully axing the mini lineup. If we get a mini 13, then a mini 19 or 20? I can live with that.
Only Apple would consider selling millions, but not tens of millions a failure.
Right. We don’t know that Apple didn’t make money. Only that they didn’t make enough money. By whatever definition they used.
Make a smaller phone with good battery life, not smaller AND thinner. The iPhone minis barely got me through the workday, let alone a full day.
Small phones are also way less addictive. It's not in the interest of the mobile ecosystem.
How do you assess that? I'd imagine it would be more along the lines of is the phone frictionless to use?
This is just an anecdote but I owned every Google Nexus phone they made up to Nexus 5. A series of bugs caused priceless videos to get ruined and I decided to try iPhone after that. I didn't realize just how much I unconsciously hated using the Nexus phone and that contributed to me not actually adopting smartphone software until I got the iPhone. When the phone and the OS were a burden it led to the phone being avoided. I dont know which was better. I appreciate the battery life, camera and general stability but I hate the new addictions to social media it has caused.
Just evaluating my dependency. Was way lower with a small phone than with my 6 inch.
It could be assessed by a study, I have opinions until then.