Comment by nikanj

2 hours 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.

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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

    • I skipped that one because my SE 2 was less than a year old and I didn't want to go up a size.

  • 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.

Only Apple would consider selling millions, but not tens of millions a failure.

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.