Comment by dijit
16 hours ago
we’ll be waiting a while. The last Mini was iPhone 8 sized, when I considered anything larger than the 5 to be too much.
The Mini thus, undersold, because if you were fine with the 8 then iPhones of that size were still available (2nd Gen SE). Nobody bought: So Apple thinks theres no market.
> The last Mini was iPhone 8 sized
It was smaller than the iPhone 8. It was slightly thicker (0.01"), shorter (by 0.27") and narrower (0.13"). And it had a bigger display despite being overall smaller. It was bigger than the 5, though.
maybe I'm misremembering the dimensions of the 8.
I did, however, take a series of photos comparing the Mini to the SE- and the packaging of the 6 (I think I gave the phone away but still had the box).
https://imgur.com/a/iphone-mini-vs-iphone-5-vs-iphone-6-case...
https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-13-mi...
The SE was the one that shared the 8's dimensions, the Mini was smaller than both. That Mini appears to be in a case, so the comparison photos aren't as useful as they'd be otherwise.
(Also, it looks like I couldn't do arithmetic earlier or typo'd the number, the Mini is 0.12" narrower, not 0.13").
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Always seemed like a marketing issue on Apple's part. People have different opinions when they actually see and handle the Mini. Apple appended so many "Pro" and "Max" names to everything which ended up creating a "status symbol" that was contrary to the actual needs of the consumer to have a more reasonably sized phone. "Fablets" weren't particularly popular for that reason, and Apple still managed to lead people down this road.
I think you forgot the history.
Apple was the last hold out with small phones, years after everybody else moved to huge phones.
But even Apple couldn't resist the pressure from the consumers, and eventually yielded.
The mini was released six months after the SE2 was released, which many SE1 owners holding out for a new smaller iPhone had already migrated to. Then Apple presented the mini in a joke-y manner in the keynote, didn’t do any publicity afterwards, and neither did the carriers (because the mini was lower-margin for them I presume). Lastly, the iPhone 12 gen had particularly bad battery life, which also hurt the mini. With today’s battery improvements, it would be much better (as demonstrated by the iPhone Air’s good battery life). Apple could at least have taken the option to make the “e” line mini-sized.
Yet they sold more minis than Google sells Pixels.
And somehow we ended up with more Pixels and not minis.