Comment by mmmmmbop
14 hours ago
100%. It was so funny to see how for years, everyone on HN was harping on about how well a smaller iPhone would sell. Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.
Basically, try to do the opposite of what HN is saying and you might just create a successful product.
It was an lower spec, gimped version to be fair. No one in the market for a new phone on launch day is excited to buy a lower end, worse battery & camera version that's missing multiple features present on the other versions.
I kept an iPhone Mini until an App I need for work started consuming so much memory it became unusable on it (iOS would kill it after 15s). Even then, I raised ticket after ticket with support to get them to fix their app – which they did, then slipped again, for months.
Now I own a 17 pro, which feels like a brick in comparison but has 12 GB of RAM instead of 4.
I really miss my mini.
Fun fact: The iPhone Duo‘s outer display is 5.4 inch, just like the iPhone mini. Ok, with different proportions.
And different price tag
You could have bought an Air and been closer to your Mini than the Pro is...
You're just proving the point of this thread by pining for a niche phone that almost no one wanted enough to actually own.
You think this big clunky thing isn’t going to be a niche at $2000?
Apple sold around six million Mini models per year that they were on sale.
It's hard to envisage a boardroom scenario where that's not considered successful, but apparently it exists.
Apple sold ~230M iPhones the year the mini was discontinued. 2% is an unquestionable failure.
-an iPhone mini fan
So much for the long tail I guess. Tough luck if you want anything quirky or unique, society will only manufacture for the mainstream taste.
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6/230 seems closer to 3%. And while the number is relatively low, it seems to be a niche where they might lose customers to other platforms. It must have been unprofitable/very expensive to maintain that they killed it.
OTOH, it's Apple, so users would rather buy a bigger iPhone and complain than switching brands (see other comments here), in which case Apple loses nothing.
I don't get that mentality. Millions of units, shares many parts with other models, OK margin. This is no reason to kill a product.
For comparison, that's roughly like Ford killing the Bronco Sport, or VW killing the ID.7.
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The mini was not mini enough.
https://youtu.be/FJgTKx-rg18?si=LRWaCeOMC5z-dLOg very relevant video from almost 10 years back which was about Oneplus but says the same thing in much greater depth.
I'm going on ebay to buy old iPhone 13 Minis because I hate giant phones
> Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.
And by "nobody", you mean "actually a lot of people, just not as many as the bigger model". It's ok to have a model that meets a less common, but still extant, need in the market. If everyone followed Apple's logic on this, people with very small or very large bodies would have to go naked because companies would go "that size doesn't sell as much, we have to kill it" rather than (as actually happens) charging more per unit to make up for the overhead of lower volumes of sales.
The mini accounted for 3% of sales. Personally I’m a believer, and a buyer, but 3% isn’t a good number.
By that logic a supermarket would sell only 33 items.
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"Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air. Supposedly they're gonna refresh the Air next year, we'll see. But even if they don't: we're well into the "keep phones 3 years or more" era of the smart phone. You don't need an exact match for every phone for everybody every year.
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6 to 7 million units is a good number.
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It's not ok if it uses resources that could be better spent elsewhere. At 3% share what do you expect them to do?