Comment by bigstrat2003
16 hours ago
> 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.
Only if they’re also the manufacturer of all of the products they sell, and they probably would in that case.
Trader Joe's limited SKU model. They are also 4x more profitable than a standard supermarket per square foot of store space.
"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.
> "Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air.
The iPhone air has a 6.5" display. That's bigger than the base iPhone 17 (6.3") and the iPhone 17e (6.1")
You're probably thinking about the thinness of the phone. iPhone air is 2.4mm thinner than iPhone 17, but I don't think anyone is asking for that, as most people use a case which makes the phone thicker.
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But I think you do need some level of consistency to retain customers. Churning models, especially given Apple's otherwise-excellent retention metrics and mechanisms, seems like a self-goal by almost encouraging those buyers to switch after 3 years.
If you bought an iPhone Mini or an Air, but that model is gone at T+3 years, that's a lot more likely to result in you looking to Android, than if you bought an iPhone 13 and want to upgrade to an iPhone 16/17.
The Air wasn't "smaller", it was thinner in some areas and as far as I can tell just a pathfinder for a folding phone
6 to 7 million units is a good number.
6 to 7 million units at the scale of Apple is not necessarily worth the investment.
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I'm sorry, how many units?
It's not ok if it uses resources that could be better spent elsewhere. At 3% share what do you expect them to do?