I love the size, the headphone jack, the price, and I get iOS and don't have to worry about the security and update issues of Android. What's not to like? :)

TBH, I probably would have upgraded to an iPhone XR had I not grabbed the SE on clearance but I ended up saving ~$500 so I'm happy how it turned out.

There's definitely a market for phones that are affordable, that can fit in your hand and run iOS. /shrug

But it was not popular in terms of volume. If you need any evidence of this, just look for Android phones with a screen under 4.5" containing a Qualcomm 825 CPU or better.

Actually, try and find any Android phone sold by any US cellular carrier under 5", never mind 4.5". This is not just an Apple-style opinionated decision, the whole market has spoken on this.

My honest belief is that people stopped buying small phones when the screen size trade-off didn't save them any significant money. I also believe that some portion of people who are vocal about the inevitable, eventual disappearance of the 4" screen aren't necessarily even using these small phones, but aren't happy about their disappearance out of some kind of principal or nostalgia.

I don't know that any of us would agree to use a 15" 1024x768 display again, even if it was free. I think it's the same concept.

As a consumer I don't remember even being given the option of buying any small phones (besides the now discontinued iPhone SE) for the last handful of years.

> I also believe that some portion of people who are vocal about the inevitable, eventual disappearance of the 4" screen aren't necessarily even using these small phones

I'm using my SEs as much as possible, but due to the limitations of iOS it's not feasible for me to use them as my primary work phone. This means I can choose between carrying two phones, carrying one that's too large, or significantly reducing my access to work resources on the go.

[EDIT] actually I suspect this is a common reason for purchasing larger phones and the phone makers know this, and are using the large-size-better-camera pairing to charge me $300-500 more for the better camera, instead of $100.

http://j.mp/2XzLuEV

That's like observing that small cars don't do well with luxury buyers. Well, true -- because carmakers have chosen not to make small high-end cars. I've had friends tell me they wanted to buy a smaller car but the interior wasn't nearly as nice so they bought a bigger model. They'd rather have a car that's too big than get a second-rate dashboard and seats.

So I'm not sure why you're pointing to supply and claiming that it's indicative of demand of one particular attribute. Even more than with cars, the history of cell phones is companies making the wrong thing, and then having their lunch eaten by some other company. 15 years ago, all my friends had Blackberrys or Palms, but today nobody would say "The market had spoken" and everybody wanted hardware QWERTY keyboards and styluses. People didn't have a choice. These companies were seeing exponential growth, right up until a better choice was available.

Also, the desktop display comparison is out of left field. My desk is plenty big enough for two big displays, while my pants pockets aren't big enough for even one 'phablet'. I don't have to move my fingers across every pixel of my desktop displays to use them. It's completely different -- ergonomics, use cases, hardware, OS, apps, and so on.

Whenever there are fewer companies C than the exponent 2^R of the number of relevant attributes R, consumers don't have a sufficient number of axes of control to communicate to product designers purely through market forces.

(There's a name for that law, in the context of systems control theory, but I can never remember what it is.)

sigh or they make it but don't bring it to the US. Why no Mercedes A Class hatchback for us!?

As a happy user of mid- to low-end phones, I don't need anything in the 800 range. Decent 600s works for me. However, I'd love to have a site that allowed searching and comparisons based on maximum screen size. 'Nothing smaller than X' seems to be a near universally available filter, but good luck with 'Nothing larger than X.'

And I don't know if this is common or special to Huawei but my 5.2" Honor 8 also has a nice "drag across the home button bar" that shrinks the screen down to the bottom left or right in a roughly 4" screen size area. Very convenient for one hand use.