In all fairness, Apple didn't expect the market to want giant phones, and were very late with big screens.

Releatedly: It's fun to look at old Futurama episodes, where they joke about phones becoming so small you accidentally inhale them while talking.

We all really thought size was going one way and that was down.

Well it is annoying as a 6ft 2 guitar player(I'm saying I have big flexible hands) I still need both hands to do most phone things, like type this.

My Galaxy 5 and 6 were the last the worked well one handed. The "small" phones available are still larger than those most of the time! Guess the demand just isn't there, tho I wish some were still available. Can't imagine how tiny ladies with small hands deal.

Being a 6'2" tall guitar player doesn't actually say big hands. There is some correlation between hand size and height, but plenty of variation. I'm a 6'1" tall guitar player and I have small hands.

Here's an interesting paper on hand size and height: Guerra, R., Fonseca, I., Pichel, F. et al. Hand length as an alternative measurement of height. Eur J Clin Nutr 68, 229–233 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ejcn.2013.220.

Here's what they did:

> A cross-sectional study was conducted using a consecutive sample of 465 inpatients (19–91 years), from a university hospital. Participants were randomly divided into a development sample of 311 individuals and a cross-validation one. A linear regression model was used to formulate the equation. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) for single measures and differences between measured height (MH) and PH and between BMI calculated with MH (BMIMH) and with PH (BMIPH) were determined.

and here were the results:

> The regression equation for PH is: PH (cm)=80.400+5.122 × hand length (cm)—0.195 × age (years)+6.383 × gender (gender: women 0, men 1) (R=0.87, s.e. of the estimate=4.98 cm). MH and PH were strongly correlated, ICCs: 0.67-0.74 (P<0.001). Differences were small, mean difference±s.d., ⩽−0.6±4.4 cm (P⩾0.24). BMIMH and BMIPH were strongly correlated, ICCs: 0.94-0.96 (P<0.001). Differences were small, ⩽0.3±1.7 kg/m2 (P⩾0.10).

Here's that regression equation in easy to read form, where H is the predicted height in cm, H is hand length in cm, G is 0 for women and 6.383 for men, and A is age in years:

  H = 80.400 + 5.122 L - 0.195 A + G

Plugging in my H, A, and G and solving for L I get 21.8 cm. My actual hand size is 19.5 cm.

Going the other way, from my hand size, age, and gender my predicted height is 5'8".

Perhaps Apple didn't want to cannibalize iPad or Mac sales? I don't know the timeline on this.

Small phones certainly make sense early on when phones were an additional computer for most people. Fast forward to now and for many people they are their only computer and have a greater need of the versatility that a larger screen can provide.

iOS and the apps were all written for a single dude screens. It wasn’t until around iOS 5/ios 6 that iOS could handle multiple screen sizes

It's 3.5", 135g :) Those were the days!

In hindsight it is funny that Apple used someone with very big hands holding the first iPhone in their 2007 ads to make it look smaller. Nobody at that time could imagine that phones would only get bigger.

iPhones got bigger in terms of screen size, but Apple remained obsessed with lighter and thinner phones for many years after that. It's hard to remember this, but some of the earlier smartphones like the Palm Trio were giant awful bricks. You can't really convey weight in a picture, but you can convey size.

Wow I'm just remembering the girth of those devices. My family had some later palm and similar devices... closer to an address book or gaming devices in thickness. My mom's case was like 3/4 an inch deep, 3-4 in wide and like ~6in deep. Not light, and kinda fragile.

It is clear that a lot of people commenting about this (here and in other threads) don't really get it. The iPhone mini wasn't (mainly) about the form factor, it was about pricing and market segmentation. They even say:

> Analyse what could be Apple’s next release of “iPhone mini” to mass market price points and plan counter-measures for it.

The only thing they got wrong was that it wasn't Apple that released this mass market priced smartphone, it was Android that filled the "iPhone mini" role. But for the purposes of this presentation, that's the same thing: a non-Nokia competitor dominating this niche.