Bigger phones encourage more user engagement and more screen space to show ads.

Smaller phones are used by people who use it less.

I have only anecdotal data, pretty sure google has the analytics to find that out.

I put Bloomberg TV on the other day, just because it's one of the easy to access channels on a Roku I was setting up, and that experience makes me agree with your statement about space to show ads. It wasn't full of ads (yet?), but the tiny actual video surrounded by huge amounts of other content reminded me strongly of the TV future shown in Idiocracy.

https://www.bloombergmedia.com/press/bloombergtv/

Bloomberg's ads are slightly separate from their regular ads; the "other content" is still news most of the time - Bloomberg is at its heart a data and news feed company (the video news is mostly an add-on for them), so they are doing what they do best anyway. "Idiocracy" is an interesting example; while the style is similar, the side content on BTV, while a pale shadow of the actual terminal, is actually quite information-rich (especially on BTV+); the actual terminal is entirely populated by feed/data/whatever function you're using.

I am on an iPhone SE 3rd gen. due to the small form factor. It is already annoying to surf the web even with an adblocker, lots of cookie banners, notes, requests to install app/signup etc. take so much screen space that you can see no content. Clearly developers do not test or care for small screens anymore.

> yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them

I don't buy this. The iPhone 13 Mini all by itself sold 6 million units in a year. That's about half the rate of Google's entire Pixel lineup. The market is small, yeah, but it definitely exists. I think a company could quietly make a high quality, straightforward, small Android device with maybe every-other-year hardware updates, and run away with a whole corner of the market all to itself.

Smaller phones tend to have a lower price point.

If they don't offer a smaller phone, you'll eventually buy a bigger phone. Once you are in camp big phone, you'll probably be back on the 2-5 year device treadmill. And you'll be spending more on the big phones.

Apple is in a continuous state of not giving their customers what they want.

A convertible Macbook with a touch screen and dual MacOS/IOS personalities would sell out. They will never make it because no one will ever buy an iPad again.

A high quality TV with Apple TV built in at a premium but reasonable price would sell like hotcakes. It would compete with Apple Cinema displays, however.

A basic "good enough" 5 inch phone for $499 would also sell fast.

Apple won't do these things because you'd be happier but spend less.

> A high quality TV with Apple TV built in at a premium but reasonable price would sell like hotcakes. It would compete with Apple Cinema displays, however.

With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.

> A basic "good enough" 5 inch phone for $499 would also sell fast.

This was the iPhone SE sold for many years until Feb 2025. It started at $430. It’s unfortunate they got rid of it for a 6inch 16E, but it is pretty reasonable on price at $600.

> With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.

If you were a person that likes Apple TV, I imagine it would be nice to have a TV that was just that rather than a TV with whatever smartness the maker insisted on, plus a standalone Apple TV. (Even nicer would be a TV without smarts, but those seem to be extinct)

Yes, a privacy preserving TV that lacks home screen ads, forced updates, automatic content recognition (ACR), etc.

Apple TV has by far the fastest processor in a TV set-top box. The interface is much cleaner and faster than any smart TV. And I'm sure Apple could do best in class 4k or 8k AI upscale, and live AI captioning w/ translation. They also have the lawyers needed to do some of the AI transformation and deal with the inevitable lawsuits from copyright holders.

They are probably also smart enough to class it as a "smart monitor", delete the TV tuners, and avoid lots of local regulatory requirements that way.

Could be a very competitive product as long as the price is no worse than Sony Bravia.

You can't just look at units sold, you have to look at net units sold because the version of the product existed.

For example, if 5.9 million of those 6 million people would have bought the larger iPhone model anyway, then you didn't actually gain much by offering the Mini unit.

I have no idea what those numbers are, though.

> You can't just look at hamburger sales to judge hamburger demand. You have to consider an alternate universe where hamburgers aren't on the menu, then subtract all the people who would have ordered something else for lunch vs going hungry.

I know this probably is how the decisions get made. Especially if the alternative has a higher profit margin. I just have to say I think the world is worse for it.

That's an important analysis but it's answering a different question from whether the product would sell enough to make a nice profit.

And it only works when there are notable deficits in competition. Otherwise a company with less to cannibalize would make the smaller model and get themselves 3-6 million sales.

> For example, if 5.9 million of those 6 million people would have bought the larger iPhone model anyway, then you didn't actually gain much by offering the Mini unit.

If nothing else, you could still give the mini a higher margin and make some gains that way.

That’s another issue, those same users won’t tolerate paying more for a smaller phone. They’re picky and principled, which is a customer type that is just not worth chasing at scale.

Hi, my name is PickyAndPrincipled. Ha, that describes me perfectly and is the reason why I still use a Pixel 4a. It works still great and has a nice form factor.

And that’s fine! Just don’t be surprised when new phone manufacturers don’t see an incentive in catering to you.

This thread seems to have a lot of people that love the iPhone mini (me included - I still use my 12 mini).

But from all reports that you can find with a quick search it seems clear that it did not sell well by Apple standards.

I would love them to bring it back and I’m not sure what it is about the Hacker News crowd that makes this phone over-represented. Maybe the tech crowd also uses laptops more, so we think of phones as our “small device” and use other devices more as appropriate?

> by Apple standards

Yeah. The question I'm trying to answer is not "does it make sense for Apple to make a small phone?", but rather "does it make sense for anyone to make a small phone?" I'm using the 13 Mini's sales data as evidence, because it is the one and only small phone made in the past decade or so.

I understand why you'd reach for that data, not a ton of other alternatives... But I'm not convinced that an arbitrarily chosen brand could achieve those sales figures. Especially if it was a new or no-name brand that didn't have a proven track record with software updates and hardware build quality.

Maybe I'm just incredibly naive but I have this small hope that we'll see a return to smaller phones that are trifolds for when you need the real estate.

I tend to like smaller phones as well, but even comparing the Pixel 9 Pro vs Pixel 9 Pro XL used markets, it seems really hard to find non-XL versions. I would totally believe that the XL is a far more popular model, unfortunately for the rest of us.

Apple said the mini iPhones underperformed, but they were not some sort of commercial failure. They sold millions of units. Numbers most Android OEMs could only dream of for a single flagship model. Current day Apple is all about optimizing and determined that still wasn't enough, and I imagine the manufacturing for small, specialized display panels certainly took a chunk out of those margins, so Apple decided to pull the plug.

Myself and the people who said we wanted a smaller phone may be a vocal minority but we did buy the small phone when we were offered it. After I used the 12 mini for 2 years, I bought a 14 Pro since no mini was offered in the 14 generation, but I returned it a week later cause it was too big/heavy and bought a 13 mini. These days I'm using a 16 Pro since no mini is offered and the titanium did help a lot with the weight issue, but if they brought back mini phones I'd happily sacrifice the camera for a reasonably sized screen.

The number of people who aren't vocal tech people who actually want a smaller phone is a very small part of the market. In HN-like circles they're a notable minority but among the general population they are a smaller percentage. Especially when you consider huge segments of the market where your phone is your only computing device: a smaller phone is a massive anti-feature in large parts of the world.

Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.

The sales numbers just don't justify it. Like people who pine for manual transmissions: they're vocal in car forums and publications but they're a tiny minority and making one is a money-loser even in the sports car segment.

Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair. A better car analogy is pickup trucks (and cars in generally really) — they've gotten huge over the years, compact pickups have disappeared, and you hear the same arguments about it being a niche audience. The reality is that as soon as something sells well (big trucks in this case), these big corporations go all in on it and alienate large segments. Now 25 year old compact Tacomas are selling for as much as their MSRP and manufacturers (Toyota, Ford, Hyundai) are all scrambling to ship a compact. It's the same with small phones — the industry over-rotated on big phones and as soon as someone ships a good small phone, it'll be a hit and small phones will come back. iPhone Mini was a crippled device compared to the Pro line and it still sold millions. Google and Samsung haven't even tried to make something compact, let alone compact and good.

> Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair

I'm not much of a car person but I thought stick shift also had the benefits of:

  1. engine braking
  2. being able to jump start a car with a dead battery by pushing it down a hill while turning the ignition and shifting into 2nd gear (which my sister successfully did after school one day).

> Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.

The last time I bought a phone I chose Samsung S22, which was way out of my initially intended budget, for the sole reason that there were not any smaller options available below its price range.

> almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway

The problem is that smaller phones are usually fundamentally flawed in ways that aren’t about the smaller screen. Whether it’s a worse CPU, worse camera or smaller battery, people are almost never making their purchasing decision based on screen size with all else being equal. I don’t think we can conclude that most people who ask for a smaller screen don’t really want one because many just don’t want a slow phone that takes worse photos and dies by midafternoon.

I think there needs to be a recognition that bigger screens aren’t only about the bigger screens. They’re also about giving phone designers more internal space to cram in components and a larger battery.

The iPhone minis were the first one to not sacrifice on those things, except for battery life compared to other iPhones. Same great display tech as the normal sized iPhone of that year, same SoC, same camera.

Even with the smaller battery, iOS is so aggressive with background tasks anyway, the iPhone 12 mini was my first iPhone and I got better battery life with it than any of my Androids I used over the span of a decade, even giant ones like the Nexus 6P, despite obsessively trying to install background task killer solutions and whatnot that were supposed to save on battery.

There was very little sacrifice with the mini iPhones, for the first time in modern "small" smartphones

In the UK manual cars are still prolific. It's still about half of new cars are manual

I directly addressed the hard sales numbers, we don't need to talk about overrepresentation in HN/tech circles. The napkin math off public numbers tells us the iPhone mini sold 6 million units in the same year Google sold 10 million Pixels total, across all devices. So if 6 million units isn't enough to indicate demand for a niche phone, then there isn't enough demand for the Pixel lineup to exist either, only marginally more.

It's only a small number compared to Apple's total number of iPhones sold which is an astronomical stat to compare to. I don't think it's fair to compare mini phone demand against total iPhone sales.

My wife carries an iPhone 13 mini and hates the new frickin' huge iPhones. If it breaks I suppose I'll buy her a new one of those. If the OS refuses to update because the phone is too old, I guess we'll get a new frickin' huge iPhone, but only under protest.

iPhone 14 Pro = Weight 206 g (7.27 oz)

iPhone 16 Pro = Weight 199 g (7.02 oz)

The weight difference (7 grams) seems negligible

It's slight, but noticeable. The 15 Pro was 187g and felt much lighter than the 14 Pro, it's a shame they added more weight on the 16.

Well the 16 Pro has a 0.2" larger screen and large dimensions than the 14 pro and 15 pro.

Also the 17 Pro will now be aluminum which is even lighter than titanium, so it should be a bit lighter than the 16 Pro I think.

Interestingly I have seen a high share of iPhone Minis in my tech-affine bubble around Berlin / Amsterdam etc. - also my grandma switched from SE to 13 Mini.

Also bought used iPhone SE (2016) in 2019 and 2020 - both time from (UX) designers - but the same people also ride bicycles, trains - or if car, really reflect their user requirements - be it a small EV or a van for vanlife.

Average consumers just buy the largest, most marketed (high margin) or "whatever the neighbour has" option - aka SUV or Pro Max.

The problem is for many years now the smallest phone available has been getting larger and larger. This has lead small phone enthusiasts to cling to their old phones as long as they can stand it until they are forced to step to a larger model.

Ultra principled users rarely if ever buy new devices or have predictable purchasing patterns in almost any way. Trying to appease this market is mostly a fools game, as they have learned.

I think it's like how everyone smart knows that small hatchbacks are the only cars worth buying, and everyone smart also knows that only idiots buy new cars. So, all new cars are made for idiots and no small hatchbacks get made :)

I’m sorry what? I read that comment and all I see is someone incapable of understanding that other people’s needs differ from their own, and only _smart_ people pick the choice that they themselves would make. It reeks of ignorance and being judgemental.

Haha. To close the loop on the comparison, you'll notice that the people I'm calling smart do not get what they want, in the end. Maybe not so smart after all, eh?

Doubling down is bold, but to be honest if you had the self reflection required to see my point, you wouldn’t have said what you said in the first place.

It is only your blind ego that is making you incorrectly assume these things about other people.

Sigh. I'm poking fun at the people I'm calling "smart", because they are too clever for their own good. Chill out a little, friend.

I mean, act smug and flippant and superior and get treated like you’re acting smug and flippant and superior.

I'm exactly that person. Always running an older device and lamenting the lack of small devices. Unfortunately, the mainstream wants big devices, so we all get big devices.

It’s a HN meme at this point. For as long as I can remember, almost every single phone announcement on this site inevitably gets a bunch of comments about how it’s too big and how a smaller version would sell like hotcakes. You would think that phone manufacturers would have figured this out by now, but what do they know.

Lol yep. They always seem to think that the companies haven’t considered this properly and are missing out on some imagined huge market haha

I don't see what I feel is the obligatory "I want a small Android phone!" post here yet: https://smallandroidphone.com/

Probably. I don't expect the market to cater to me when I don't cater to it. The only reason I ditched my iPhone 5 in 2019 was the carrier entirely stopped service for it. I don't like my new 12 mini as much.

I recently had to replace my Pixel 7 Pro and went with the Galaxy S25. My hands are much larger than average and it is amazing how unweildy I find the Pixel 7 Pro is in comparison to the S25 even though the size difference doesn't seem that big when compared side to side. Makes me wonder how people with normal sized hands deal with the massive phones.

Who's actually making 5.5" phones to prove that though apart from the iphone 13 mini? These chinese phones often tend to be 4" instead of 5.5" and often come with with massive downsides like awful cameras or being very thick

Nobody is saying they aren't the least popular, but there are certainly many who would still buy them.

They probably figure if they stop making them then most people will reluctantly move to a bigger model.