Agree, and as an ex-mini user, I wish this was the world we lived in.

I presume the problem is that iPhones are a lot more expensive to produce than tomato sauce, and it's a lot more difficult to get rid of the ones that people don't buy.

I would go for a chunky iPhone.

just gave up mine last month.

I kept seeing people mention the 13 mini but I always thought the 12 mini was the last mini. Just looked it up and I see why now, seems like the 13 mini is barely different from the 12 mini.

They added just enough battery capacity to make it thru the day. Thats about it.

That's enough of an improvement, tbh

I had the 13 mini and now the 12 mini and the 13 mini was noticeably better - battery life, camera, screen brightness (big difference when using phone on a bike for navigation)

Iphone 13 mini has a bigger battery. This is quite relevant, because the Iphone 12 mini battery life is quite bad.

The CPU in the 13 Mini is something like 20-30% more power efficient, making it much more viable given the small battery capacity of the phone.

My pet theory about why the Minis sold poorly is that the 12 Mini was released just a few months after the SE 2; I suspect a lot of the would-be Mini purchasers had just bought an SE 2 instead (not knowing the Mini was just around the corner), and are also not a demographic interested in upgrading their phone every year.

My pet theory is that having to charge the phone twice a day was a deal breaker. We wanted small, not "impossibly thin" and always dead.

Didn't the SE models sell notoriously bad as well?

There are always a bunch of us who wants a smaller phone, but the sales number indicates that we are the minority.

To some extend I also think it explains the increasingly thin phones. With the increases in screen size, they need to make the phones thinner, otherwise it would feel like a brick in your pocket.

The SE3 has bad selling because it is exactly the same SE2 with upgrade SOC. People buying SE phone mostly don't care about SOC performance.

No. Even the 2022—which was intentionally nerfed—sold 15-20 million and ranked in the top ten best-selling phones.

Wasn't eight of the ten best selling phones iPhones? It was even beaten by the iPhone 14 line up, which was only for sale in four out of the twelve months, while the SE was available for all twelve.

You're right that it was good sales figures for a smartphone, but not great for an iPhone.

My theory is rather about battery life:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44588733

I always point out that the minis were a billion dollar product. Most companies would DIE for a billion dollar product.

Apple is like CBS in that regard - shows with viewers that other networks would kill for get canceled at CBS because they expect more. Apple doesn’t get as much ROI on phones that sell in the low ten millions or low single digit percentage of the market. But I do think they could put those phones on a slow refresh cycle and teach e.g. Mini or Plus users to wait for the next release and stack that market together over a few years to be worthwhile to them.

Apple could easily keep a "mini" around as the lightweight option for folks who don't want a pocket tablet

Hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in design, engineering and manufacturing is not easily.

I'm trying to hang on to my 13 mini until next year, when hopefully Apple will have figured out Apple Intelligence and upgrade the phone hardware to run it. But I'm worried my 13 mini won't make it that long. It's starting to struggle with even basic apps and lags just reading news articles. Battery is still at over 80% though

My 13 mini works great. Just got a replacement on Swappa after dropping mine in a lake.

What’s lagging for you? I haven’t noticed anything even remotely slow on this phone.

Safari sometimes lags terribly, otherwise it's ok.

Adblocker might help you there. It's great that Safari on iOS supports extensions.

> It's starting to struggle with even basic apps and lags just reading news articles

Not my experience, but I tend to blame the web rather than my phone when things get laggy. I estimate that my 13 is about in the middle of its life, barring unexpected rapid deceleration events.

My battery is at 80% after 2 years. Mine is still on AppleCare+. I always do express replacement so I get a « new » one. Hopefully my battery reach 79% soon.

Speaking of dozens. I’m on a 12 Mini and will be hard pressed to give it up. I also replaced the battery recently and am still quite pleased with its performance!

I’m one of the dozens on an iPhone 13 mini waiting for the next mini release. Before that I was on the iPhone 8