One girl I knew was complaining about how big her phone is and asked me about my 4s at the time so I let her try it out. She decided she'd get the 5 right after it was out because her current phone was "too damn big to text with easily". I pointed out she could install a different launcher/keyboard but her phone had never been updated.
This is the problem with anecdotes. The plural is not data.
I also know a fair amount of women primarily that have iphones because they don't like the giant android phones. But again, could just be my friends, where I live, the alignments of whatever influencing buying decisions.
I'm getting more annoyed with all of these "my anecdote X which reinforces view Y means company FOO should BLAH" comments. They don't really contribute to actual discussion of the technical problems at hand, which are interesting. Hopefully that didn't come off too harsh as its just intended to spark more of a discussion of can we please stop with anecdotes in these stories in future? Pretty please? If you come to the twin cities I'll even buy you beer, or if we're ever in the same spot. I'm not above bribing.
So the 4" and 6-7" sizes end up being more popular for women, while the 5" sizes do worse, because they're not as big as the Notes but still too big to fit in a woman's pocket.
(Similarly, there's appeal to the 7" size for guys because it's something you can fit in a jacket pocket.)
For both your and parent's anecdote, screen size was the primary determinant for this user. I wouldn't be surprised if that's common.
It's a good reminder that many people don't buy a device based on the topics we discuss a lot like openness, lock-in, carriers, and fragmentation.
The iPhone 5 just absolutely mystifies me, they had a 4 and 4s for sale there too but unless you hold the phones right next to one another and see the extra row of icons on the screen, they're virtually indistinguishable as products to most people, yet the 5 costs much more. To a nontechnical buyer it seems inexplicable that this extra row of icons costs $100-$200 difference in price. Even digging into the specs, I couldn't really make a case for the 5 over the 4 series without getting into technical specs she didn't care about. Her comments were "the 5 is the new one, but I'm getting price gouged for it, and the 4 is on the way out...and these other phones are really popular too"
In the store, with all of the important context clues that stores put around flagship products, the iPhone section felt like it was selling to a market that was quickly disappearing. Like selling incredibly nice horsewhips at a car dealership.
Even Nintendo sells two sizes of their portables.
Apple took it's sweet time to get into the small tablet market, and now is selling iPad minis like they're going out of style. Why not get into the slightly larger smartphone market which has already proven itself to be at least as popular a segment as the niche the iPhone is in.
After a couple questions I realized that she couldn't figure out which ones were the iPhones from the Android from the Windows Phone. So I walked around with her to the phones that she liked and answered a few questions about each (storage, battery, if it was a popular phone that sort of thing). I realized that she hadn't even checked out the iPhones at all. They were kept over in a special Apple section of the store, and from a distance looked like the small budget smart phones they had elsewhere in the store. So she had skipped them entirely. All of the phones she liked were in the larger screen sizes.
I took her over to them and the conversation went something like this, "and these are the famous iPhones, give them a try, they're really easy to use." She messed with it a bit, "isn't there a bigger one, like the other phones?" I pointed out that it's designed to be easier to use in one hand, for people on the go. "But it's so small, it's hard to see things on the screen, I have to hold it so close" She pointed to the iPad mini they had there "something in-between that one and this one"
And that was that, it came down to a decision between the Droid MAXX, the Galaxy S4 and the Galaxy Note II. She walked out with an S4.