I’m probably just holding it wrong.
The perfect form factor. Touch ID instead of Face ID. It's the absolute pinnacle of the iPhone models, based on the iPhone 6.
I don't understand why I can't just have this same phone with a slightly better camera. That's all I want.
Just make it configurable yknow
Instead you are stuck with the OS, and security updates, that were out a year before you bought it. And you can't install LineageOS either.
I’ve said this many times when this came up.
The Mini didn’t fail because it was too small. It failed because it wasn’t small enough.
I want a small phone that I can use single-handedly. A smaller screen is a tradeoff. The Mini had the disadvantage of a smaller screen plus the disadvantage of not being usable with a single hand. Because of that, I never bought one - if I’m going to be handicapped anyway, I’d rather have a larger screen.
I've never seen a preference like this, in real life. Usually the thing closest to what you want is the preferred option. You're suggesting there's a hump in the preference curve, pushing people away from their preference, buying a larger phone than the smallest, when they "want" a smaller one.
I have trouble believing this is true. Do you have any other example of this type of preference curve? I suppose the "uncanny valley" may be one, but that seems more understandable.
Small phone vs. larger phone is a very simple tradeoffs calculation.
Large phone: good screen, bad ergonomics Small phone: small (thus worse) screen, best ergonomics
I'm willing to pick the second option above.
Unfortunately the Mini is somewhere in the middle: smaller screen than the larger phone - thus worse in that aspect -, combined with worse ergonomics than an actually small phone. It's the worst of both worlds.
I don't know about other things, but ever since the iPhone 5 I've been wanting another model that I could use with a single hand. The Mini was never that, so why would I sacrifice a good feature (larger screen) for... nothing in return?
It's not like enlarging the screen where you can at least generalize it by scaling everything up and it's still useable.
With shrinking screens, you have to decide on tap target and content size minimums. It's quite an undertaking that needs to pay in the market.
The size is fine. But why they gotta handicap cameras?
All I want is a mini-sized phone with max's camera. Is that so much to ask for?
At this point I'm strongly considering ditching the iPhone and going Watch + Fujifilm Camera. Maybe keep an old phone at home to manage the watch.
Actually, yes. The mini already has limited space to work with, they had already to shrink the MB, the battery. It would take much more effort to put a pro camera into it. Also those camera do heat up.
Personally, i think the camera setup on ip13mini is fine.
Give me 3" iPhone. That would be mini.
This is a very funny typo, considering the topic at hand.
But yeah, I think I stopped being happy with phone sizes when they started going beyond 4" or so. It's hilarious to me that they can make a phone that's ~5.5" and call it "mini".
I'm an Android guy, and had high hopes for https://smallandroidphone.com/, but the guy who was originally driving it is running his resurrected Pebble company now, and there's been basically no useful activity in the Discord for at least a couple years now, so I assume it's dead.
In any case, the Apple Watch has a much smaller screen and absolutely horrendous ergonomics for everything but the simplest use cases.
So, to answer your question: no.
The correlation I saw a while back during one of the debates about the trend towards phablets was it depended a lot on your usage patterns.
Are you someone who tends to use your phone while sitting down? Larger form factor
Are you someone who tends to use your phone standing up, especially while walking? Smaller form factor.
You have absolutely no idea how many people are curious which iPhone I have
Yeah, I've noticed this. Many women also wear clothing where they either have no pockets at all, or the pockets are more decorative than functional, small enough that a truly small phone would have trouble fitting (certainly not the 5.5" iPhone "mini", which is hardly mini at all).
[edit] I'll answer my own question. Nobody is going to replace an iPhone because it drops from 21 days battery to 14 days battery, but they probably will replace an iPhone that drops from 21 hours battery to 14 hours.
Air could’ve been the perfect mini replacement. Same width, but higher.
But no.. why get the air when the pro has so much more of everything, and is only 100 more
The GSM Arena review is mostly about the confusion of whether it should still be considered a phone at this size. Ultimately they decide it's just too damn big for a phone.[1].
It had a 5" screen.
Screen diameter is in general a bit misleading figure for phones from different generations as "full screen" phones tend to have a taller aspect ratio and hence larger diameter even with same body dimensions.
Not small enough to be worth the tradeoffs though.
I'm sorry, but the market has spoken. And there's Android phones in that form factor if you really want it.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...
I'm genuinely interested. Which ones?
Back to reality, Apple sells close to 200 billion worth of iPhones per year, so yeah, maybe they know what they're doing?
They could build a small town with all things you can imagine, cars, cinemas, hospitals, schools, whatever then get people to live there for months and use whatever new device prototypes they plan to launch a year later, and have an army of analysts even looking at their damn micro-expressions each time they pick up their phones in different ways and all of that might come down to like 50 million a year, which is like 0.05% of their revenue.
Apple is not anymore a startup where two/three guys make major decisions out of intuition (they ousted Ive because of that), again, this is a 2 trillion dollar company, they're not just vibing, lmao.
