Comment by expensive_news

Comment by expensive_news 5 days ago

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?

coldpie 5 days ago

> 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.

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baby_souffle 4 days ago

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.

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eredengrin 4 days ago

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.

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