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69 points

I want a smaller smartphone but not an iPhone. It’s sad that Apple is the only manufacturer still producing reasonable sized phones. Small phone gang unite and push for other manufacturers to follow Apple on this one!

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58 points

Unfortunately even Apple has announced they are discontinuing their smaller phone, citing poor sales, so it seems the small phone gang is too small to have any market power.

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37 points

Small people want small phones. Small people have small hands. Small hands can’t carry very much money.

It’s simple economics.

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2 points

Lol. You would think that, but I’m a small person counter example, and the market is proving there are more like me than those who want small phones.

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30 points
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I don’t believe the small phone gang is small, we just have one option: a pretty expensive iPhone mini.

I want a small phone but not an iPhone, I have no option therefore manufactures assume I want a humongous phone. That’s flawed logic.

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10 points
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If it is actually a larger demographic, then it would be huge opportunity for any of these other phone makers, especially those that are struggling. I highly doubt they are all unaware of the opportunity to make a smaller phone, so I suspect they have stayed away because they don’t think it will be a profitable market.

As production quantities go down, costs go up, and with the lower prices that these vendors sell at compared to Apple, their margins are already much thinner, so they have much more risk than Apple in introducing a smaller phone unless they are confident there is a large enough market for it. They simply have much less wiggle room than Apple in which to create a profitable product out of a smaller phone. Since Apple is pulling out and the others haven’t even bothered to try to compete with them in the decade that this big phone trend has been trending, I don’t think there’s any other conclusion that we can draw other than the small phone market is not large enough to pursue, but I’m open to other possibilities.

Edit: Someone else mentioned the small Asus Zenphone, which was also discontinued due to poor sales. That means at least one other manufacturer tried to make a small phone, and they came to the same conclusion that Apple did, so I see even less reason to doubt them.

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10 points

I was going to say that the Mini should be pretty cheap now that it’s two generations old – the 13 is down to $629 new, after all, and the Mini ought to be $100 cheaper…

But it looks like Mini demand has actually driven prices much higher than the normal 13. Strange, almost as if there IS demand for small phones…

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9 points

What about Asus Zenfone?

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1 point
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I don’t believe the small phone gang is small, we just have one option: a pretty expensive iPhone mini.

You have it backwards. You have no options because your gang is too small. You used to have options but the market has moved far far away from that.

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5 points

They haven’t made it in two years now. They stopped with the 13.

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3 points

Right, but I’m pretty sure they never said anything about discontinuing it altogether when the iPhone 14 came out, and most people just assumed they were just skipping a year on it. It wasn’t until right before they released the 15 lineup that they said the smaller phone was actually discontinued.

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1 point

They say that all the time because it disposes of the issue without them needing to provide any evidence.

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3 points

What’s your alternative theory?

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7 points

Yea i wanted iPhone mini as well but it’s hard for me to miss abilities such as using OG Firefox (not some stupid skinned safari) with ublock origin and NewPipe.

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2 points

There is the samsung galaxy base line up of the ‘S series’.

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4 points

The base galaxy s is the same size as a base iPhone. 6.1 inch screen.

There’s nothing mini about it in the least. The iPhone mini had a 5.4 inch screen.

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1 point
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2 points

Asus makes small phones (for now).

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