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.
Small people want small phones. Small people have small hands. Small hands can’t carry very much money.
It’s simple economics.
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.
They never officially discontinued the mini line in the first place. They just didn’t release new models after the 13. The announcement that they discontinued it was that they were discontinuing production of the 13 mini, which they had kept making alongside the regular 13 after the 14 lineup was released. Up until the release of the 15s, you could still buy the 13 mini new from Apple. Discontinuing the 13 mini killed off any way to buy one new.
There’s still strong rumors that they might use the mini frame for the next SE model. It has pretty close to the same external dimensions as the 3rd gen SE, but would bring more screen real estate in the same package since it would be edge to edge instead of have the bezels. And it would also fit the rumored “release a mini every few years” strategy since they only release an SE every couple of years anyway.
The SE cannibalized mini sales because, for the most part, people that wanted the smaller size cared more about price than features, and the SE was the same size and quite a bit cheaper. Replacing the old iPhone 8 based SE with an iPhone mini based SE would kill two birds with one stone. It would let them use up a bunch of the excess stock they have laying around due to the poor sales, would bring the mini to a lower price point which would make it more popular, and would remove the competition between the SE and the mini.
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.
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…
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.
They say that all the time because it disposes of the issue without them needing to provide any evidence.
What do you mean?
They don’t want to make a product. They say “consumers don’t like it”. You ask for evidence. They say it’s confidential, or they deliberately sabotage the availability of the product and say, “see?”
It’s standard marketing.
