If they can standardize their whole lineup around two sizes, regular and max, then I think it will be a very hard sell to add extra work and complexity for the production lines for a smaller size that sells both lower volumes and lower price. Don't get me wrong, I love the Mini and have one right now, but from a business management perspective I can totally see how getting rid of it makes sense.
Another aspect that I think is often missed is that the Mini physically cannot offer the same battery life as other iPhones. Many say they don't mind this, but over time as the battery life deteriorates, it becomes a pain point all the same. I think that is another aspect of why they don't like the small form factor.
Battery life deteriorating is only a pain point because they make it so users can't trivially service the battery themselves. It is amazing seeing the walk back over the years from sensible affordances to the consumer to binning those features behind expensive repairs. I still remember my ibook where you could pop out the keyboard with your fingers and pop out the battery with a dime. I remember when they released the unibody macbook and they gave you a simple clasp to access both the battery and the hard drive as they were anticipating consumers shifting to SSDs in the near future in 2010 and wanted to offer an affordance. Slowly that went away. The latch went away for a dozen small screws that are easy to strip and lose. Eventually the ability to change out the drive or the battery yourself went away too. Slippery slope of setting up user expectations for a worse version of the product in a few generations from certain standpoints. Sure it is faster but imagine if it was faster and also as serviceable as devices used to be. There isn't good reason for it other than to gouge you when you spec out your macbook at rates that are always at a convenient premium over today's prices for these hardware.
Exactly.
I had this MacBook. It is legendary, they made it at a great price point with most of the qualities and features of the more expensive Pros of the time.
It didn't last long, they axed it the next year, figuring they were leaving money on the table.
Its weakness was the terrible iGPU in the Intel chip, you couldn't do much serious graphical work with it until you would get the spinner of doom.
I think this is really "peak Apple" era. Most stuff they did after Jobs death is re-heated or poorly designed/conceived.
Apple is just a luxury brand nowadays because they have lost focus on the user, it's a bit maddening that they are getting so rich from it but I guess that's how it is...
> I think it will be a very hard sell to add extra work for the production lines for a smaller size
The Toyota Corolla sells 1 million units a year worldwide - it's totally practical and realistic to set up a production line to make 1 million devices a year.
Apple sells 200 million iphones a year.
That's why they're happy to make the iPhone 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, 16 Pro Max and 16e and offer them in 4-5 colours per model as well.
AFAIK it's 360px wide, the same as on larger phones. You can of course enable an accessibility option to take it down to 320px width, which was the iOS standard for almost a decade and only stopped being a standard iOS resolution when they killed off the iPod touch.
Well, in the case of Samsung, I imagine they would rather not want to in order to promote their Z Flip series instead. More compact than any Mini version would potentially be. Though I guess for the people who like their phones to be able to fit in their hand, it doesn't make much of a difference.
Another aspect that I think is often missed is that the Mini physically cannot offer the same battery life as other iPhones. Many say they don't mind this, but over time as the battery life deteriorates, it becomes a pain point all the same. I think that is another aspect of why they don't like the small form factor.