People make fun of me but I'll never skip a chance to complain about how large these phones are. I hate it so much. I have a standard iPhone, not a max, and it causes real pain in my wrist if I use it too much. Was honestly thinking about downgrading to the last SE model even though it's several years out of date.
I want to +1 every comment in this thread. Phones are too big now. I don't understand Apple's weird obsessions, first trying to make all the phone so thin you cut your hand holding it, and then making it too big to fit comfortably in your pocket unless you are walking around in camo pants.
You know what I would like? When I tap on the search and type the first few letters of an app on my phone, and the app appears, and I click on that -- I would like the app to open. Only happens about half the time now. UI is getting worse with every release.
Many people used low iPhone mini sales to point at the idea that small phones aren't popular anymore.
They might be right, but the "Mini" was more like a return to the size of the 6 & 8; not the same size as the 5 or prior SE. So for me it was still too large.
The "usable screen" is where my thumb can reach, not whatever idea people have in their heads about the total size of the phone or anything, truthfully.
Anyway; hit recognition of the keyboard is so far behind where it was in the iPhone 4/5 generation that I doubt modern iOS would even be functional; even if you excused the padding issues that would inevitably be an issue.
> Anyway; hit recognition of the keyboard is so far behind where it was in the iPhone 4/5 generation that I doubt modern iOS would even be functional; even if you excused the padding issues that would inevitably be an issue
Right?? It is worse than I remember right? I'm not crazy.
POS Apple just made me upgrade my iPhone Mini to 26 so that I could pair my new Apple Watch, because I just broke the old one.
I wasn't sure I wanted another Apple Watch, but it was the easiest thing to buy, and I don't have to figure out how to transfer all the data and set it up somewhere else.
But I definitely regret going the "easy" way; iOS 26 is truly awful, what the fuck.
I'm going to figure out what fitness/sport watch I really want to use next because I doubt I'll be sticking to iPhone with what they have on offer these days...
Luckily, hearing all the complains early adopters of 26 had, I disabled auto updates on my SE. Since you can't go back to previous iOS version, leaving it on is a bit risky in general.
I recently switched from an iPhone 16 to an Air and my experience is the opposite. I type way more accurate on the Air (even when both dictionaries are reset and have no screen protector what could make the touch less sensitive). I do not know why.
> The "usable screen" is where my thumb can reach, not whatever idea people have in their heads about the total size of the phone or anything, truthfully.
In the early days of the phablets I had an observation that has mostly held true all these years later. At the time I noticed you could accurately predict whether someone wanted the large or small form factor based on their usage patterns. Did they tend to use their device while sitting down? Or did they tend to use their device while on the move? This indicated whether or not they typically used 2 hands vs 1 hand.
It turned out the 2 handers dominated the market, unfortunately for people like you & I.
Apple follows the market. There just aren’t many people who want small phones, HN notwithstanding. If they sold like hotcakes they’d have a full lineup.
And I kind of get it. Philosophically I want a small phone. Realities of age and eyesight forbid.
The market is basically people who don’t read or watch videos on their phone, and who have excellent eyesight, and who don’t care about having the best cameras. 100% legit market segment, but that Venn intersection is too small to be worth it.
I don't agree with this. In my view, there are plenty of cases where the product changes are shoved down our throats.
I think the problem is that the product folks don't actually listen to the market. They read Jobs' biography and are convinced that they will tell their users what product they will like and that they will see the light later on.
The sad reality is: they are not Jobs (and even he was not faultless). So, we get Mac like Windows interfaces, we get mail clients losing features, we get AI in every single app you see, etc.
The iphone air isn’t popular either and yet here we are. They preferred releasing a huge thin phone than a tiny thin phone. Even if the % of clients is small, there are still millions of potential mini clients
I interpret the same facts differently: I see Apple realizing that the SE form factor doesn’t sell enough to be worth it, and trying something different with the Air. It sounds like the Air will likely go the way of the SE, with occasional updates but not every year.
Apple is very good at market research and understanding users… but not perfect. I think they genuinely believed the Air would sell a lot more than it did.
And “millions” is not necessarily a lot. Apple sells 250 million phones a year. A SKU that sells 3 million is a distraction with much lower ROI against R&D than a mainline phone. It takes just as much engineering to create and as much manufacturing to produce, so fixed costs are spread among many fewer units.
Am old. Am experiencing presbyopia. Am still very much tied to my mini on the default font size. When I can't read something I just pinch/zoom. Meanwhile it's easy to hold & use in one hand while walking down the street, and fits into normal sized pockets.
Until you hit 'Search' at the bottom right it shows you a preview result set - that can differ completely from the one you get then. Because two are not enough, they added a third with 'Siri suggestions' as top row. Which is not in the Search settings but in the ones for Siri. The iOS docs[1] misname it as 'Suggest App' when it is called 'Suggest Apps Before Searching' which only the iPadOS docs [2] get right. Did I mention they cut useful info from the iOSv26 version[3] and changed the URL?
Why do almost all phones have to be in that narrow band of 6.5 to 6.9 inches?
I wish there were more size choices on both ends of the spectrum.
While most people prefer more choice below 6", I would like some choice above 7", since I keep my phone in my belly pouch, and never use it one-handed. My current Huawei Mate20X is actually ok at 7.2" (but worse than the Mediapad X1 I had before which at 7" was actually wider) but is way behind on Android updates, and will soon stop running my banking app.
While I agree with the spirit of the thread and dearly love my mini, I think this reasoning doesn’t account for a substantial reduction in bezels: my iPhone 5S had more than a centimetre of black bars above and below its 4" display (altogether it was 5.4" in diagonal), I bet those phablets you mentioned had even bigger bezels and were closer to modern 8.5" phones.
Yes. It's the Apple's product first philosophy that Steve Jobs repeated again and again:
"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
"Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.' But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do."
"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
"If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse."
Is that the direction of causality or it's the other way around? Maybe people buy larger screens because they want to watch Netflix or TikTok on their phone more comfortably than on smaller screens. I do love small and light phones (an A40 right now) but I watch movies on a tablet. If I were often on the move or sharing home with many people, maybe I would use a larger phone.
I dived into a niche world of small phones recently while looking for replacement to malfunctioning Pixel 4a (which is apparently now considered compact phone). There's a few small manufacturers in China making some, with 4 inch or 5 inch screen, like Aiphor or Unihertz. And by "small" I mean "they use kickstarter to fund their R&D" small.
Other than that... Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.
> Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.
And the worst thing is that app developers do not bother with testing their apps on small phones. So even if someone would produce small phone, many apps would be broken on that UI. So there's no way back.
PS 4 inch is not a small phone. iPhone 4S had 3.5" display and it wasn't small, it was normal. Small is something like 2" screen I suppose. All modern phones including these "iPhone Minis" are egregiously huge.
I would not go as far as calling the iPhone Minis "egregiously huge", keep in mind that screen size is not a great measure for phone sizes across different generations. You could easily fit a 4+ inch display into the form factor of the 4S with modern technology, the bezels on those phones were huge. Unless my math is off, the housing of the 4S has a diagonal of just over 5 inches.
Yep. Aiphor's BlueFox NX1 with 4 inch screen is roughly the same size as original iPhone, but has a larger screen (iPhone had bigger bezels and the home button underneath). To me it feels a bit too small for things like typing/texting for example.
Unihertz Jelly Star has 3 inch screen, that's way too small for me.
We do, and it is a pain. It is incredibly easy to defeat any kind of design or in fact HID guidelines by cranking text size to the max on these smaller devices.
> Screen size is area (x^2) and battery size is volume (x^3). As battery life is a critical feature, a bigger screen supports (a nonlinear) better battery life.
This does not square with especially Apple's unending obsession to make phones as thin as possible. Which is doubly stupid when it makes them so fragile that the first thing you do after taking it out of the box is to wrap it in a thick rubber shell.
What obsession about making thin phones? iPhones are pretty thick and have been that way for years. The Air being an outlier, of course, but it's an intentionally thin phone in a lineup of thick and heavy ones.
I think it’s even better than that. Your cellular modem (on all the time) scales at O(1) with phone size. Same for on-board tasks that do not involve the screen. Powering your RAM (also on all the time) is similar, but larger (more expensive) phones may tend to have more RAM.
I have found the iPhone Air much easier to hold than the iPhone 13 Pro it replaced because of how light it is, even though the iPhone Air has a bigger screen.
The 17e weighs roughly the same at a smaller size, and the mini weighs significantly less. Not to mention the first SE, compared to which even the mini is heavy. Yes the Air is lightweight compared to the Pro, but that’s a low bar.
The other thing with the Air is that you can’t really use it one-handed, which is what most people who like small phones are after, besides pockability.
The first SE was the best form factor I've ever owned.
Incredibly small. Incredibly light. Pretty thin, even in a case. Had a headphone jack, Lightning and Touch ID.
The only thing I like about the new iPhone designs is the action button. Having an automation which automatically turns silent mode off or on based on whether I'm home or not is pretty cool. You can't do that with a physical switch.
I don’t think anyone should make fun of you for it but I’m in the opposite boat. I’m so glad that they make the pro max variants because most smartphones are so small that it hurts my fingers to bend them in the unnaturally inward way it requires to hold and interact with them.
It wouldn't be so bad if both options were available. By all means, have your giant pro max or whatever if you want, but that shouldn't be the only reasonable option.
I switched from a pixel 3 to a pixel 9 pro over a year ago, and I still miss the smaller form factor. the pixel 3 really was the perfect size for me and I am sad I can no longer get a smallish phone with a high end processor.
I switched from Pixel 4a to Unihertz Max (5G phone with 5 inch screen from a small Chinese startup). Love the form factor, I can keep the phone in my front pants pocket again, next to my keys or wallet. I'm somewhat reluctant to put anything sensitive on that phone (like my email), but happy overall.
I still have my Pixel3. I use it without a SIM for random stuff, and miss the small form factor. It is half the thickness of a Pixel 10, my current phone!
I’m still running an SE2020. I was expecting the latest update (with liquid) to be the death of it. But performance has actually improved significantly! Very unexpected.
Funnily, the large display is the most important thing for me. I find my efficiency directly proportional to display size (which holds for laptops too).
If a 30 second task can be done in just 20 on a device with a larger display, that's absolutely worth it for me.
Also larger device tends to imply longer battery life too.
If the task can’t be done in a few taps I feel I’m better off opening a laptop anyways.
However the market agrees with you so I must be missing something. I used to think it was driven by media consumption on phones, and that I try to avoid, but this isn’t the first time I have heard people tout phone productivity gains from a slightly larger screen.
The expression 'fat fingers' concerns the phenomena where users (including myself) lack the eyesight and finer motor skills required to type accurately on a small keyboard, so a slightly larger display makes all the difference.
Perhaps you simply have those fine motor skills (and good eye sight) so a larger device isn't necessary to prevent typos and remain productive.
I was able to thumb type at high speed and accuracy on the 3.5 inch iPhones. On modern iPhones, I produce more typos than ever, because apparently Apple thinks it knows which key I meant to hit better than I do, even with all the autocorrect and suggestions turned off.
I've banned social and don't use my phone much anymore, so it's less of an issue than it used to be, but it's really frustrating when I'm clearly hitting the right key and it insists on pretending I hit an adjacent key.
It’s so strange. Like, the obviously correct thing is to have a small ML model that learns the user’s typing patterns, which of their own typos they fix, which auto- and suggested fixes they reject, what rare, made-up, and jargon words they use, what acronyms they use, etc.
Instead, after 20 years of iPhone usage, I am not allowed to type the names of projects I use all the time without fixing the autocorrect every time, or (as you say) carefully hitting the left side of the F key because dead center will produce a G.
My preferred conspiracy theory is that larger, brighter screens hold attention better, so everyone involved in the whole “user experience” (phone manufacturer, application developers, advertisers, etc.) prefers (whether they consciously realize it or not!) phones to have a larger screen. Smaller phones make fewer demands; who would want to make a device like that?
Yes I can just print out directions on Mapquest before I leave home, tell people to page me and I will call them back from the nearest pay phone, carry around my Walkman and my Polaroid camera with me.
Have you ever thought that with 80% of web traffic coming from mobile, you might be the outlier?
What next? The old Slashdot meme “I haven’t watched TV in 20 years. Do people still watch TV?”
I said you don't have to do every task, not do no tasks.
> Have you ever thought that with 80% of web traffic coming from mobile, you might be the outlier?
Wow, snark too. In recent years, I've taken a much more luddite stance against mobile device usage for my own mental wellbeing. Maybe other people should follow suit.
"You should do your taxes on the train". No, I don't think that I will. You're free to stress yourself out like that. Have fun.
So park_match is the arbiter of what tasks should and should not be done on your phone?
> You should do your taxes on the train". No, I don't think that I will. You're free to stress yourself out like that. Have fun.
I along with 90% of the taxpayers in the US take the standard deduction - meaning my taxes are stupid simple.
I logged into the TurboTax app, it offered to download my w2’s, I answered five questions, entered the date that I wanted IRS to take out the taxes we owed and we were done. I don’t have to even file state taxes for the state I live in?
How would that have been easier from a computer? In fact it would have been harder if I had to use a computer because the other option I had to submit my W2 was to take a picture of it.
I believe the GP was talking about trying to do “real work” on a phone, which is something many people try to do — but which many others find a repugnant idea, as they currently use the excuse of the impracticality of doing work on a phone as a lever to push back on letting work intrude on their personal life.
Have you thought that a lot people work remotely and don’t sit at their desk all day? I have deliverables and deadlines to meet like everyone else. But sometime I would rather go for a swim in the middle of the day in the heated pool when the sun is still out - benefit of living in Florida in the winter - and work late and be contactable (wearing my watch) or go to the gym during the day (downstairs). Business traveling is also a thing (much less than I use to), working with people in different time zones where I’m not going to refuse to answer a message from a coworker in India if they need me.
It’s a fair trade off. My company gives me a lot of leeway during the day and I am flexible about time zones.
Is this really a driving factor for people? If I anticipate tasks that I can't wait to get back to a good work environment to do, I'll bring my laptop and tether on my phone. It's a fantastically more productive setup than trying to ssh in via a phone keyboard or even write a long email. 1 inch extra on the phone screen diagonal won't move the needle there for me.
It's not feigned. I'm astonished to learn how hard people will work for the (seemingly to me) false convenience of doing things on their phone which would be (to me) much more straightforward to do on a more suitable device.
So I tend to assume that these stories are often the outliers, and that my personal experience is more common. I recognize the fallacy, and I suspect we're both wrong and we're both right. I just honestly don't know which one of us is more of which.
It probably devolves to a question of what kind of work we're talking about. The work that I do (or the way I do it), I do not believe could be done effectively on a phone or tablet, most of the time. I work with people whose work can be done there. And there are probably more of them that there are of me. But that does not mean I could become one of them.
(addressing your comment on another subthread): if music, camera, and web are a person's "work", then sure. But that does not resemble "work" for me in any way.
Again, you can look at the worldwide penetration of cell phones vs laptops, where most web traffic comes from, the amount of resources spent on mobile development vs desktop, the amount of revenue globally of phone sales vs PC sales, etc
I also don’t spend all day working and I definitely don’t take out my laptop when I’m not working
Worldwide is not relevant, and mobile-vs-desktop dev is not relevant.
Mobile-vs-web dev is probably a better metric. And developed, mature markets only. Anything else introduces the second- and third-generation tech gap inconsistencies.
> Anything else introduces the second- and third-generation tech gap inconsistencies
This is completely responsive to your thread if you think countries that use their phones more than the US is some type of signal they are 3rd world countries.
Only about 70% of Americans even own a laptop[1]. Factor in many of those being ancient with 15 minute battery life, plus user preferences… it’s hard to see how that could be the majority use case.
It‘s also generational. My 18yo sister in law is now applying for colleges and the word “application” immediately made her look for an app. That the whole process happened on a (not mobile friendly) website was rather surprising to her.
I am 51. The amount of Ludditism on HN shouldn’t come as a surprise to me. But it does. Most older 70+ year old people I know don’t own a computer at all and would never use one. But they do know how to get to things they need on their phones.
It's not feigned ignorance, it's disbelief that people are comfortable working in such an inefficient and frankly unpleasant way.
Can I file my taxes on my phone? Probably. But I could also set myself on fire, and I think that might be more fun. Why would I not want to use a tool that is 100x faster and 1000x easier to use for any task more complex than writing a sentence?
I'm a developer. I've heard of developers SSH'ing from their phone and developing that way. It's impressive, in the same way removing all your fingernails is impressive.
Really? I did file my taxes by phone. It took me all of five minutes.
90% of taxpayers claim the deduction - meaning their taxes are really simple.
I launched TurboTax, it offered to download my and my wife’s W2s, I clicked through a few buttons on a wizard and I was done. It had all of my information from the prior year so it already knew my employer.
As far as speed, have you compared the speed of the fastest iPhone to a low to midrange x86 PC? The latest A series chips in the iPhone are faster in single core performance than an M1 MacBook Air which is no slouch. But all that is besides the point. How fast of a computer do you think you need to file taxes? There was tax filing software for the 1Mhz Apple //e in 1986. You just had to print it out.
I entered maybe one number?
I live in a state without state taxes so I didn’t even have to file states.
FWIW, I also shopped for, did all of the paperwork before closing, for the house we had built in 2016 from my phone.
The things that require more than a few taps to do aren't things that need to be done at a moment's notice. Those things can wait until I'm at my laptop.
Just Thursday, I left home at 6AM got in an uber, waited at the airport got on a plane for an hour and half , waited at another airport, got on another plane for four hours, uber to the Airbnb and while I was out to dinner that night, my wife and I were planning a trip we were taking during the summer.
Are you suggesting that o just queue everything up until I set my laptop up?
Again you realize you’re the odd one right with most activity these days taking place on mobile?
Is there anything you need to do during that time? Or are you looking to fill that time with whatever to keep you occupied and enjoy whatever?
If it's the former, you lead a very different life from me. There are very few things in my life that show up and require immediate action (or action within 24-ish hours for that matter. Most things can wait). If it's the latter, I try to fill that time with reading.
Again, are you so much in the HN bubble you don’t realize that most people don’t wait to get home to their laptop (if they even have a laptop) to get things done in 2026?
Is it really that hard to look at stats and realize that you might not be the normal one?
I'm sure they do it that way. I'm also not convinced there's any actual need to do it that way.
You also didn't answer my question. Nothing in your travel scenario there, if I were in your shoes, would need me to use my phone for more than a few taps per actual task, while the rest of my phone use would go to mindless browsing or reading. What specific tasks are you imagining popping up here that I would then queue to my laptop?
I'm not trying to say my way is superior. On the contrary, I'm asking what use cases you have that you are unable to solve. If you have a genuine need to send emails from your phone at a moment's notice, then I can't argue with that; if you can't wait to respond to the emails you receive, there's nothing else to really do about it. That's why I'm asking what needs you have. I'm trying to better understand your situation, trying to put myself in your shoes.
But if you have no desire to actually respond to my inquiry, I shall remain in the dark.
> Yes you will if you think most communication personally or even work related is happening via email…
The same principles apply to Slack, Teams or whatever else you may use. I don't do work outside of work hours, so what would I know. Email was just the example I thought of in the moment. Again, I'm asking you a question out of a desire to better understand your situation.
Personal correspondence doesn't take many taps to do. It's rarely more than 25 characters at a time in my experience.
> You know sending email via mobile has been popular since 2003 right?
'sending' and 'popular' are doing some pretty heavy lifting here. Reading, sure, I'll buy that. Sending? I'm not sure sending emails longer than two sentences from any device without a keyboard has ever been popular, for values of. It's probably more popular than ever given that touch keyboards make it reasonably possible, but James S. Casual isn't sending a lot of emails from his phone just through the sheer power of not sending many emails to begin with.
And 'popular' for that matter. Possible, sure, but how many people ever even had a mobile device that could send email before the iPhone came out?
I'm sure sarcasm and implying I'm stupid are great ways to convince your interlocutor, or the unseen masses for that matter.
I’m not implying you are stupid. I’m saying straight out that you’re feigning ignorance (ie not that you are ignorant) and you know how the world works in 2026.
Myself personally, I work remotely. I might be running errands during the day and still be monitoring Slack so I can be on a call at 6 or 7 at night with someone in another time zone.
I also travel for work - consulting - and travel personally during the work day and may work after I land. Even if not for work, do you wait to get to your computer to respond to text messages? Check HN?
Believe it or not, I'm not feigning ignorance. I just lead a very different life from you.
> Myself personally, I work remotely. I might be running errands during the day and still be monitoring Slack so I can be on a call at 6 or 7 at night with someone in another time zone.
> I also travel for work - consulting - and travel personally during the work day and may work after I land.
See, I would never do this. A.) I don't work remotely (not out of a desire not to, but it's just not viable with my current line of work), and B.) If I did, that work would be zoned off away from my personal life. If there's downtime, I can kill time by browsing whatever, but I wouldn't be out and about but also 'at work' at the same time. Work-time and personal time basically never mix in my life, and I'd like to keep it that way.
If you're 'at work' for 48 hours at a time, while travelling, then having to respond instantly at any given time makes a lot more sense, although I'd probably still want to defer those responses until I can get some downtime during any given travels to then type up my responses on an actual keyboard. I can however understand if that's not really viable in your life of work.
> do you wait to get to your computer to respond to text messages?
I've never(?) sent a text message longer than maybe 100 characters. Most are a fair bit shorter than that, and I don't send that many to begin with. Same goes for Discord, although confirming that is harder, since it's contaminated with messaged written with an actual keyboard.
> Check HN?
To read? Sure. I even read books on my phone. Respond to a comment? Not unless my response is really short.
You're being pretty defensive / aggressive about what some might call a phone addiction.
Most on HN know the data: healthier people tend to enforce boundaries with their devices. The average person is addicted, yes, but I'm not sure being "the odd one" in an era of actually decreasing literacy and numeracy and attention span is the insult that you seem to think.
I was ready to agree with you, as that was my belief. (I also agree it's a sign of a dangerous addition, but just like everyone in the 60s smoked, everyone today use phones)
Then I cam across this, showing about even split between laptop and phone
Yes I’m sure that using my phone for things that in the before times I would have used a desktop computer to do over a 2400 baud modem is a negative for my life. Those negatives are around social media
Yes, during our first night of our 45 day stay in another country and she got a text from someone she is meeting on the first leg of our trip during our summer 45 day domestic trip asking could we come 3 days earlier. We were looking at our calendar, our Hyatt points, flights etc. while enjoying live music and planning our next get away.
I’m sure you would have thought we should have waited to take out my laptop when we got back home.
I don't understand why are you downvoted. Are people in this thread really pulling out a laptop and trying to get it connected (or pay for one with a cellular modem) every time they need to respond two words to an email, call a uber or look up where is the nearest coffee shop that is open at an odd hour?
HN seems to have some really weirdly prescriptive view of how people ought to use their devices in a way that is almost like Steve jobs.
> I don't understand why are you downvoted. Are people in this thread really pulling out a laptop and trying to get it connected (or pay for one with a cellular modem) every time they need to respond two words to an email, call a uber or look up where is the nearest coffee shop that is open at an odd hour?
Because some of us read the original comment and thought maybe the discussion should be responsive to it:
> If the task can’t be done in a few taps I feel I’m better off opening a laptop anyways.
Talking about Uber, email and directions in Maps are literally "task[s] that can be done in a few taps". Perhaps being less "weirdly" defensive and taking the time to think about the discussion you're about to jump into would be helpful?
Surely your laptop has a mic on it and probably a camera. It also has blueteeth, wifi and stuff. Your phone has much the same and can act as a proxy to whatever is missing on your laptop and vice versa. Obviously, getting your laptop to fit under or within your "lap" is a bit of an ask!
Things like KDE Connect provide a direct bridge and a bit of imagination does the rest.
If your laptop isn't cutting the mustard then ditch it ...
... Oh your phone has a tiny screen and a shit mic and speakers, unless you stick it in your ear?
Oddly enough, I don’t carry around my laptop in my pocket all of the time. You do realize that in 2026 most people do most of their day to day non work tasks on phones don’t you?
At least for me, the effect is real, and is driven not by media consumption but ergonomics of use. But at the same time, I'd say you're not missing that much. I always preferred large screens because of productivity gains[2], but even as screens kept getting larger, the set of things that "I feel I’m better off opening a laptop" for remained the same for me.
That is, until I switched to a foldable phone (Galaxy Z Fold 7) half a year ago, and - I kid you not - I haven't used my personal laptop since that day.
FWIW, I still have a proper desktop PC; In the past decade+, I've been using a PC at home, and a "sidearm" on the go / away from home: always a 2-in-1 Windows laptop with top specs[0]. Being always with me, this laptop often replaced use of PC at home too, because of convenience & portability.
So by amount of productive use, for past 10+ years it was sidearm >> PC >> smartphone. But getting a foldable flipped it around. Having twice the screen size of a regular (large) phone is a big productivity win[1], but it's folding that makes the actual qualitative difference. Folded, the device becomes a regular smartphone - i.e. something that fits in my pocket, meaning it's always on me, in my hands, or less than 1 second away. Contrast that with tablets, whose form factor makes them basically just shitty laptops (same logistic as ultraportable, but toy OS of a phone).
I didn't expect this. I didn't even feel this change - I only noticed two months later that my laptop has been sitting unused on my desk, covered by a pile of stuff. Doing "laptop tasks" on a mobile device is still annoying (no keyboard, toy OS), but combining tablet-sized screen with portability of a phone makes them less annoying than logistics overhead of a laptop - and at least in my case, this eliminated the entire[3] space between "smartphone" and "PC".
--
[0] - Think Microsoft Surface, except I could get better specs at half the price if I bought an off-lease but pristine Dell or Lenovo.
[1] - It's not immediately obvious to people, but as things are today, a foldable phone isn't any better at media consumption than regular one, because almost all cinema, TV, videogames, etc. are all produced for widescreen - meanwhile, the inner screen of my Fold is approximately square, so e.g. for most TV, half or more of it is black at all times. However, all that extra space allows to effectively use multiple (3+) apps on screen, not to mention makes spreadsheets actually usable.
[2] - Bigger screen = less scrolling and tapping in menus, but also with text size scaled to minimum, my previous phone (S22) had a big enough screen that running two apps in split-screen became useful on a regular basis.
[3] - Well, almost. There are some tasks I really like physical keyboard and larger screen for - but for those, I just plug the phone into the screen via USB-C, and volia, it turns into a regular desktop. A shitty one, but good enough for occasional use.
That's interesting. I knew foldables have been selling well, and I assumed they were basically the promise that tablets were trying to sell but as you said- usable this time. I've never heard anyone's actual story laid out like this before though.
Now I'm having second thoughts on what I'll do myself because I would have never guessed a foldable would be ideal as you described.
I've been trying to avoid building an $8,000 tech stack of redundant devices that I don't need. Which is what Apple is all about, and then some. It's not the initial investment that bothers me, it's calculating replacement costs over time. It's pretty quickly that you have half a new vehicle in redundant electronics. It leaves you asking: why?
So while I appreciate the longevity and durability of my iPhone 12 mini, along with seamless Airdrop and the Airtag network being as handy as it gets, I'm thinking about going back to Android for docking support. This is a feature I don't think Apple will ever add until the end of time, so I may as well bite the bullet now and get another OS switch over with.
I'm not entirely convinced I would love a foldable like you do, but I am rethinking that now. I've been on the idea that Microsoft's partnership with Samsung for Phone Link features will make my life delightful at my desktop battlestation, and DeX with a lapdock will cover any mobile needs. A lapdock really does create an alternative to the battery life offered by the M-series Macbooks, while leaving me with only two devices to maintain and replace with my desktop and phone.
It's amazing with the flexibility and options offered in the Android space, whether it be my proposal or your foldable experience, how they don't have more marketshare. I think the issue is marketing, people need to be shown what they can do with a product and Apple makes Continuity and closed ecosystem features seem like a value add. When it's kind of a lure to an iCloud subscription and $8,000 personal tech stack.
What, ummm, efficiency benefits are you finding on a smart phone? Is it related directly to the keyboard size when typing? That's kind of all I can think of, other than a really tiny display + big fingers being an issue.
I find my efficiency directly proportional to the distance from my smart phone.
I did downgrade back to my SE (from iPhone 16). Big selling point (aside from its size and rounded corners) is the physical button with fingerprint. I missed that even more than I disliked carrying a big phone around.
Former small phone person here: I went from a small iphone to a large one just to substitute not having to carry around my ipad. I really wish iphone fold is here sooner.
Same. The Pixel 4a was the perfect phone for me: Light, screen exactly the right size to navigate with a single thumb whilst holding the phone in one hand, enough battery life, small enough to fit in my jean pockets comfortably.
But people buy big phones in preference to small ones, so that’s what Google & Apple manufacture. Nobody (from the POV of Apple/Google decision makers) buys these smaller phones.
I don't think that's true. Every iPhone user I've texted in the last 6 months at least has had rcs turned on, and that's including some very non tech savvy friends that I doubt did it manually
Yeah, I wish they would commit to doing a mini every x years. Last year I bought a 16 and this year I bought an Air. I returned both after just a few days. I can't reach across the phone with my thumb, meaning I can't use it one-handed.
The new phones have some neat tricks (satellite connectivity comes to mind), but the on-device AI seems pretty mediocre and I value pocketability and one-handed usability more than the new gizmos.
When I asked myself if I would rather keep the new Air or go back to my 13 mini with an extra thousand dollars in my pocket, it was no contest.
> I wish they would commit to doing a mini every x years
The problem is all the tooling is pipelined for annual releases. You can't just find a team to do the mini; it has to always be there, and parts of it have to always be working on the next one. Your vendors will get grumpy because it doesn't fit their product cycles.
I have large hands but the 13 Mini is roughly the maximum I can use one-handed without doing the weird finger balancing act to shift the phone around. I get why most people like large phones - media consumption - but not everyone is into that.
I don't even mind large phones if they're done right. My favorite phone of all time is the BB Passport which you have to use two-handed, but it was actually designed around that and amazing to use.
Sorry but if that’s the case you definitely don’t have large hands. If you did you’d be able to use the Pro Max one handed and reach everything except the top left corner by swiveling your thumb (Reachability enables you to reach top left corner)
This depends entirely on how you hold your phone in your hand. For some positions, someone would need a 5” thumb to reach the corner. You can’t make such sweeping statements for something with such variation.
> Reachability enables you to reach top left corner
I thought it goes without saying that poorly made accessibility features don't mean the device is very usable. The existence of that feature by itself is already evidence against that.
I've a lot of unexpected behavior from the faceid thing. Lots of unexpected swipe-ups that drop me out of an app and put me on the home screen. Can't unlock in the dark, too close to your face, off to the side, in your pocket. Lots of "I saw your face an unlocked" that I didn't know had happened.
fingerprint sensor unlocked when you wanted it to, with haptics. switching apps was a button operation, not happening when you didn't expect it.
Plus, fingerprint scanners can be activated without breaking eye contact with the person you're talking to. It's very anti-social technology.
It makes one look completely like a tool to pull out their iPhone and stare at it for ten seconds while checking out with a cashier. Deeply embarrassing and very annoying.
The physical home button is, no bullshit, one of the greatest pieces of UI ever. No, I am not kidding, I really think that. It’s crazy to me that they abandoned it, the gestures that replace its functionality are overall-worse and cluttering the gesture system with even more of them is bad for the overall UX.
I agree with this, while also thinking it was basically physical-enough that the home button still served the same UI purpose about as well as before. But yes it was a step down from the real button.
The haptic sensor is almost as good as the physical button, and the trade off of not having to worry about it breaking (which was likely after a few years with the physical ones) is well worth it for me.
What I don’t like about FaceID is the premature unlocking. If you pass your phone to someone else it can unlock, especially for taking photos. And to allow strangers to make photos is intentional that’s why the camera app doesn’t need an unlock.
Aside from that all the gestures, positions and holding points are annoying. The usage of TouchID is simpler.
Apple could at least fix the security issue by unlocking only after swiping up. FaceID? Isn’t fast enough? Well. Than TouchID is better.
I get that getting rid of touchid haptic eliminates dead space but still blows my mind they couldn't or refused to figure out screen-based touch id as an option at least. Samsung has it...
Under-screen fingerprint readers are definitely inferior - slower and less reliable. I (Android user) wish they'd revert to back-of-device readers, which were amazing.
(I also wish for smaller screens and no-adhesive battery swaps though, neither of which seems likely to happen.)
Me too, but I’m going to have to upgrade. The lack of storage on my phone (64GB) is killing me - every time there is an os update I have to delete almost everything to make room
I'm also a touchID / iphone 8 size fan, but the nice cameras/zoom in flagship models are hard to give up. At least Face ID has improved significantly from the early days of iphone 10 -- it's faster and more reliable than it was on the older models if you tried it back then.
The thing I've come to like about FaceID on my 13 mini is that I can require it for certain apps to open that don't require it - e.g. messaging as opposed to banking which generally require some kind of auth by default - which is much better security in case someone snatches it out of my hand while it's unlocked. It's pretty seamless because I'm generally looking at the device anyway, and it's much less faff than it would be with TouchID.
I think the way the Pixel does it is strictly better across the board. The fingerprint sensor doesn't sacrifice screen space, and the platform offers face unlock as well.
My iPhone 12 mini is hobbling along. A few rare apps are not usable because UI is clipped, the battery is throttling and making it sluggish, and it overheats all the time as a GPS.
Many mobile websites are unusable.
But I love the form factor and I'm going to keep it going as long as it is reasonably secure.
I stuck with my 13 mini for a long time, and had recently put a new iFixit battery in it too. I did finally make the jump to a Pixel 10 but sign me up with everyone else who misses reasonably-sized phones.
i send them an iphone mini request every once in a while through the feedback form hoping it will make a little bit of difference: https://www.apple.com/feedback/
still holding on to iphone 13 mini hoping they bring back the perfect size. also trying very hard not to accidentally fat finger a ios 26 update.
That's why they stopped making them, because the people who buy minis are willing to stick with them for 5 years, whereas Apple wants you to buy a new phone every year.
Every single person I know who uses a phone of more than 4 years old, uses an iPhone 13 mini. Without exception. Now I'm sure there's plenty of HNers who use other 4+ year old phones, but I'm talking about non-tech people.
> That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.
They also haven't come out with another iPhone with a headphone jack, yet no one kept using those.
I get what you're saying, but what I think is that the average mini buyer is inherently someone (on average!) who changes their phone a lot less often. They're less likely to be glued to their phones. Bigger phones = more infinite scroll addiction, and so on. Apple doesn't want to cater to the mini buyers.
> That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.
I kind of agree with the previous comment. I think if you spend a lot of time on the phone, have a lot of apps then it makes sense to upgrade your phone more frequently and also makes sense to have a larger screen and better battery life. So conversely, there is a correlation between people who have smaller phones and upgrade less frequently.
I have my iPhone 12mini for 5-6 years now, and I'd upgrade it now if there was a new small iPhone. But I would upgrade it 3 years ago.
The release schedule was crap, as well as the 12 mini being an objectively bad phone.
Spring 2020, they released the iPhone SE 2020, 4 years after the previous iPhone SE. This satiated a lot of the demand for people holding out for a smaller phone. Then came the surprise with 12 mini in September of 2020, except the battery life and performance sucked, garnering bad reviews.
Then, finally in September 2021, they released the 13 mini, an objectively good, smaller phone. But over the previous 18 months, a lot of the buyers for the 13 mini had already bought the 2020 SE or were burned by the 12 mini.
> The release schedule was crap, as well as the 12 mini being an objectively bad phone.
I still use my 12 mini; it's by far my favorite iphone I've had since my 5s. It might have had sucky battery life but I was just happy to have a phone that could fit in my pocket.
I've replaced the screen twice, battery once (by myself) and I have really very little intentions on moving to anything newer than the 13 mini.
I'm not sure why Apple doesn't care about the mini apple users. My friends, when they pull out a 17 pro look absolutely ridiculous, constantly having to pull the phone out when doing any real work since the phone just keeps getting in the way.
Spring 2020, they released the iPhone SE 2020, 4 years after the previous iPhone SE. This satiated a lot of the demand for people holding out for a smaller phone.
Count me in this group. I wound up buying the 13 mini right before it was going to be discontinued because I knew that would be the last small phone they would produce and I'm keeping it until it dies (or I can't get a battery for it).
Also, the mini had worse cameras than the larger screens.
Camera quality is the second most important thing to me (after not needing finger enhancement surgery to hold the phone).
So, they designed it to fail, and it still was 3-5% of sales vs. ones that actually got good spec bumps every year. (If you’re upgrading the phone every 12 months, why buy the one with cameras a few years behind the curve?)
Anyway, I like my mini. I wish it had touch id instead.
The Minis had the exact same cameras as the non-Minis. The Pros had the only camera improvements. In my experience all were worse than the contemporary Pixels though.
Ah true. It came down to Pro vs. Mini for me because I usually just buy the best iPhone without regard to price. (I don't care about spending an extra $200 for a device I'll use for 4-5 years, but Apple's cheapest phones were also the best back then.)
Tenth of millions of devices were sold (somewhere between 20 to 35 Million?). You could build multiple plants for it, with government funding in Europe.
The MBAs at Apple noticed:
* Big size is a status symbol in Asia. And TV replacement. Their a lot of people in Asia.
* Due to vendor lock-in people need to purchase anyway. So just sell them the standard phone.
They got the sales anyway. We don’t have a “functional market”. But Apples marketing was weird. They named it Mini instead of Compact or Air. And launched it against the SE? A lot people already refused to move from the SE 1st Gen to the Mini, to due the increased size and missing TouchID.
So Apple assumed people want even bigger Max or Air. The Air which is actually much thicker most other phones. Both seem to fail.
Crazy people fixate. It’s why you get people talking about how 4o was the best AI model ever and crying for it to be brought back. (It had no internal thinking process and would believe you are the messiah without question)
Have you replaced the battery? My 13 mini shows 90% battery health but I can’t use it for the full day (and I don’t game or anything, just light use). I wonder if the battery is really ok and it’s the software that is to blame.
I still have my 12 Mini, changed the battery in a Apple store a year ago (and they broke the screen in the process so got a new screen too) for I think 99 EUR, now the battery still last ~2 days, easily worth it. Maximum capacity says "87%" right now although I don't know what exactly that's based on.
I'm keeping this phone until either Apple releses a new mini or until Motorola released a GrapheneOS phone, whichever comes first.
> changed the battery in a Apple store a year ago (and they broke the screen in the process so got a new screen too)
Huh, I had a 12 mini and had the same thing happen at an independent repair shop I used to frequent. I've been pretty salty with the shop, but I guess it's an easier fuckup than I've been giving them credit for.
Just replaced my 13 mini battery this past week which was at 80%. Noticeable improvement. I'm not a very heavy user but did find that I was getting to the 20/10% range at the end of most days. Now its 30/40 and I'm happy! Many more years in the old steed yet.
My 13 mini on iOS 26 shows 83% maximum capacity but makes it through the day with light-ish use (Spotify (although generally offline playlists because of lossless audio) NYT games, email, messaging, browsing, Instapaper). I do have lots of accessibility settings enabled to stop things like transparency and animations though. See my comment here for more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45544554
I got the base 13 at launch day whose battery health now states 86%. While I have noticed degraded battery performance, the stated health has been stuck at 86% for quite a while now.
I guess it's bugged out and would opt for a battery change if you're feeling the battery pains, I'm thinking of upgrading to the new base model this year for the usb c and 120hz display.
I did! I ended up buying a kit off ifixit IIRC. It was super cheap and works great! If I did it again, I would splurge for the Apple verified battery as a third party one doesn't work with the new Battery app features.
I showed my Costco membership QR code to the cashier the other day, and they suddenly exclaimed, “oh my! What a cute little phone!!”
It took me a second to even process why someone might say such a thing about my case-less generic 12 mini. Most of my close friends have 13 mini’s so I often feel my wife’s “regular” size iPhone is the odd one out.
My next upgrade if my 12 mini gives up will be an 13 mini. And from there I will probably just stick to refurbed 13 minis until a good alternative comes out.
I highly recommend hunting down a 13 mini now (with a lot of battery left) so you can switch when you have to. I did last summer and was glad I didn´t have to organize one on short notice. And if you avoid ios26 - make sure the ios18 on the device is updated because now you no longer get updated within ios18
I moved off the mini to get satelite messaging which I use while hiking. But now that T-Mobile/starlink support satelite on the 13 mini, maybe I’ll go back.
Finally moved on from my 12 mini, but I still have it sitting in my office and when I pick it up I think "wow this feels like a phone from the future."
Wish they made a new mini instead of the Air. A friend bought one of those, and frankly I just don't get it.
The screen is too big to use it one-handed, and thickness is really the only one of the three dimension of the phone that I don't care about how small it is (within reason). They probably spent billions of dollars shaving off half a millimeter and what do we get with that technology? Phone that's too big.
If this keeps up in another 5 years I'll be looking at flip phones and a separate camera.
I think that's it exactly. Hopefully we're not looking forward to "phone that's too big, and unfolds to be even more too big."
I can see a large unfolded phone being desirable if it had a stylus and I could use it like a small notebook, but just as a "watch Netflix bigger for $2000" device, no.
Especially if it has the worst camera of all of the phone models like the Air does.
Somehow not a problem I have - still have my original 2018 iPad stylus, and I don't lose regular pens either.
Suspect this is a mindset thing if you mostly use 10 cent Bic pens you'll never care to make a habit of keeping them, and then when you're using an expensive gadget pen those habits carry over.
Even a pen that costs a few bucks (Signo UM-151 for instance) I know where they're at.
Still loving mine as well. I held out with the 2016 SE for 8 years. Sadly it's looking like I might have to do that again with the 13 mini! It boggles my mind that Apple thinks it's worthwhile to sell the 16, 17, 17 Pro, and 17e all in basically the exact same form factor. And then the Air and Max in very similar form factors. Vary it up! I don't need a new mini every year, but something in the 5.4" form factor every 3-4 years would obviously have an audience. I don't care if it's a Pro or an SE/e model, I just need something that'll keep me on the latest iOS for security updates.
Sigh. Maybe the Clicks Communicator (at 13cm tall) will get my money.
I'm on my 8th year of using my 2016 SE. Have replaced the battery and screen a few times over the years. A fair few of the apps I used stopped supporting iOS 15 so I've got old versions of those apps installed, but WhatsApp, Signal and my banking app still actively support iOS 15 so it works well enough for me, for now.
I have an iPhone 13 mini sitting in a drawer for when I need to switch.
The SE3 is only half a year younger than the 13 mini the parent comment mentioned (and it’s larger and heavier than the mini), so I don’t really see the benefit there.
Right, I missed that part. Then get the mini if you prefer it. I’m in the camp of people who hate large phones, the day they remove the SE form factor is the day I switch to android. IMHO the 5S form factor was perfected, any change after that is unnecessary. And I also love having a physical button on my SE, I hope that device will survive for a very long time as I’m not optimistic we will have such options in the future :(
Small form factor and security updates are literally my only criteria for phones.
That's where I'm at, it's about time to replace my 12 mini and it's looking like it's time to go back to Android. It was form factor (iPhone 5) that moved me to the iPhone to begin with. That and back then, iOS had a lot more advantages like longterm support and higher quality apps. Most every advantage that isn't a bald faced attempt at lock-in is gone now.
Same. This would be an obvious upgrade for me, if the overall size was anywhere close to the Mini. Oddly enough, the announcement doesn't even list the screen size, but I'm sure it's 6" +
It will be even shorter than the mini, but also wider than the Pro Max. The aspect ratio is different from a normal iPhone. The weight should be in the Pro range, and of course it’ll be relatively thick. Not a mini replacement in my book.
iPhone 11 here. Chugging along just fine. Though after the latest liquid glass update the responsiveness has noticeably degraded. They've added lot of animations & moving elements which my poor old 11 doesn't seem to handle all that well.
I’m in exactly the same situation. My wife just upgraded from a iPhone 11 Pro to a refurbished iPhone 13 Mini. My daughter just bought a refurbished 13 Mini too.
The second hand market for these phones seems pretty buoyant
One can only hope... My 13 mini's performance, especially for the Camera and Safari seem to have hit new lows with iOS 26. I'm sticking with the mini for its size, but also its weight. So far the Air is the only alternative I think I could switch to, but apparently that's also on Apple's chopping block due to poor sales.
Been thinking of doing the same. My 12 is showing its cycles, but it’s either I have a phone that lives in my front pocket, or I can go phone-less.
I refuse to have a phone I have to constantly carry, hold, or move from back pocket when I sit. This damn thing is in my hands enough, I don’t need to increase the surface area for potential distractions.
Are there any androids with a similar form factor?
Ideally, degoogled android, of course. (Or even not android?)
The 13 mini probably still has a few years of security fixes coming, but after that, I’m going to consider jumping ship, and would like something that’s privacy respecting.
Worst part about big phones are that fingers cannot reach around the whole screen when using one hand, so you are forced to always use two hands. They also fall out of pant pockets easily and have no holes for lanyards.
Same. And so do many people around me. And many still cling to their 12 minis.
Maybe that’s why Apple won’t make them anymore, people like us tend to keep them forever.
> Running deepseek 6B on the Private LLM app on the iPhone 13 basically set my phone on fire
Hey, I’m the author of Private LLM. I hope you’re joking about the phone catching fire. Btw, there’s no DeepSeek 6B model, you’re likely talking about the DeepSeek Distill 7B model.
Yeah, I agree. Really hard to fit anything larger on the 4GB of RAM on the iPhone 13 of which, only about (depending on what iOS version you're on) 2.1-2.5GB is usable by apps.
I stupidly downgraded to a 17 from the 13 mini two-weeks ago and I hate it. It’s the first time I have been earnestly tempted to just get a dumb-phone and be done with it. The constant growth of mobile phones is perplexing to me but I don’t doubt Apple knows what sells.
my wife upgraded from a 13 mini to an Air and she loves it. She thought she hated the larger size of new phones, but after holding the Air in her hand she realized the weight and thickness was the issue for her!
It’s a tough call though because the Air has a lot of pros and cons! My wife never takes nature photography or macro photography, so she was OK with the 1 camera compromise.
If you truly want a shorter phone, my condolences lol. Apple seems to be ignoring this user segment.
I can relate. I actually used to be jealous of the ladies because they always have a convenient purse to put things in. These days I wear a light weight cross-body “sling” bag, and i’m happy as a peach.
Easy way to bring my phone, sunglasses, wallet, keys, etc with me. Pockets can be pretty annoying.
I tried the Air and went back to the mini because of the camera compromises. One big issue for me was losing Cinematic video, which I use all the time.
So... there is a 4" Android phone out there. It's widely available, and from a major manufacturer. It's very usable, and it runs mostly stock Android. I have it, and I like it very much. Brace yourself for the reveal because you're not going to like it.
It's a foldable. It's the Motorola Razr+ or Razr Ultra (I have the 2025 Ultra). The outer screen is 4" and you can use it for almost everything you want to do. I use the outer screen probably 80+% of the time, since I prefer small phones. Every once in a while you run into an app or website that just wasn't built to function on a 4" display, but for almost everything I've tried it works great. You can then also un-fold it into a full-size 7" phablet when you need to do high-detail stuff like Maps.
There are downsides: it's expensive; it's a foldable, so reliability is a concern; and Motorola's OS support promise is not great at only like 3-4 years. But if you're willing to make those compromises, you can get a genuinely very good, small phone, right now today.
Once you get over the shock of having a foldable suggested to you (I was initially skeptical, too), give it a look. It's really genuinely a nice phone for small-phone-likers.
I just signed up on their site and got a mail with the following info:
"To catch you up:
We’ve been hard at work over the summer building out a team and searching the globe for a manufacturer to build our dream phone. It’s been a slow process, but we’re nearing completion and expect to be able to kick off this project very soon.
Once we have a manufacturer locked in, we will be reaching out with a full update on the project and our plan to move forward."
I'd love to have a smaller/cheaper phone but I continue to hold onto my Pro from a couple years ago is for the high end camera, particularly the telephoto lens.
What I would like is a really good single camera. If that's even possible. One thing I find sort of irritating about the multi-camera setup on my iPhone is that using it as a magnifier is often frustrating. Get too close to something and it decides to switch cameras, which then means now you're actually looking at something else entirely. Maybe I'm missing a setting somewhere, I can't be the only person to notice how awkwardly the functionality is implemented.
It's hard to get that in a single camera because of the size.
If you consider the size of professional grade camera lenses there's a reason why they produce much better images. But conversely it's pretty impressive what phone manufacturers have been able to accomplish with such a small amount of space. For 90% of use cases camera phones are sufficient.
I have the same issue with my Pixel. It's nice to be able to use a real zoom when I need it, but that means I can't get the one that's otherwise what I really need.
Indeed. I have 16e from it's launch and can't be happier. Battery life is incredible while no issues with connections whatsoever (I am heavy traveler so can test it on multitude of telco hardware)
> iPhone 17e also features C1X, the latest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple
But the 17e iPhone seems to lack the Apple developed N1 chip that provides Wifi 7 + Bluetooth 6. So presumably they're using off the shelf components for Wifi and Bluetooth in the 17e.
I couldn't care less about multi-gigabit 5G speeds (my 15 Pro can already practically get ~2 Gbps – who really needs that in a battery-powered phone?!); give me better battery life (my 15 Pro gets warm to the touch doing absolutely nothing in some 5G scenarios) and better security (e.g. carrier-side location tracking prevention) any day.
I'm happy for the existence of the e line mainly because it forces them to bump up the specs on the base iPhone. 17 is so good now that there's very little reason to get the 17 Pro.
I don't think I ever used the ultra wide camera in my phone. I find the default wide angle already too wide for most use cases. For some reason every phone includes one but not a ~50mm equivalent. Weird.
Taking inflation into account, a $599 iPhone in 2026 would have been $380 in 2007. Given that the actual launch price in 2007 was $499, that's a pretty hefty drop.
Sure, it hasn’t crashed like the prices of televisions, or like computers did in the 80s and 90s. But it’s still meaningfully cheaper and of course much more capable (the original iPhone didn’t even launch with an App Store!).
- no app store
- no video recording at all
- no copy/paste function
- no selfie camera
- no GPS
Just to name a few. I won't even go into things like touch/faceID, wireless charging, iCloud, any form of water resistance etc.
And then in terms of the specs on what it did have that got better, processor, memory, storage, screen quality, battery life, camera, it's all orders of magnitude better. There really is no comparison.
I mean look at the price of a digital camera, music player etc, hell even external battery pack in 2007, with the same specs as the iPhone today, and you'll easily find support for using the words 'hefty price drop'.
It took about three years to get all the features in your bulleted list. It's been another fifteen and a half years since.
Touch/faceID is cheap, wireless charging is cheap, the free tier of iCloud is cheap, water resistance is cheap.
Yes the specs have increased a ton. When asking for a model under $500, the idea would be giving up some of those specs. And that's clearly possible; even low end phones these days are a zillion times better than an original iPhone.
And no I will not look at non-iPhone things when I'm evaluating whether iPhones underwent a hefty price drop. The cheapest iPhone these days is slightly cheaper than a first or second generation iPhone, and the best one is a lot more expensive.
Yes it was the iPhone 4 and it was $649, or $968 in today's money for 16gb of storage.
That mean's today's cheapest iPhone is 40% cheaper than this base model you're referring to, as well as being tons better. If you don't think 40% is a hefty price drop then idk what to tell you.
That's for the 16gb by the way, the next year's 64gb would've constituted a 53% price drop today.
And that's still for a wildly different phone. You're getting way, way more value today. Longevity alone is easily twice as long, meaning the cost-per-use or cost-per-year can be halved, leading to >75% price drops.
The idea Apple should be going even beyond that to make low-end new phones for a company that positions itself at the top of the market, is just silly. Apple has a long line of phones available for purchase on the secondary market, refurbished market, old-model market, is known to replace batteries 7 years after discontinuing the sale, and can be replaced with non-official batteries as well.
Like you could literally buy an iPhone 12 on the secondary market for $50 and do a $39 battery replacement, or buy it fully refurbished for $150. You can buy a million android phones at any spec level. The idea that Apple should compete at this budget with its own old phones and android phones is a bad idea and the idea Apple entry level phones aren't much cheaper, have more longevity and have wildly better specs than before, is empirically not true.
Is it technically possible for Apple to create a $400 phone that's still much better than the original iPhone? Obviously I agree with you that it is. Does it make sense for Apple to do it? Obviously not.
In this thread you'll have people saying 60 hertz is ridiculous in 2026 on an iPhone 17, and people saying they're completely fine with iPhone 12 specs in 2026 and wanting to get more discounts for fewer specs (ignoring the fact you can indeed simply buy that iPhone 12). The remaining market is so slim it's not worth getting into, but you can't please everyone with a lineup of 5 phones.
> If you don't think 40% is a hefty price drop then idk what to tell you.
For 15 years of tech product, it's not.
For a tech product to stay the same price in dollars for so long is not great. And remember that the 17 itself is $799. This is the discount model and it's still way over the $500 bar.
> The idea Apple should be going even beyond that to make low-end new phones for a company that positions itself at the top of the market, is just silly.
It's silly because you took the thing being complained about, the positioning, and made it part of the premise. Anything sounds silly if you do that.
> you can't please everyone with a lineup of 5 phones
5 phones is plenty to cover a big range if they wanted to. Pro and Pro Max isn't needed, and the Air is totally unnecessary with how close it is to a normal model.
Though for market coverage I wouldn't say low end first, I would say new SE model. I bet a 4.3 inch screen would sell a lot better than the Air's thinness.
Alright I guess we simply disagree, it's getting a bit out of hand to argue this case, and to be honest also a bit silly. Apple's best selling phones are the Pro and Max, which you want to scrap, and you advocate for a 4.3 inch screen when the iPhone mini was Apple's biggest flop phone. I'm not really interested fleshing out why that doesn't make sense if it isn't obvious.
You also think a 50% discount is not much which we just have a disagreement about, no point arguing that further. But to expect an even cheaper lineup with lower specs just doesn't make sense and we've covered the obvious reasons already. For one, Apple has tons of competition at that price/spec level. And secondly, Apple already made hundreds of millions of such phones (they're called years-old models) which anyone can buy with new batteries at the price level you're talking about (<$400). To bring out additional new models that compete with its old models and other brands brings little additional revenue and even smaller margins, the opposite of what drives Apple's market cap. With respect it looks to me like there's a reason you're not CEO of Apple and that Apple isn't taking your advice to bring out another iPhone mini flop or low-budget competitor.
I’m pretty sure they determine the price upfront and then figure out what bells and whistles they can ship without eating into their margins. Their goal is to hit a certain average selling price across their massive user base when they upgrade their old phones. They are not going to jeopardize that by releasing an attractive cheap iPhone.
For the people who really don’t want to spend a lot, obviously the easiest option is to just buy an older iPhone or keep your phone for longer. My partner doesn’t care about having the latest tech. So first I use a phone for 3 years and then they use it for another 3 years. We essentially get 6 years of life out of it (Apple is good about releasing software updates for 6 years).
No, Mercedes Benz is definitely a luxury brand. They don’t want to sell to everyone. Apple (Steve Jobs) has explicitly stated that as one of their goals.
> It’s not a luxury brand, it is a quality brand. There is a difference.
It’s an attainable luxury brand. There aren’t many products that a high school kid has in common with billionaires, superstar athletes and movie stars—the iPhone is such a product.
I'd argue that is worth the money if you're going to be using a phone every single day of their life. People will drop a few hundred on fancy shoes and wear them once a month, but they treat phones as cheap commodities.
Agreed, but its more the fact that you get a lot more peace of mind tossing around, and otherwise treating without too much care, a cheaper device. Risk of drops, theft, forgetting etc. are pretty high for something that I use every day. But then I'm a broke PhD student, so perhaps my views will change one day.
Last time I complained about the pricing of the iPhone, people pointed out that inflation included the prices wasn't to far of from the original iPhone.
Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.
The prices are, in my mind insane, and I'll be buying used, but those are also overpriced.
> Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.
This obviously isnt relevant generally though, this is not how the general public feels at all.
Accounting for inflation, that's $542. And considering how much everything, including phones, costs nowadays, $600 seems like a steal to me too. I was expecting a much higher price for what I'm seeing on that page.
I'm glad they added MagSafe with this version, that was my biggest "issue" with the 16e. Thankfully you can add a ring to the back of the device to "give" it MagSafe (the magnets part at least, if not the faster charging).
My understanding (and I don't ahve a magsafe phone so maybe I'm wrong), is that a lot of the time, you need to buy a magsafe compatible case, i.e. one with magnets in it, to get it to work (assuming you want a case on your phone). But if so, then adding such a case to a 16e would also add back the magsafe functionality. So technically, having it on your phoneb doesn't actually make a difference right? Or am I missing something? I was considering getting the 16e because its discounted now.
> I don't see why I would want magsafe on my phone at this point.
I've been charging my 13 Pro exclusively via MagSafe for a couple of years... out of necessity. The charging port has... an issue... and I've yet to get it resolved.
Honestly the only time I miss being able to use the charging port is on flights, where I'm using someone else's charging solution (i.e. a port I can plug in to).
Everywhere else (bedside table, in the car, or even out and about) it's MagSafe.
The only downside to this approach is that you need to be more specific about which case you buy (they don't all support MagSafe) but in terms of convenience it's night and day better.
I have one of those magsafe multi charger things that let you charge your iphone, watch and whatever you can lie on the base of the charger. I absolutely love it, since it doubles up as a bedside clock for me and it's nicer to snap things on the charger than to fiddle with the cables. I only use USB-C charging for my phone only if I need to charge it fast before leaving somewhere.
The biggest thing for me is not having a fragile connector involved when charging and using it at the same time. A MagSafe puck is super easy to charge your phone while browsing.
Waiting for the first pro line phone with both the Apple modem and Apple wifi/BT stack in it. Battery life is always a struggle when the phone gets older.
Why is it so hard to make a phone without camera bump? Not each table has a strategically placed depression so the phone would lie neatly on the table and do not wobble.
I do not think that is really the case. What actually happens is that smaller phones are often worse, i.e less battery life, worse processor, worse camera. Because there is less space in the device (and manufacturers think that people will buy a slightly thicker phone) and the screen doesn't use that much energy, the battery has to be smaller impacting performance. And users do not accept that. So unless someone discovers that you can make a full feature, big battery phone by increasing depth and weight of the small device, it wont happen / be popular. But once one company makes one, other will probably follow. Which again reduces revenue per producer...
No. It doesn't sell. You so called mini buyers never showed up except in forums making a lot of pointless noise. If you understand anything about how businesses work you would understand how useless your comment is.
I’m sure they showed up, but if you compare to the entire market size it’s a small size like maybe 10%. They should have calibrated their expectations, but they didn’t. Also the battery life on them aren’t as good as the regular.
Hmmph, well fine then. Use that foldable phone technology everyone else apparently wants to give me a "normal" phone I can fold in half. Now everyone's happy!
Yep, let's drop the pretence that companies churning tech widgets do it for consumers. That's merely an inconvenience in the process of enriching stakeholders.
It's AOSP, not Googled so things like Uber don't work. There's also no app store, but you can sideload F-Droid or Aurora using Mudita software. Case is plastic not rubber though.
Some years ago a chinese company released a phone with 2 screens, one typical mobile screen and other side a e-paper screen.
But I don't remember what happened, but unfortunately this idea didn't succeed.
Seems like a decent deal for what it has and getting the full support lifecycle out of it instead of used. Does anyone know if this gets $50 off with the education discount?
Well, that's it. I cannot stand HN anymore. Literally my experience is being downvted and no one commenting on why what I said was negative. And just warning people to wait to by the phone is now frowned on? Nothing but a bunch of capitalist suck up fanbois here I guess.
Same thing happened on a quantum science post. If you cannot express why you disagree with me either you are a schill or your thoughts are not solid enough.
I can't believe Apple expected the 13 mini to be a hot seller; most people holding out for a small phone probably would have already bought the 12 mini just a year prior. The 13 mini was an incremental update -- basically just alleged camera improvements that I could not discern myself in a few minutes of testing.
The standard screen size market is so big that every year there are enough people looking for an upgrade. Apart from enthusiasts or the fashion-minded, most people upgrade every 2-3 years.
It was cannibalized by iphone 12 mini and also se and older iphones still being sold by carriers. All that going on and it still sold millions of units. If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers. In fact if it was apple 10 or 15 years ago they'd also probably be happy with those numbers.
You also have to understand the psychological profile of us "utilitarian" iphone users. We only get one when our hands are forced either hardware failure or forced software obsolescence. The iphone mini came to market and was discontinued all in the time I was still using my SE.
"If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers"
That's what sucks about these huge dominant companies. They suppress interesting products because they don't reach the huge sales they need to make a difference to a trillion dollar company. And smaller companies can't compete against these behemoths.
So I've never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why there aren't interesting niche phones that don't sell a ton (anymore: android used to be full of them, that was half the point), but are enough for a small company to make consistent (but small) profits. People who want niche phones are a tiny fraction of the market....but the smartphone market is enormous. A tiny fraction seems like it should be able to sustain a few small companies.
My best guess is that the kind of person who would found a company capable of making such a phone won't do it because they know it doesn't have potential to make them fabulously wealthy (just regular old wealthy) because it's inherently limited in scale. And the big companies don't do it because, while such a line could be profitable, in the absence of competition, it's more profitable to force their consumers to buy the "main" line and not make another product line.
My guess is they are only able to make the phones cheap if it’s sold at huge scale. If you make some niche small phone, the price goes way up and doesn’t look attractive.
Then you have to deal with the fact that the people with obscure requirements have a million other requirements. The person asking for a small phone then complains it doesn’t have a headphone jack, and AV1 decoding, and 16gb memory, and an unlocked bootloader, and whatever else.
While being more expensive even further decreases your niche size, it still isn't obvious to me that this should be enough to prevent the niche from existing. I am one of those customers you talk about who has a lot of obscure preferences (I can't call them requirements because literally not a single existing phone matches all of them and yet I still buy phones). A phone that met most of them would be something I'd be willing to pay a pretty good premium for.
The 13 mini sold poorly because all of those same influencers just would not stop complaining that it had less battery life than a Max. I mean, of course the battery life wasn’t as good, because it was a smaller battery! But the people who want a mini aren’t influencers who need a phone that can go 18 hours without a break.
It was absolutely this manufactured “range anxiety” that killed it.
Exactly, every older person I've seen has the Plus model (RIP) with screen text turned up to 150%. A small screen for someone with poor eyesight sounds like torture.
It definitely is less important / visible to some people. I have a 175Hz screen at home and a 120Hz iPhone, but I use a 60Hz iPad and displays at work and if I am not focusing on it I simply do not notice the difference.
Can confirm - I go for the cheapest and smallest iPhones possible (e.g. 13 mini) and could not care less about >60Hz on my phone, although I care about it quite a lot for laptop or desktop displays. 17e will likely be my next upgrade (if I can bear to part with my 13 mini).
Really hate huge phones. I have an Xr. It's way too big, and you cannot actually fully lift your left while you have it in your front pocket. It restricts your movement. Even though I'm holding onto this phone as long as possible, it's not because I like it. I hate the phone. But I'm going to hate the next phone too, and they cost so much, (I got the Xr for free) and society effectively requires me to own one. So I'm just trying to avoid a phone purchase for as long as possible since the next one will be terrible as well.
I really want to like the lower cost e phones, but the lack of ultrawide band support is a deal breaker. Does adding this feature really increase the cost, or is this a calculated move by Apple to ensure those who use this for air tags or keyless entry continue to buy higher end phones.
There are a lot of foldable options in the Android world now. I wonder when Apple will create an offering of their own. An unfolded screen could be great for reading source code, not that I've tried.
Interesting but ultimately still not my upgrade target.
I'm on a 14 Pro. It's fine -- plus, it's been replaced twice under AppleCare. Once was a Lightning jack failure, but the second was when it fell off my motorcycle mount and got run over back in October. (Amazingly, the phone part worked fine, but the mishap ruined the camera lenses.)
The upshot is that I have a phone that's only a few months old, and see almost no compelling reason to upgrade to anything else. It _would_ be nice to have USB-C, but that's not worth hundreds of dollars to me. And it also appears there are aspects of the 17e that aren't as nice as my 14 Pro, so ...
It's a bit of a shame that the 10a introduction price was pretty much the same as the Pixel 10 by that time. The Pixel 10 has a much better SoC and PixelSnap.
10a will be worth it when the price drops down to 350 Euro.
Why would anyone buy this over a good as new refurb 16 pro with 100% battery and likely few months of Apple care left? Here they can be found for $650 or less
Are they using binnned A19 chips like they use the binned A18 chips in the iPhone 16e that has a GPU that can’t handle liquid glass? Asking for a friend.
What do you mean? With every launch they change the orientation of the camera array so you can tell who has the new model, and thus, is a better person.
You need to be well versed in the attribution for camera disposition. I am too old for that so getting understanding who is the better person is challenging :)
Sad it doesn't have the dynamic island, was going to pick up one of these for testing for iOS app development. Everything else looks fine however, as expected.
If your phone is a problem for you, or is insufficient then any phone in your budget that fixes your problems is a worthy upgrade. Otherwise no phone is.
I'm using less than 100 GB of total storage on my phone. I'm not sure how your laptop is supposed to come into that but 256 GB is already plenty for the smallest possible option to select, doubly so since this is the budget variant.
The bogus part with the storage here is instead on needing to pay $200 more just to get to 512 GB.
My 256GB phone is already almost full because of all this app bloat. 6 different parking apps, 17 messaging apps because nobody uses the same thing, 13 different financial apps, EV charging apps, ...
I have one messaging app eating 40GB
On the other hand, a terabyte is cheap, they should just put a terabyte in the phone, it's what we apparently need in 2026
Is massive storage on a mobile device really still a thing that's important?
I'm saying this as someone with 512GB, but I just checked and I'm using 85GB at the moment, including the OS.
Photos and videos are the likely reason why the phones have so much storage, but these days both apple and google offer decent cloud backup solutions which negates the need for massive on-device storage. I'd rather the storage be smaller, and the savings going toward more battery or whatever.
Cloud storage do not help you sharing that old photo album with friends spending the night in a cabin far from the closest cell phone coverage.
Also, cloud service typically move your older stuff to colder/slower storage which are painfully slow to retrieve whenever you decides to do it. I realized this when browsing some old pictures before closing a google account I had not been using for years except emptying the gmail inbox every few months.
I personally prefer having a local copy of my files and syncthing them to my NAS at home (which is itself backuped in a storage in the cloud).
The iCloud backup built into the iPhone for me seems quite seamless. As I mentioned in another comment, I have several thousand photos and videos that don’t fit on my phone because it’s only a 64 GB device. It’s been this way for many years. But I can still scroll back and see all the photos. And when I click one I view it instantly. I’ve never noticed any lag or any problems associated with the cloud backup. It feels to me exactly the same as if they were local.
First that’s not iCloud backup but iCloud Photo Library. Second, I’ve experienced data loss with exactly this feature. I stopped using it in 2021 after using it for six years from 2015.
Both third party developers and Apple have increasingly become terrible at respecting the user’s disk space. Recently my iPhone started crashing as it ran out of space. I found that Apple Maps was using twenty gigs. Fortunately the fix is simple as the issue is widespread and it has become the first search result. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256084682?sortBy=rank
If you have 512GB I don’t think you really experience the worst of it. A lot of bugs are just Apple creating humongous temporary files before they are deleted as they age. Unless you check every day you don’t really know how much is really being used. You don’t really experience these crashes, and you have no skin in the game to make an informed comment.
I don't think it's inherently impossible, but Apple at least seems to do a really poor job at local cache management on iOS for Photos and Messages attachments. I am constantly amazed to find my non-tech-savvy relatives deleting stuff from their phones to free up local storage.
I've had at least 256GB on my phones for the last couple of generations after having had to deal with storage issues beforehand, and it's been much nicer.
But I picked up a 16e for my son a few months ago, with 128GB, and yes, we're running into issues with storage space when it comes time to do an OS update. Between local music and photos storage, base storage, and the image for the new update, two or three times now we've had to delete stuff temporarily in order to get the update going. So I'm happy the new base is 256GB, at least that will probably last us a couple more generations before ~~640KB~~ 256GB is enough for everyone.
I have a 64 GB iPhone and I’ve never come close to using all the storage space in many years. I’ve got thousands of photos and videos but like you say, they are automatically backed up to the cloud and then the local version is optimized away until I need it.
Unfortunately yes. Some mobile games are 30+ GB (and this is probably the major reason for increasing minimum storage), high-res videos take any amount of space and are slow to sync with cloud, in-app downloaded data caches are routinely 2-5 GB each in addition to apps themselves.
Cloud backups are great for keeping your photos long-term, but if you want those photos on your phone so you can show them to people or share them, you need to download them anyway.
I need storage because Honkai: Star Rail is 32gb and I like being able to have more than one game on my phone.
I know good network connectivity is not a privilege that everyone has, but on google photos I can scroll back all the way to 2007 when my digital photo collection started (I uploaded everything I had manually), and it's as if all those photos are local on my device.
iCloud seems to work differently. Nearly all of the photos and videos I have are stored in iCloud because my phone is only a 64 GB device. But I can scroll back many years and pull up any photo video and play or view just fine right away. I can swipe right through long sequences of photos from five years ago on a device that doesn’t have them downloaded. I’m not sure exactly how that works.
Ah dang my typical luck, just bought a 16e on friday since my old 2020 SE broke down (same price as I would've paid for a 17e also since I got the 256gb version).
Bought from a retailer that has "no returns on phones with broken seals", and honestly with all accounts and everything else setup on the device now, the time taken to go exchange it and setup everything again, I'm gonna lose money by swapping it compared to possibly buying the next phone one year earlier instead.
I'm trying to understand what you mean by this. Are you saying they're "bad" in terms of resolution, or artistic value, or something else? They seem good enough (far from "bad") by any definition I can think of.
I actually don’t want a smartphone anymore. The first iPhone was fun, the new one is creepy. I survived for many years without it, I think I can do it.
What, if any, mobile phone are you using instead? Even if I would not miss all the features I do not find these feature phone companies more trustworthy. Some are in bed with AdTech companies. Less features does not necessarily mean less tracking.
Still holding onto my 13 mini. Dreaming of another small form factor release one of these announcements.. :'}
People make fun of me but I'll never skip a chance to complain about how large these phones are. I hate it so much. I have a standard iPhone, not a max, and it causes real pain in my wrist if I use it too much. Was honestly thinking about downgrading to the last SE model even though it's several years out of date.
I want to +1 every comment in this thread. Phones are too big now. I don't understand Apple's weird obsessions, first trying to make all the phone so thin you cut your hand holding it, and then making it too big to fit comfortably in your pocket unless you are walking around in camo pants.
You know what I would like? When I tap on the search and type the first few letters of an app on my phone, and the app appears, and I click on that -- I would like the app to open. Only happens about half the time now. UI is getting worse with every release.
Many people used low iPhone mini sales to point at the idea that small phones aren't popular anymore.
They might be right, but the "Mini" was more like a return to the size of the 6 & 8; not the same size as the 5 or prior SE. So for me it was still too large.
https://imgur.com/a/iphone-mini-vs-iphone-5-vs-iphone-6-case...
The "usable screen" is where my thumb can reach, not whatever idea people have in their heads about the total size of the phone or anything, truthfully.
Anyway; hit recognition of the keyboard is so far behind where it was in the iPhone 4/5 generation that I doubt modern iOS would even be functional; even if you excused the padding issues that would inevitably be an issue.
> Anyway; hit recognition of the keyboard is so far behind where it was in the iPhone 4/5 generation that I doubt modern iOS would even be functional; even if you excused the padding issues that would inevitably be an issue
Right?? It is worse than I remember right? I'm not crazy.
Using the iOS 26 keyboard on an iPhone SE 2/3 is a truly miserable experience now. Upgrading from 18 was a terrible mistake
POS Apple just made me upgrade my iPhone Mini to 26 so that I could pair my new Apple Watch, because I just broke the old one.
I wasn't sure I wanted another Apple Watch, but it was the easiest thing to buy, and I don't have to figure out how to transfer all the data and set it up somewhere else.
But I definitely regret going the "easy" way; iOS 26 is truly awful, what the fuck.
I'm going to figure out what fitness/sport watch I really want to use next because I doubt I'll be sticking to iPhone with what they have on offer these days...
Luckily, hearing all the complains early adopters of 26 had, I disabled auto updates on my SE. Since you can't go back to previous iOS version, leaving it on is a bit risky in general.
I recently switched from an iPhone 16 to an Air and my experience is the opposite. I type way more accurate on the Air (even when both dictionaries are reset and have no screen protector what could make the touch less sensitive). I do not know why.
> The "usable screen" is where my thumb can reach, not whatever idea people have in their heads about the total size of the phone or anything, truthfully.
In the early days of the phablets I had an observation that has mostly held true all these years later. At the time I noticed you could accurately predict whether someone wanted the large or small form factor based on their usage patterns. Did they tend to use their device while sitting down? Or did they tend to use their device while on the move? This indicated whether or not they typically used 2 hands vs 1 hand.
It turned out the 2 handers dominated the market, unfortunately for people like you & I.
Apple follows the market. There just aren’t many people who want small phones, HN notwithstanding. If they sold like hotcakes they’d have a full lineup.
And I kind of get it. Philosophically I want a small phone. Realities of age and eyesight forbid.
The market is basically people who don’t read or watch videos on their phone, and who have excellent eyesight, and who don’t care about having the best cameras. 100% legit market segment, but that Venn intersection is too small to be worth it.
I don't agree with this. In my view, there are plenty of cases where the product changes are shoved down our throats.
I think the problem is that the product folks don't actually listen to the market. They read Jobs' biography and are convinced that they will tell their users what product they will like and that they will see the light later on.
The sad reality is: they are not Jobs (and even he was not faultless). So, we get Mac like Windows interfaces, we get mail clients losing features, we get AI in every single app you see, etc.
Just my 2c.
Why do you buy things you don’t like?
And if you’re convinced that most people don’t like most products… why don’t you make a fortune building what people actually want?
The iphone air isn’t popular either and yet here we are. They preferred releasing a huge thin phone than a tiny thin phone. Even if the % of clients is small, there are still millions of potential mini clients
I interpret the same facts differently: I see Apple realizing that the SE form factor doesn’t sell enough to be worth it, and trying something different with the Air. It sounds like the Air will likely go the way of the SE, with occasional updates but not every year.
Apple is very good at market research and understanding users… but not perfect. I think they genuinely believed the Air would sell a lot more than it did.
And “millions” is not necessarily a lot. Apple sells 250 million phones a year. A SKU that sells 3 million is a distraction with much lower ROI against R&D than a mainline phone. It takes just as much engineering to create and as much manufacturing to produce, so fixed costs are spread among many fewer units.
> Realities of age and eyesight forbid
Am old. Am experiencing presbyopia. Am still very much tied to my mini on the default font size. When I can't read something I just pinch/zoom. Meanwhile it's easy to hold & use in one hand while walking down the street, and fits into normal sized pockets.
Until you hit 'Search' at the bottom right it shows you a preview result set - that can differ completely from the one you get then. Because two are not enough, they added a third with 'Siri suggestions' as top row. Which is not in the Search settings but in the ones for Siri. The iOS docs[1] misname it as 'Suggest App' when it is called 'Suggest Apps Before Searching' which only the iPadOS docs [2] get right. Did I mention they cut useful info from the iOSv26 version[3] and changed the URL?
[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/about-siri-suggestion...
[2]: https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/about-siri-suggestions-...
[3]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/turn-siri-suggestions...
The silver lining if ai takes all of our jobs will hopefully be that the people responsible for all of this become destitute as well
woah
Why do almost all phones have to be in that narrow band of 6.5 to 6.9 inches?
I wish there were more size choices on both ends of the spectrum. While most people prefer more choice below 6", I would like some choice above 7", since I keep my phone in my belly pouch, and never use it one-handed. My current Huawei Mate20X is actually ok at 7.2" (but worse than the Mediapad X1 I had before which at 7" was actually wider) but is way behind on Android updates, and will soon stop running my banking app.
Quick reality check that
- 7" used to be tablet category, e.g the Nexus 7
- anything above 6" would be considered phablet
Phones are really just like cars now, size inflation included.
While I agree with the spirit of the thread and dearly love my mini, I think this reasoning doesn’t account for a substantial reduction in bezels: my iPhone 5S had more than a centimetre of black bars above and below its 4" display (altogether it was 5.4" in diagonal), I bet those phablets you mentioned had even bigger bezels and were closer to modern 8.5" phones.
I loved the size of my iPhone 6, and very iPhone that I’ve used after that has been too big.
It's not an obsession. Its calculation. They noticed bigger phones lead to customers buying more services and apps.
That’s an entertaining construction of “people are more likely to buy things they get more utility from” that somehow removes agency from consumers.
Yes. It's the Apple's product first philosophy that Steve Jobs repeated again and again:
"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
"Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.' But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do."
"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
"If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse."
Is that the direction of causality or it's the other way around? Maybe people buy larger screens because they want to watch Netflix or TikTok on their phone more comfortably than on smaller screens. I do love small and light phones (an A40 right now) but I watch movies on a tablet. If I were often on the move or sharing home with many people, maybe I would use a larger phone.
> first trying to make all the phone so thin you cut your hand holding it,
Except the cameras that stick out. Why do I want a phone thinner than the camera lenses?
> I don't understand Apple's weird obsessions
Selling you Apple Watch ?
I dived into a niche world of small phones recently while looking for replacement to malfunctioning Pixel 4a (which is apparently now considered compact phone). There's a few small manufacturers in China making some, with 4 inch or 5 inch screen, like Aiphor or Unihertz. And by "small" I mean "they use kickstarter to fund their R&D" small.
Other than that... Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.
> Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.
And the worst thing is that app developers do not bother with testing their apps on small phones. So even if someone would produce small phone, many apps would be broken on that UI. So there's no way back.
PS 4 inch is not a small phone. iPhone 4S had 3.5" display and it wasn't small, it was normal. Small is something like 2" screen I suppose. All modern phones including these "iPhone Minis" are egregiously huge.
I would not go as far as calling the iPhone Minis "egregiously huge", keep in mind that screen size is not a great measure for phone sizes across different generations. You could easily fit a 4+ inch display into the form factor of the 4S with modern technology, the bezels on those phones were huge. Unless my math is off, the housing of the 4S has a diagonal of just over 5 inches.
> All modern phones including these "iPhone Minis" are egregiously huge.
Agreed - going from the original SE to the mini meant a big downgrade in usability for me, as it's now hard to reach the top of the screen.
My assumption is that very few people who like Dom Joly sized phones use them one handed
I don't give a stuff about the vast majority of "apps". Webpages work fine.
Built in ones work fine - mail, safari, music, maps, photos
Major ones work fine - bbc sounds, slack+teams, whatsapp, various authenticator programs
Yep. Aiphor's BlueFox NX1 with 4 inch screen is roughly the same size as original iPhone, but has a larger screen (iPhone had bigger bezels and the home button underneath). To me it feels a bit too small for things like typing/texting for example.
Unihertz Jelly Star has 3 inch screen, that's way too small for me.
But they exist and so do people who buy them.
We do, and it is a pain. It is incredibly easy to defeat any kind of design or in fact HID guidelines by cranking text size to the max on these smaller devices.
> Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore,
They need to show all that ad somewhere right?
The phones get larger and the UI gets less information dense every release. More padding, more offsets, more dead space.
Yeah, this is what bothers too much. Retina displays for low density content? We could've remained at 800x600.
I'd pay good money for a small phone with nothing but a unix terminal
Termux on Android. Lots of hardware choices.
Apple needs all that space so that the aesthetic can fit in.
I have a pet theory about increasing phone sizes
> Screen size is area (x^2) and battery size is volume (x^3). As battery life is a critical feature, a bigger screen supports (a nonlinear) better battery life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44588733
This does not square with especially Apple's unending obsession to make phones as thin as possible. Which is doubly stupid when it makes them so fragile that the first thing you do after taking it out of the box is to wrap it in a thick rubber shell.
What obsession about making thin phones? iPhones are pretty thick and have been that way for years. The Air being an outlier, of course, but it's an intentionally thin phone in a lineup of thick and heavy ones.
I think it’s even better than that. Your cellular modem (on all the time) scales at O(1) with phone size. Same for on-board tasks that do not involve the screen. Powering your RAM (also on all the time) is similar, but larger (more expensive) phones may tend to have more RAM.
I had a Sony Xperia Z1 mini, that was close to the size of a SE but had double the battery lifetime.
We made fun of phablets, only for them to become the default.
well we have galaxy fold tablet-as-phone, so... maybe not all is lost?
I have found the iPhone Air much easier to hold than the iPhone 13 Pro it replaced because of how light it is, even though the iPhone Air has a bigger screen.
The 17e weighs roughly the same at a smaller size, and the mini weighs significantly less. Not to mention the first SE, compared to which even the mini is heavy. Yes the Air is lightweight compared to the Pro, but that’s a low bar.
The other thing with the Air is that you can’t really use it one-handed, which is what most people who like small phones are after, besides pockability.
The first SE was the best form factor I've ever owned.
Incredibly small. Incredibly light. Pretty thin, even in a case. Had a headphone jack, Lightning and Touch ID.
The only thing I like about the new iPhone designs is the action button. Having an automation which automatically turns silent mode off or on based on whether I'm home or not is pretty cool. You can't do that with a physical switch.
Agreed about the SE. I’m still depressed anytime I take it in hand that we don’t have something like it anymore.
I don’t think anyone should make fun of you for it but I’m in the opposite boat. I’m so glad that they make the pro max variants because most smartphones are so small that it hurts my fingers to bend them in the unnaturally inward way it requires to hold and interact with them.
It wouldn't be so bad if both options were available. By all means, have your giant pro max or whatever if you want, but that shouldn't be the only reasonable option.
I agree, and ideally neither should be tied to the phone’s technical specs.
For me it's not the fingers, it's the eyesight.
Boban Marjanovic posts on HN? Would never have guessed.
Great reference. It's a shame most people seeing this comment won't get it.
I switched from a pixel 3 to a pixel 9 pro over a year ago, and I still miss the smaller form factor. the pixel 3 really was the perfect size for me and I am sad I can no longer get a smallish phone with a high end processor.
I switched from Pixel 4a to Unihertz Max (5G phone with 5 inch screen from a small Chinese startup). Love the form factor, I can keep the phone in my front pants pocket again, next to my keys or wallet. I'm somewhat reluctant to put anything sensitive on that phone (like my email), but happy overall.
I still have my Pixel3. I use it without a SIM for random stuff, and miss the small form factor. It is half the thickness of a Pixel 10, my current phone!
I’m still running an SE2020. I was expecting the latest update (with liquid) to be the death of it. But performance has actually improved significantly! Very unexpected.
It’s been a great phone!
Same. I'll probably try to run it out for another year and end up with the 18e. Its been a great phone, but its days have to be numbered.
I just bought a refurbished SE. It works great with newest iOS, Liquid Glass, etc. Do it!
Which gen of SE?
3rd is the only one still supported.
Both se 2 and 3 support iOS 26
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphone-models-compati...
Funnily, the large display is the most important thing for me. I find my efficiency directly proportional to display size (which holds for laptops too).
If a 30 second task can be done in just 20 on a device with a larger display, that's absolutely worth it for me.
Also larger device tends to imply longer battery life too.
If the task can’t be done in a few taps I feel I’m better off opening a laptop anyways.
However the market agrees with you so I must be missing something. I used to think it was driven by media consumption on phones, and that I try to avoid, but this isn’t the first time I have heard people tout phone productivity gains from a slightly larger screen.
> I must be missing something
I wouldn't assume that.
The expression 'fat fingers' concerns the phenomena where users (including myself) lack the eyesight and finer motor skills required to type accurately on a small keyboard, so a slightly larger display makes all the difference.
Perhaps you simply have those fine motor skills (and good eye sight) so a larger device isn't necessary to prevent typos and remain productive.
I was able to thumb type at high speed and accuracy on the 3.5 inch iPhones. On modern iPhones, I produce more typos than ever, because apparently Apple thinks it knows which key I meant to hit better than I do, even with all the autocorrect and suggestions turned off.
I've banned social and don't use my phone much anymore, so it's less of an issue than it used to be, but it's really frustrating when I'm clearly hitting the right key and it insists on pretending I hit an adjacent key.
It’s so strange. Like, the obviously correct thing is to have a small ML model that learns the user’s typing patterns, which of their own typos they fix, which auto- and suggested fixes they reject, what rare, made-up, and jargon words they use, what acronyms they use, etc.
Instead, after 20 years of iPhone usage, I am not allowed to type the names of projects I use all the time without fixing the autocorrect every time, or (as you say) carefully hitting the left side of the F key because dead center will produce a G.
My preferred conspiracy theory is that larger, brighter screens hold attention better, so everyone involved in the whole “user experience” (phone manufacturer, application developers, advertisers, etc.) prefers (whether they consciously realize it or not!) phones to have a larger screen. Smaller phones make fewer demands; who would want to make a device like that?
I believe you are correct.
I have my phone with me all of the time and it has an always on connection. My laptop has neither trait
> I have my phone with me all of the time and it has an always on connection
That's a bug, not a feature. You don't need to be able to do every task all the time. In fact, it's nice to be able to separate that aspect.
Yes I can just print out directions on Mapquest before I leave home, tell people to page me and I will call them back from the nearest pay phone, carry around my Walkman and my Polaroid camera with me.
Have you ever thought that with 80% of web traffic coming from mobile, you might be the outlier?
What next? The old Slashdot meme “I haven’t watched TV in 20 years. Do people still watch TV?”
What a ridiculous exaggeration.
I said you don't have to do every task, not do no tasks.
> Have you ever thought that with 80% of web traffic coming from mobile, you might be the outlier?
Wow, snark too. In recent years, I've taken a much more luddite stance against mobile device usage for my own mental wellbeing. Maybe other people should follow suit.
"You should do your taxes on the train". No, I don't think that I will. You're free to stress yourself out like that. Have fun.
So park_match is the arbiter of what tasks should and should not be done on your phone?
> You should do your taxes on the train". No, I don't think that I will. You're free to stress yourself out like that. Have fun.
I along with 90% of the taxpayers in the US take the standard deduction - meaning my taxes are stupid simple.
I logged into the TurboTax app, it offered to download my w2’s, I answered five questions, entered the date that I wanted IRS to take out the taxes we owed and we were done. I don’t have to even file state taxes for the state I live in?
How would that have been easier from a computer? In fact it would have been harder if I had to use a computer because the other option I had to submit my W2 was to take a picture of it.
I believe the GP was talking about trying to do “real work” on a phone, which is something many people try to do — but which many others find a repugnant idea, as they currently use the excuse of the impracticality of doing work on a phone as a lever to push back on letting work intrude on their personal life.
Have you thought that a lot people work remotely and don’t sit at their desk all day? I have deliverables and deadlines to meet like everyone else. But sometime I would rather go for a swim in the middle of the day in the heated pool when the sun is still out - benefit of living in Florida in the winter - and work late and be contactable (wearing my watch) or go to the gym during the day (downstairs). Business traveling is also a thing (much less than I use to), working with people in different time zones where I’m not going to refuse to answer a message from a coworker in India if they need me.
It’s a fair trade off. My company gives me a lot of leeway during the day and I am flexible about time zones.
Is this really a driving factor for people? If I anticipate tasks that I can't wait to get back to a good work environment to do, I'll bring my laptop and tether on my phone. It's a fantastically more productive setup than trying to ssh in via a phone keyboard or even write a long email. 1 inch extra on the phone screen diagonal won't move the needle there for me.
Yes and even though you haven’t watched TV in 20 years ((c) Slashdot) people still watch TV.
The feigned ignorance on HN that most normal people don’t pull their laptops out to do everything in 2026 is amazing
It's not feigned. I'm astonished to learn how hard people will work for the (seemingly to me) false convenience of doing things on their phone which would be (to me) much more straightforward to do on a more suitable device.
So I tend to assume that these stories are often the outliers, and that my personal experience is more common. I recognize the fallacy, and I suspect we're both wrong and we're both right. I just honestly don't know which one of us is more of which.
It probably devolves to a question of what kind of work we're talking about. The work that I do (or the way I do it), I do not believe could be done effectively on a phone or tablet, most of the time. I work with people whose work can be done there. And there are probably more of them that there are of me. But that does not mean I could become one of them.
(addressing your comment on another subthread): if music, camera, and web are a person's "work", then sure. But that does not resemble "work" for me in any way.
So it’s not feigned ignorance…
Again, you can look at the worldwide penetration of cell phones vs laptops, where most web traffic comes from, the amount of resources spent on mobile development vs desktop, the amount of revenue globally of phone sales vs PC sales, etc
I also don’t spend all day working and I definitely don’t take out my laptop when I’m not working
Worldwide is not relevant, and mobile-vs-desktop dev is not relevant.
Mobile-vs-web dev is probably a better metric. And developed, mature markets only. Anything else introduces the second- and third-generation tech gap inconsistencies.
Yes Japan and S. Korea who led in mobile penetration for decades are poor countries..
Are you really arguing in 2026 about time spent on mobile vs PCs?
This is non-responsive to my comments.
Also, you're being unnecessarily unpleasant in these threads; I wish I had read down further before replying initially, but I'm done now.
> Anything else introduces the second- and third-generation tech gap inconsistencies
This is completely responsive to your thread if you think countries that use their phones more than the US is some type of signal they are 3rd world countries.
Only about 70% of Americans even own a laptop[1]. Factor in many of those being ancient with 15 minute battery life, plus user preferences… it’s hard to see how that could be the majority use case.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/228589/notebook-or-lapto...
It‘s also generational. My 18yo sister in law is now applying for colleges and the word “application” immediately made her look for an app. That the whole process happened on a (not mobile friendly) website was rather surprising to her.
(English is her 3rd language)
I am 51. The amount of Ludditism on HN shouldn’t come as a surprise to me. But it does. Most older 70+ year old people I know don’t own a computer at all and would never use one. But they do know how to get to things they need on their phones.
It's not feigned ignorance, it's disbelief that people are comfortable working in such an inefficient and frankly unpleasant way.
Can I file my taxes on my phone? Probably. But I could also set myself on fire, and I think that might be more fun. Why would I not want to use a tool that is 100x faster and 1000x easier to use for any task more complex than writing a sentence?
I'm a developer. I've heard of developers SSH'ing from their phone and developing that way. It's impressive, in the same way removing all your fingernails is impressive.
Really? I did file my taxes by phone. It took me all of five minutes.
90% of taxpayers claim the deduction - meaning their taxes are really simple.
I launched TurboTax, it offered to download my and my wife’s W2s, I clicked through a few buttons on a wizard and I was done. It had all of my information from the prior year so it already knew my employer.
As far as speed, have you compared the speed of the fastest iPhone to a low to midrange x86 PC? The latest A series chips in the iPhone are faster in single core performance than an M1 MacBook Air which is no slouch. But all that is besides the point. How fast of a computer do you think you need to file taxes? There was tax filing software for the 1Mhz Apple //e in 1986. You just had to print it out.
I entered maybe one number?
I live in a state without state taxes so I didn’t even have to file states.
FWIW, I also shopped for, did all of the paperwork before closing, for the house we had built in 2016 from my phone.
The things that require more than a few taps to do aren't things that need to be done at a moment's notice. Those things can wait until I'm at my laptop.
Just Thursday, I left home at 6AM got in an uber, waited at the airport got on a plane for an hour and half , waited at another airport, got on another plane for four hours, uber to the Airbnb and while I was out to dinner that night, my wife and I were planning a trip we were taking during the summer.
Are you suggesting that o just queue everything up until I set my laptop up?
Again you realize you’re the odd one right with most activity these days taking place on mobile?
Is there anything you need to do during that time? Or are you looking to fill that time with whatever to keep you occupied and enjoy whatever?
If it's the former, you lead a very different life from me. There are very few things in my life that show up and require immediate action (or action within 24-ish hours for that matter. Most things can wait). If it's the latter, I try to fill that time with reading.
Again, are you so much in the HN bubble you don’t realize that most people don’t wait to get home to their laptop (if they even have a laptop) to get things done in 2026?
Is it really that hard to look at stats and realize that you might not be the normal one?
I'm sure they do it that way. I'm also not convinced there's any actual need to do it that way.
You also didn't answer my question. Nothing in your travel scenario there, if I were in your shoes, would need me to use my phone for more than a few taps per actual task, while the rest of my phone use would go to mindless browsing or reading. What specific tasks are you imagining popping up here that I would then queue to my laptop?
Have you ever thought that the HNs crowd superiority complex above the “commoners” and unwashed masses may be unwarranted?
And no I’m not a young guy - my first computer was in 1986 in 6th grade…
I'm not trying to say my way is superior. On the contrary, I'm asking what use cases you have that you are unable to solve. If you have a genuine need to send emails from your phone at a moment's notice, then I can't argue with that; if you can't wait to respond to the emails you receive, there's nothing else to really do about it. That's why I'm asking what needs you have. I'm trying to better understand your situation, trying to put myself in your shoes.
But if you have no desire to actually respond to my inquiry, I shall remain in the dark.
Yes you will if you think most communication personally or even work related is happening via email…
You know sending email via mobile has been popular since 2003 right?
> Yes you will if you think most communication personally or even work related is happening via email…
The same principles apply to Slack, Teams or whatever else you may use. I don't do work outside of work hours, so what would I know. Email was just the example I thought of in the moment. Again, I'm asking you a question out of a desire to better understand your situation.
Personal correspondence doesn't take many taps to do. It's rarely more than 25 characters at a time in my experience.
> You know sending email via mobile has been popular since 2003 right?
'sending' and 'popular' are doing some pretty heavy lifting here. Reading, sure, I'll buy that. Sending? I'm not sure sending emails longer than two sentences from any device without a keyboard has ever been popular, for values of. It's probably more popular than ever given that touch keyboards make it reasonably possible, but James S. Casual isn't sending a lot of emails from his phone just through the sheer power of not sending many emails to begin with.
And 'popular' for that matter. Possible, sure, but how many people ever even had a mobile device that could send email before the iPhone came out?
I'm sure sarcasm and implying I'm stupid are great ways to convince your interlocutor, or the unseen masses for that matter.
I’m not implying you are stupid. I’m saying straight out that you’re feigning ignorance (ie not that you are ignorant) and you know how the world works in 2026.
Myself personally, I work remotely. I might be running errands during the day and still be monitoring Slack so I can be on a call at 6 or 7 at night with someone in another time zone.
I also travel for work - consulting - and travel personally during the work day and may work after I land. Even if not for work, do you wait to get to your computer to respond to text messages? Check HN?
Believe it or not, I'm not feigning ignorance. I just lead a very different life from you.
> Myself personally, I work remotely. I might be running errands during the day and still be monitoring Slack so I can be on a call at 6 or 7 at night with someone in another time zone.
> I also travel for work - consulting - and travel personally during the work day and may work after I land.
See, I would never do this. A.) I don't work remotely (not out of a desire not to, but it's just not viable with my current line of work), and B.) If I did, that work would be zoned off away from my personal life. If there's downtime, I can kill time by browsing whatever, but I wouldn't be out and about but also 'at work' at the same time. Work-time and personal time basically never mix in my life, and I'd like to keep it that way.
If you're 'at work' for 48 hours at a time, while travelling, then having to respond instantly at any given time makes a lot more sense, although I'd probably still want to defer those responses until I can get some downtime during any given travels to then type up my responses on an actual keyboard. I can however understand if that's not really viable in your life of work.
> do you wait to get to your computer to respond to text messages?
I've never(?) sent a text message longer than maybe 100 characters. Most are a fair bit shorter than that, and I don't send that many to begin with. Same goes for Discord, although confirming that is harder, since it's contaminated with messaged written with an actual keyboard.
> Check HN?
To read? Sure. I even read books on my phone. Respond to a comment? Not unless my response is really short.
You're being pretty defensive / aggressive about what some might call a phone addiction.
Most on HN know the data: healthier people tend to enforce boundaries with their devices. The average person is addicted, yes, but I'm not sure being "the odd one" in an era of actually decreasing literacy and numeracy and attention span is the insult that you seem to think.
No I’m not living in some Luddite bubble. I am sure you’re also surprised that I’m not running Linux and using KDE Connect.
Again, look at the statistics..
I was ready to agree with you, as that was my belief. (I also agree it's a sign of a dangerous addition, but just like everyone in the 60s smoked, everyone today use phones)
Then I cam across this, showing about even split between laptop and phone
https://tgmstatbox.com/stats/united-kingdom-device-usage-bre...
I'd assumed it was more like 80% phone
The statistics suggest that being perpetually glued to a phone is negative for your life across essentially every dimension.
Yes I’m sure that using my phone for things that in the before times I would have used a desktop computer to do over a 2400 baud modem is a negative for my life. Those negatives are around social media
> while I was out to dinner that night, my wife and I were planning a trip
Were you out to dinner with your wife?
Yes, during our first night of our 45 day stay in another country and she got a text from someone she is meeting on the first leg of our trip during our summer 45 day domestic trip asking could we come 3 days earlier. We were looking at our calendar, our Hyatt points, flights etc. while enjoying live music and planning our next get away.
I’m sure you would have thought we should have waited to take out my laptop when we got back home.
I don't understand why are you downvoted. Are people in this thread really pulling out a laptop and trying to get it connected (or pay for one with a cellular modem) every time they need to respond two words to an email, call a uber or look up where is the nearest coffee shop that is open at an odd hour?
HN seems to have some really weirdly prescriptive view of how people ought to use their devices in a way that is almost like Steve jobs.
> every time they need to respond two words to an email
I don't have my work email on my phone, and personal emails basically never need any actual response.
> call a uber
This is a few clicks and not a big ask regardless of the exact device. You can order an Uber regardless of screen size.
> look up where is the nearest coffee shop that is open at an odd hour?
Google Maps works fine on smaller screens. Ask me how I know.
> I don't understand why are you downvoted. Are people in this thread really pulling out a laptop and trying to get it connected (or pay for one with a cellular modem) every time they need to respond two words to an email, call a uber or look up where is the nearest coffee shop that is open at an odd hour?
Because some of us read the original comment and thought maybe the discussion should be responsive to it:
> If the task can’t be done in a few taps I feel I’m better off opening a laptop anyways.
Talking about Uber, email and directions in Maps are literally "task[s] that can be done in a few taps". Perhaps being less "weirdly" defensive and taking the time to think about the discussion you're about to jump into would be helpful?
And they probably are also surprised that I’m using an iPhone where I can’t use Docker and have JavaScript enabled on my browser.
Surely your laptop has a mic on it and probably a camera. It also has blueteeth, wifi and stuff. Your phone has much the same and can act as a proxy to whatever is missing on your laptop and vice versa. Obviously, getting your laptop to fit under or within your "lap" is a bit of an ask!
Things like KDE Connect provide a direct bridge and a bit of imagination does the rest.
If your laptop isn't cutting the mustard then ditch it ...
... Oh your phone has a tiny screen and a shit mic and speakers, unless you stick it in your ear?
Horses for courses.
Oddly enough, I don’t carry around my laptop in my pocket all of the time. You do realize that in 2026 most people do most of their day to day non work tasks on phones don’t you?
Yes most people use KDE Connect..
At least for me, the effect is real, and is driven not by media consumption but ergonomics of use. But at the same time, I'd say you're not missing that much. I always preferred large screens because of productivity gains[2], but even as screens kept getting larger, the set of things that "I feel I’m better off opening a laptop" for remained the same for me.
That is, until I switched to a foldable phone (Galaxy Z Fold 7) half a year ago, and - I kid you not - I haven't used my personal laptop since that day.
FWIW, I still have a proper desktop PC; In the past decade+, I've been using a PC at home, and a "sidearm" on the go / away from home: always a 2-in-1 Windows laptop with top specs[0]. Being always with me, this laptop often replaced use of PC at home too, because of convenience & portability.
So by amount of productive use, for past 10+ years it was sidearm >> PC >> smartphone. But getting a foldable flipped it around. Having twice the screen size of a regular (large) phone is a big productivity win[1], but it's folding that makes the actual qualitative difference. Folded, the device becomes a regular smartphone - i.e. something that fits in my pocket, meaning it's always on me, in my hands, or less than 1 second away. Contrast that with tablets, whose form factor makes them basically just shitty laptops (same logistic as ultraportable, but toy OS of a phone).
I didn't expect this. I didn't even feel this change - I only noticed two months later that my laptop has been sitting unused on my desk, covered by a pile of stuff. Doing "laptop tasks" on a mobile device is still annoying (no keyboard, toy OS), but combining tablet-sized screen with portability of a phone makes them less annoying than logistics overhead of a laptop - and at least in my case, this eliminated the entire[3] space between "smartphone" and "PC".
--
[0] - Think Microsoft Surface, except I could get better specs at half the price if I bought an off-lease but pristine Dell or Lenovo.
[1] - It's not immediately obvious to people, but as things are today, a foldable phone isn't any better at media consumption than regular one, because almost all cinema, TV, videogames, etc. are all produced for widescreen - meanwhile, the inner screen of my Fold is approximately square, so e.g. for most TV, half or more of it is black at all times. However, all that extra space allows to effectively use multiple (3+) apps on screen, not to mention makes spreadsheets actually usable.
[2] - Bigger screen = less scrolling and tapping in menus, but also with text size scaled to minimum, my previous phone (S22) had a big enough screen that running two apps in split-screen became useful on a regular basis.
[3] - Well, almost. There are some tasks I really like physical keyboard and larger screen for - but for those, I just plug the phone into the screen via USB-C, and volia, it turns into a regular desktop. A shitty one, but good enough for occasional use.
That's interesting. I knew foldables have been selling well, and I assumed they were basically the promise that tablets were trying to sell but as you said- usable this time. I've never heard anyone's actual story laid out like this before though.
Now I'm having second thoughts on what I'll do myself because I would have never guessed a foldable would be ideal as you described.
I've been trying to avoid building an $8,000 tech stack of redundant devices that I don't need. Which is what Apple is all about, and then some. It's not the initial investment that bothers me, it's calculating replacement costs over time. It's pretty quickly that you have half a new vehicle in redundant electronics. It leaves you asking: why?
So while I appreciate the longevity and durability of my iPhone 12 mini, along with seamless Airdrop and the Airtag network being as handy as it gets, I'm thinking about going back to Android for docking support. This is a feature I don't think Apple will ever add until the end of time, so I may as well bite the bullet now and get another OS switch over with.
I'm not entirely convinced I would love a foldable like you do, but I am rethinking that now. I've been on the idea that Microsoft's partnership with Samsung for Phone Link features will make my life delightful at my desktop battlestation, and DeX with a lapdock will cover any mobile needs. A lapdock really does create an alternative to the battery life offered by the M-series Macbooks, while leaving me with only two devices to maintain and replace with my desktop and phone.
It's amazing with the flexibility and options offered in the Android space, whether it be my proposal or your foldable experience, how they don't have more marketshare. I think the issue is marketing, people need to be shown what they can do with a product and Apple makes Continuity and closed ecosystem features seem like a value add. When it's kind of a lure to an iCloud subscription and $8,000 personal tech stack.
You could put a sim card in a tablet in that case. Might look a little funny when doing a phone call though.
What, ummm, efficiency benefits are you finding on a smart phone? Is it related directly to the keyboard size when typing? That's kind of all I can think of, other than a really tiny display + big fingers being an issue.
I find my efficiency directly proportional to the distance from my smart phone.
I did downgrade back to my SE (from iPhone 16). Big selling point (aside from its size and rounded corners) is the physical button with fingerprint. I missed that even more than I disliked carrying a big phone around.
I'm typing this on an iPhone SE (2020).
It runs the latest iOS, although it's likely missing some of the new bits.
I prefer the size, although the screen that spans the entire front surface would be the superior device; I like the iPhone 13 Mini.
My SO has the latter and switched from the former when it started behaving erratically.
It's the very last reasonably sized iPhone and one of the very last in this category overall.
I rather have the fingerprint button!
Former small phone person here: I went from a small iphone to a large one just to substitute not having to carry around my ipad. I really wish iphone fold is here sooner.
Same. The Pixel 4a was the perfect phone for me: Light, screen exactly the right size to navigate with a single thumb whilst holding the phone in one hand, enough battery life, small enough to fit in my jean pockets comfortably.
But people buy big phones in preference to small ones, so that’s what Google & Apple manufacture. Nobody (from the POV of Apple/Google decision makers) buys these smaller phones.
Completely agree. And to make matters worse, I can't even switch to android without losing the ability to reliably send quality video to iPhone users.
Apple suffered for decades from Microsoft's anticompetitive OS monopoly, and turned around and did the same thing to the android ecosystem.
I have no idea why this sub is full of Apple fanboys. I was an Apple fan 10 years ago, but these days they no longer deserve your support.
> the ability to reliably send quality video to iPhone users.
Just curious but why? Is it iMessage lock in?
Yes exactly. RCS exists but unless an iPhone user goes and turns it on it won't work. Which means no one has it turned on.
I don't think that's true. Every iPhone user I've texted in the last 6 months at least has had rcs turned on, and that's including some very non tech savvy friends that I doubt did it manually
It's also dependent on the telco supporting it. Australian telcos don't.
RCS compatibility with iMessages relies on the telcos to implement it, particularly for group chats.
iMessages work using SMS 1-to-1, but group chats require the telcos to enable RCS instead of SMS.
Of the 3 telco network operators in Australia, none of them have enabled it.
And no one uses WhatsApp, Telegram, Line or another cross platform messaging service?
You should look into grips that attach via Magsafe.
>it causes real pain in my wrist if I use it too much
LMAO
Yeah, I wish they would commit to doing a mini every x years. Last year I bought a 16 and this year I bought an Air. I returned both after just a few days. I can't reach across the phone with my thumb, meaning I can't use it one-handed.
The new phones have some neat tricks (satellite connectivity comes to mind), but the on-device AI seems pretty mediocre and I value pocketability and one-handed usability more than the new gizmos.
When I asked myself if I would rather keep the new Air or go back to my 13 mini with an extra thousand dollars in my pocket, it was no contest.
> I wish they would commit to doing a mini every x years
The problem is all the tooling is pipelined for annual releases. You can't just find a team to do the mini; it has to always be there, and parts of it have to always be working on the next one. Your vendors will get grumpy because it doesn't fit their product cycles.
This is true. But if they can afford it for the iPad Mini (my other favorite Apple product), then they should do it for the iPhone Mini.
an every-two-or-three year release cycle would be fine, ideal even
I have large hands but the 13 Mini is roughly the maximum I can use one-handed without doing the weird finger balancing act to shift the phone around. I get why most people like large phones - media consumption - but not everyone is into that.
I don't even mind large phones if they're done right. My favorite phone of all time is the BB Passport which you have to use two-handed, but it was actually designed around that and amazing to use.
Sorry but if that’s the case you definitely don’t have large hands. If you did you’d be able to use the Pro Max one handed and reach everything except the top left corner by swiveling your thumb (Reachability enables you to reach top left corner)
This depends entirely on how you hold your phone in your hand. For some positions, someone would need a 5” thumb to reach the corner. You can’t make such sweeping statements for something with such variation.
> Reachability enables you to reach top left corner
I thought it goes without saying that poorly made accessibility features don't mean the device is very usable. The existence of that feature by itself is already evidence against that.
SE 3rd gen here as my daily driver. Small form factor and Touch ID. The perfect iPhone IMO.
Not looking forward to having to settle for those comically large phones with Face ID for my next one.
I "adapted" to losing the fingerprint reader.
Wow, it has a lot of unexpected downsides.
I've a lot of unexpected behavior from the faceid thing. Lots of unexpected swipe-ups that drop me out of an app and put me on the home screen. Can't unlock in the dark, too close to your face, off to the side, in your pocket. Lots of "I saw your face an unlocked" that I didn't know had happened.
fingerprint sensor unlocked when you wanted it to, with haptics. switching apps was a button operation, not happening when you didn't expect it.
Plus, fingerprint scanners can be activated without breaking eye contact with the person you're talking to. It's very anti-social technology.
It makes one look completely like a tool to pull out their iPhone and stare at it for ten seconds while checking out with a cashier. Deeply embarrassing and very annoying.
What are you talking about? It doesn’t cause swipes. It uses IR so it doesn’t need light. You don’t want it to unlock in your pocket.
These new Gemini shill-agents are not very compelling.
Same. Home button is sooo much better than swiping gestures
The physical home button is, no bullshit, one of the greatest pieces of UI ever. No, I am not kidding, I really think that. It’s crazy to me that they abandoned it, the gestures that replace its functionality are overall-worse and cluttering the gesture system with even more of them is bad for the overall UX.
Maybe you know this but it wasn't a physical button since i think iphone 7 - it was a haptic sensor.
True, and in my opinion it was a worse experience than the previous physical one.
I agree with this, while also thinking it was basically physical-enough that the home button still served the same UI purpose about as well as before. But yes it was a step down from the real button.
The haptic sensor is almost as good as the physical button, and the trade off of not having to worry about it breaking (which was likely after a few years with the physical ones) is well worth it for me.
What I don’t like about FaceID is the premature unlocking. If you pass your phone to someone else it can unlock, especially for taking photos. And to allow strangers to make photos is intentional that’s why the camera app doesn’t need an unlock.
Aside from that all the gestures, positions and holding points are annoying. The usage of TouchID is simpler.
Apple could at least fix the security issue by unlocking only after swiping up. FaceID? Isn’t fast enough? Well. Than TouchID is better.
I get that getting rid of touchid haptic eliminates dead space but still blows my mind they couldn't or refused to figure out screen-based touch id as an option at least. Samsung has it...
Under-screen fingerprint readers are definitely inferior - slower and less reliable. I (Android user) wish they'd revert to back-of-device readers, which were amazing.
(I also wish for smaller screens and no-adhesive battery swaps though, neither of which seems likely to happen.)
Me too, but I’m going to have to upgrade. The lack of storage on my phone (64GB) is killing me - every time there is an os update I have to delete almost everything to make room
I'm also a touchID / iphone 8 size fan, but the nice cameras/zoom in flagship models are hard to give up. At least Face ID has improved significantly from the early days of iphone 10 -- it's faster and more reliable than it was on the older models if you tried it back then.
The thing I've come to like about FaceID on my 13 mini is that I can require it for certain apps to open that don't require it - e.g. messaging as opposed to banking which generally require some kind of auth by default - which is much better security in case someone snatches it out of my hand while it's unlocked. It's pretty seamless because I'm generally looking at the device anyway, and it's much less faff than it would be with TouchID.
I think the way the Pixel does it is strictly better across the board. The fingerprint sensor doesn't sacrifice screen space, and the platform offers face unlock as well.
I only wish Pixel retained the back fingerprint sensor. It was sooooo much better than even the current under-the-screen sensor.
Agreed - the rear fingerprint sensor on my Pixel 5 was far better than the blinding on-screen sensor on my new Pixel 9a.
I've still got my 12 mini. Just got a new battery replacement too. Back in my day, phones were cooler if they were smaller.
My iPhone 12 mini is hobbling along. A few rare apps are not usable because UI is clipped, the battery is throttling and making it sluggish, and it overheats all the time as a GPS.
Many mobile websites are unusable.
But I love the form factor and I'm going to keep it going as long as it is reasonably secure.
curious, did changing the battery make the phone faster under the latest OS?
If find that after the upgrade to the latest iOS my 13 mini has been struggling with framerate and just overall feeling laggy.
Liquid Glass has totally screwed up my 13 mini. Needing frequent soft reboots.
I just eBay'd a 12 mini after my camera started getting blurry. There isn't a viable flagship replacement.
I stuck with my 13 mini for a long time, and had recently put a new iFixit battery in it too. I did finally make the jump to a Pixel 10 but sign me up with everyone else who misses reasonably-sized phones.
I just "upgraded" to a 13 mini last year, after being on the original SE for so long. Wrote a little post about it here:
https://blog.bschwind.com/2025/01/11/the-original-iphone-se-...
i send them an iphone mini request every once in a while through the feedback form hoping it will make a little bit of difference: https://www.apple.com/feedback/
still holding on to iphone 13 mini hoping they bring back the perfect size. also trying very hard not to accidentally fat finger a ios 26 update.
You need a passcode to update. There's no way to fat-finger it.
Besides, you can always delete the update (if already downloaded) and turn automatic updates off.
Being the crazy person that spams the feedback form isn’t supporting the argument for a new mini.
If people wanted it, you wouldn’t be faking the feedback.
> Still holding onto my 13 mini.
That's why they stopped making them, because the people who buy minis are willing to stick with them for 5 years, whereas Apple wants you to buy a new phone every year.
Every single person I know who uses a phone of more than 4 years old, uses an iPhone 13 mini. Without exception. Now I'm sure there's plenty of HNers who use other 4+ year old phones, but I'm talking about non-tech people.
> Every single person I know who uses a phone of more than 4 years old, uses an iPhone 13 mini
That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.
Half the time when I'm home I still use my iPod touch because it's even smaller than the mini.
> That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.
They also haven't come out with another iPhone with a headphone jack, yet no one kept using those.
I get what you're saying, but what I think is that the average mini buyer is inherently someone (on average!) who changes their phone a lot less often. They're less likely to be glued to their phones. Bigger phones = more infinite scroll addiction, and so on. Apple doesn't want to cater to the mini buyers.
> That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.
I kind of agree with the previous comment. I think if you spend a lot of time on the phone, have a lot of apps then it makes sense to upgrade your phone more frequently and also makes sense to have a larger screen and better battery life. So conversely, there is a correlation between people who have smaller phones and upgrade less frequently.
I have my iPhone 12mini for 5-6 years now, and I'd upgrade it now if there was a new small iPhone. But I would upgrade it 3 years ago.
*typing this from my iPhone 11 purchased in... early 2021 I think?
It always surprises me that the mini was ~1% of sales and yet the pro mini comments get so many upvotes
The release schedule was crap, as well as the 12 mini being an objectively bad phone.
Spring 2020, they released the iPhone SE 2020, 4 years after the previous iPhone SE. This satiated a lot of the demand for people holding out for a smaller phone. Then came the surprise with 12 mini in September of 2020, except the battery life and performance sucked, garnering bad reviews.
Then, finally in September 2021, they released the 13 mini, an objectively good, smaller phone. But over the previous 18 months, a lot of the buyers for the 13 mini had already bought the 2020 SE or were burned by the 12 mini.
> The release schedule was crap, as well as the 12 mini being an objectively bad phone.
I still use my 12 mini; it's by far my favorite iphone I've had since my 5s. It might have had sucky battery life but I was just happy to have a phone that could fit in my pocket.
I've replaced the screen twice, battery once (by myself) and I have really very little intentions on moving to anything newer than the 13 mini.
I'm not sure why Apple doesn't care about the mini apple users. My friends, when they pull out a 17 pro look absolutely ridiculous, constantly having to pull the phone out when doing any real work since the phone just keeps getting in the way.
Spring 2020, they released the iPhone SE 2020, 4 years after the previous iPhone SE. This satiated a lot of the demand for people holding out for a smaller phone.
Count me in this group. I wound up buying the 13 mini right before it was going to be discontinued because I knew that would be the last small phone they would produce and I'm keeping it until it dies (or I can't get a battery for it).
It was 3-5%, if I remember the numbers correctly. There are rumors that the Air didn’t sell better.
I don't have any official numbers, but it sure seems like the Air is selling worse than the Plus which sold worse than the Mini.
(source: keeping an eye out on the NY subway, which I have found to be a pretty damned good gauge of consumer electronics popularity)
Also, the mini had worse cameras than the larger screens.
Camera quality is the second most important thing to me (after not needing finger enhancement surgery to hold the phone).
So, they designed it to fail, and it still was 3-5% of sales vs. ones that actually got good spec bumps every year. (If you’re upgrading the phone every 12 months, why buy the one with cameras a few years behind the curve?)
Anyway, I like my mini. I wish it had touch id instead.
The Minis had the exact same cameras as the non-Minis. The Pros had the only camera improvements. In my experience all were worse than the contemporary Pixels though.
You are misremembering. There was no issue with the cameras on the mini, unless you expected a Pro mini for some reason.
Ah true. It came down to Pro vs. Mini for me because I usually just buy the best iPhone without regard to price. (I don't care about spending an extra $200 for a device I'll use for 4-5 years, but Apple's cheapest phones were also the best back then.)
Tenth of millions of devices were sold (somewhere between 20 to 35 Million?). You could build multiple plants for it, with government funding in Europe.
The MBAs at Apple noticed:
They got the sales anyway. We don’t have a “functional market”. But Apples marketing was weird. They named it Mini instead of Compact or Air. And launched it against the SE? A lot people already refused to move from the SE 1st Gen to the Mini, to due the increased size and missing TouchID.So Apple assumed people want even bigger Max or Air. The Air which is actually much thicker most other phones. Both seem to fail.
1% of iPhone sales is more people than live in most countries.
Yes but 99% of non mini users upvote other things
"1%" of the massive Apple base is still more phones than sales of iPhone 1, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and many others.
You do understand what a "percentage" means? And that there's a lot of people in the world, right? :)
Crazy people fixate. It’s why you get people talking about how 4o was the best AI model ever and crying for it to be brought back. (It had no internal thinking process and would believe you are the messiah without question)
It's a good phone though. Also on the 13 mini and no desire to switch to a chunkier one.
Have you replaced the battery? My 13 mini shows 90% battery health but I can’t use it for the full day (and I don’t game or anything, just light use). I wonder if the battery is really ok and it’s the software that is to blame.
I still have my 12 Mini, changed the battery in a Apple store a year ago (and they broke the screen in the process so got a new screen too) for I think 99 EUR, now the battery still last ~2 days, easily worth it. Maximum capacity says "87%" right now although I don't know what exactly that's based on.
I'm keeping this phone until either Apple releses a new mini or until Motorola released a GrapheneOS phone, whichever comes first.
> changed the battery in a Apple store a year ago (and they broke the screen in the process so got a new screen too)
Huh, I had a 12 mini and had the same thing happen at an independent repair shop I used to frequent. I've been pretty salty with the shop, but I guess it's an easier fuckup than I've been giving them credit for.
Just replaced my 13 mini battery this past week which was at 80%. Noticeable improvement. I'm not a very heavy user but did find that I was getting to the 20/10% range at the end of most days. Now its 30/40 and I'm happy! Many more years in the old steed yet.
My 13 mini on iOS 26 shows 83% maximum capacity but makes it through the day with light-ish use (Spotify (although generally offline playlists because of lossless audio) NYT games, email, messaging, browsing, Instapaper). I do have lots of accessibility settings enabled to stop things like transparency and animations though. See my comment here for more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45544554
I got the base 13 at launch day whose battery health now states 86%. While I have noticed degraded battery performance, the stated health has been stuck at 86% for quite a while now.
I guess it's bugged out and would opt for a battery change if you're feeling the battery pains, I'm thinking of upgrading to the new base model this year for the usb c and 120hz display.
I did! I ended up buying a kit off ifixit IIRC. It was super cheap and works great! If I did it again, I would splurge for the Apple verified battery as a third party one doesn't work with the new Battery app features.
I’m down to 75% on my 13mini. I recently picked up a magsafe battery pack that gets me through the day when I’m traveling and can’t charge.
I was considering swapping out the phone battery but this is a better alternative for now.
13 mini user here. I have 86% battery health, and it is "okay". I need to charge it about once a day. Also holding out due to the smaller size.
I showed my Costco membership QR code to the cashier the other day, and they suddenly exclaimed, “oh my! What a cute little phone!!”
It took me a second to even process why someone might say such a thing about my case-less generic 12 mini. Most of my close friends have 13 mini’s so I often feel my wife’s “regular” size iPhone is the odd one out.
Same. Many developers are "desktop"-native for their work and reading-focused for their media, so they don't value the gauche pocket TV-era of phones.
My next upgrade if my 12 mini gives up will be an 13 mini. And from there I will probably just stick to refurbed 13 minis until a good alternative comes out.
I highly recommend hunting down a 13 mini now (with a lot of battery left) so you can switch when you have to. I did last summer and was glad I didn´t have to organize one on short notice. And if you avoid ios26 - make sure the ios18 on the device is updated because now you no longer get updated within ios18
I’m currently on iOS 16 with iPhone 12 mini. I don’t even see an option to update to anything but iOS26, so I’m staying put.
My worst fear is buying a 13mini that is already updated to IOS26, then I think I would be screwed.
Where are you finding refurb’ed 13 Minis? Apple only goes back to 14s now on store.apple.com in the U. S.
refurbed.com and swappie.com, I don't know if they do it on all phones but some of them get their battery changed to a fresh one aswell!
Hey man, this is great!
Thanks.
(I'm also looking to "refresh" my iPhone 13 mini)
FB marketplace and/or eBay.
I moved off the mini to get satelite messaging which I use while hiking. But now that T-Mobile/starlink support satelite on the 13 mini, maybe I’ll go back.
For a whole minute because of the display notch and since all iPhones moved to the island I got my hopes up that this 17e was 13 mini sized.
So much so that I went on to check the specs but no it's 6.1". Damn, so close, what a missed opportunity.
Same holding on the 13 mini, love the form factor.
Finally moved on from my 12 mini, but I still have it sitting in my office and when I pick it up I think "wow this feels like a phone from the future."
Wish they made a new mini instead of the Air. A friend bought one of those, and frankly I just don't get it.
The screen is too big to use it one-handed, and thickness is really the only one of the three dimension of the phone that I don't care about how small it is (within reason). They probably spent billions of dollars shaving off half a millimeter and what do we get with that technology? Phone that's too big.
If this keeps up in another 5 years I'll be looking at flip phones and a separate camera.
I don't get Air either. My guess is that Air is just a stepping stone for a foldable iphone.
I think that's it exactly. Hopefully we're not looking forward to "phone that's too big, and unfolds to be even more too big."
I can see a large unfolded phone being desirable if it had a stylus and I could use it like a small notebook, but just as a "watch Netflix bigger for $2000" device, no.
Especially if it has the worst camera of all of the phone models like the Air does.
You'll want a replacement stylus 10-pak.
Somehow not a problem I have - still have my original 2018 iPad stylus, and I don't lose regular pens either.
Suspect this is a mindset thing if you mostly use 10 cent Bic pens you'll never care to make a habit of keeping them, and then when you're using an expensive gadget pen those habits carry over.
Even a pen that costs a few bucks (Signo UM-151 for instance) I know where they're at.
They'll pry mine from my cold dead hands!
(Until they release a new human hand sized phone at least)
Still loving mine as well. I held out with the 2016 SE for 8 years. Sadly it's looking like I might have to do that again with the 13 mini! It boggles my mind that Apple thinks it's worthwhile to sell the 16, 17, 17 Pro, and 17e all in basically the exact same form factor. And then the Air and Max in very similar form factors. Vary it up! I don't need a new mini every year, but something in the 5.4" form factor every 3-4 years would obviously have an audience. I don't care if it's a Pro or an SE/e model, I just need something that'll keep me on the latest iOS for security updates.
Sigh. Maybe the Clicks Communicator (at 13cm tall) will get my money.
I'm on my 8th year of using my 2016 SE. Have replaced the battery and screen a few times over the years. A fair few of the apps I used stopped supporting iOS 15 so I've got old versions of those apps installed, but WhatsApp, Signal and my banking app still actively support iOS 15 so it works well enough for me, for now.
I have an iPhone 13 mini sitting in a drawer for when I need to switch.
Get an SE 3rd gen!
The SE3 is only half a year younger than the 13 mini the parent comment mentioned (and it’s larger and heavier than the mini), so I don’t really see the benefit there.
Right, I missed that part. Then get the mini if you prefer it. I’m in the camp of people who hate large phones, the day they remove the SE form factor is the day I switch to android. IMHO the 5S form factor was perfected, any change after that is unnecessary. And I also love having a physical button on my SE, I hope that device will survive for a very long time as I’m not optimistic we will have such options in the future :(
Small form factor and security updates are literally my only criteria for phones.
That's where I'm at, it's about time to replace my 12 mini and it's looking like it's time to go back to Android. It was form factor (iPhone 5) that moved me to the iPhone to begin with. That and back then, iOS had a lot more advantages like longterm support and higher quality apps. Most every advantage that isn't a bald faced attempt at lock-in is gone now.
Same. This would be an obvious upgrade for me, if the overall size was anywhere close to the Mini. Oddly enough, the announcement doesn't even list the screen size, but I'm sure it's 6" +
6.1" vs. 6.3" on the regular 17
It’s basically iPhone 14-sized.
I'd still be using my iphone 5 if the battery didn't swell and if apps still worked with it and updates (sabotages) didn't slow it down so much
Same here, just replaced the battery.
Maybe the iPhone Fold won’t be two 8” slabs of glass glued together, I think that’s the only hope for those holding out for another Mini.
It will be even shorter than the mini, but also wider than the Pro Max. The aspect ratio is different from a normal iPhone. The weight should be in the Pro range, and of course it’ll be relatively thick. Not a mini replacement in my book.
That's true, some foldables like that exist. The problem for me is that I don't want to pay for the folding part, not interested in that.
Likewise, am still holding on to my iPhone 13 Pro for the foreseeable future. Even with Liquid Glass destroying my battery life.
In fact, if this phone died, thanks to Liquid Glass I would likely go buy an Android phone. Maybe a Graphene OS phone from Motorola.
iPhone 11 here. Chugging along just fine. Though after the latest liquid glass update the responsiveness has noticeably degraded. They've added lot of animations & moving elements which my poor old 11 doesn't seem to handle all that well.
I’m in exactly the same situation. My wife just upgraded from a iPhone 11 Pro to a refurbished iPhone 13 Mini. My daughter just bought a refurbished 13 Mini too.
The second hand market for these phones seems pretty buoyant
Just upgraded from a 12 mini to a 13 mini with more storage. I intend for it to last another 5 years.
One can only hope... My 13 mini's performance, especially for the Camera and Safari seem to have hit new lows with iOS 26. I'm sticking with the mini for its size, but also its weight. So far the Air is the only alternative I think I could switch to, but apparently that's also on Apple's chopping block due to poor sales.
The 17e weighs only 4 grams more than the Air, would certainly be worth the smaller size for me.
Been thinking of doing the same. My 12 is showing its cycles, but it’s either I have a phone that lives in my front pocket, or I can go phone-less.
I refuse to have a phone I have to constantly carry, hold, or move from back pocket when I sit. This damn thing is in my hands enough, I don’t need to increase the surface area for potential distractions.
Are there any androids with a similar form factor?
Ideally, degoogled android, of course. (Or even not android?)
The 13 mini probably still has a few years of security fixes coming, but after that, I’m going to consider jumping ship, and would like something that’s privacy respecting.
Worst part about big phones are that fingers cannot reach around the whole screen when using one hand, so you are forced to always use two hands. They also fall out of pant pockets easily and have no holes for lanyards.
If we could get a 13 mini sized phone with some better battery that would be great
Also still on my iPhone 12 mini. A new mini would be an instant buy for me :)
Wow, I thought I was the only one.. or very few. Bring back small phones please
Same. And so do many people around me. And many still cling to their 12 minis. Maybe that’s why Apple won’t make them anymore, people like us tend to keep them forever.
I would pay extra to get an iPhone mini, they could sell it as a “pro” feature. Still holding on to my mini too.
That's a great phone for runners who need to carry their phone. Smaller, lighter, pocket friendly.
I abandoned mine for a 16. It’s not so bad but I miss my 13 at times.
Best phone I ever had, the 12 mini
Still rocking mine
+1 - if there was a new mini, I'd buy instantly
I’m exactly there with you with my 13 mini and I did realize that it’s not gonna last as we really get into the era of local LLMs
Running deepseek 6B on the Private LLM app on the iPhone 13 basically set my phone on fire
> Running deepseek 6B on the Private LLM app on the iPhone 13 basically set my phone on fire
Hey, I’m the author of Private LLM. I hope you’re joking about the phone catching fire. Btw, there’s no DeepSeek 6B model, you’re likely talking about the DeepSeek Distill 7B model.
Yes thank you for the correct correction
The last model I tried to run was Dolphin 3B but even Zephyr1.6B kills the phone pretty fast even with a full battery
Even Dolphin completely killed my phone so yeah I can’t really use the Private LLM app for anything heavier than the default 1.6B
Yeah, I agree. Really hard to fit anything larger on the 4GB of RAM on the iPhone 13 of which, only about (depending on what iOS version you're on) 2.1-2.5GB is usable by apps.
I stupidly downgraded to a 17 from the 13 mini two-weeks ago and I hate it. It’s the first time I have been earnestly tempted to just get a dumb-phone and be done with it. The constant growth of mobile phones is perplexing to me but I don’t doubt Apple knows what sells.
It's already starting to get slow too
Literally came here to write this
There are some models that everyone wants but companies discontinue or never make
iPhone 13s was the last one
Another example was the Cadiallac Ciel at Pebble Beach. Only ever appeared in Entourage after that.
Same! Phablets are ungainly
You're holding it right.
UPVOTED IN HOPE
One of us!
my wife upgraded from a 13 mini to an Air and she loves it. She thought she hated the larger size of new phones, but after holding the Air in her hand she realized the weight and thickness was the issue for her!
It’s a tough call though because the Air has a lot of pros and cons! My wife never takes nature photography or macro photography, so she was OK with the 1 camera compromise.
If you truly want a shorter phone, my condolences lol. Apple seems to be ignoring this user segment.
for me it's the comfort/ability to put the thing in my pocket.
I can relate. I actually used to be jealous of the ladies because they always have a convenient purse to put things in. These days I wear a light weight cross-body “sling” bag, and i’m happy as a peach.
Easy way to bring my phone, sunglasses, wallet, keys, etc with me. Pockets can be pretty annoying.
Maybe 2027 will be the year of the mini? :)
Market the thicclight pocketable without foldline "babysize" iPhone at the expense of ridiculing the fingertip unreachable "neanderthalsize" phablet.
I tried the Air and went back to the mini because of the camera compromises. One big issue for me was losing Cinematic video, which I use all the time.
Now imagine an iPhone Mini Air. I'd be all over that, camera compromises or not.
I wonder if the Small Android Phone project has moved forward since the last time it was posted here: https://smallandroidphone.com
So... there is a 4" Android phone out there. It's widely available, and from a major manufacturer. It's very usable, and it runs mostly stock Android. I have it, and I like it very much. Brace yourself for the reveal because you're not going to like it.
It's a foldable. It's the Motorola Razr+ or Razr Ultra (I have the 2025 Ultra). The outer screen is 4" and you can use it for almost everything you want to do. I use the outer screen probably 80+% of the time, since I prefer small phones. Every once in a while you run into an app or website that just wasn't built to function on a 4" display, but for almost everything I've tried it works great. You can then also un-fold it into a full-size 7" phablet when you need to do high-detail stuff like Maps.
There are downsides: it's expensive; it's a foldable, so reliability is a concern; and Motorola's OS support promise is not great at only like 3-4 years. But if you're willing to make those compromises, you can get a genuinely very good, small phone, right now today.
Once you get over the shock of having a foldable suggested to you (I was initially skeptical, too), give it a look. It's really genuinely a nice phone for small-phone-likers.
The weight is an issue for me at 189g. I've been looking for something compact, light weight, secure with a decent OS for 2 years without luck.
Iphone air is tempting at 165g if the screen was smaller. Unihertz Titan 2 Elite may hit the sweet spot if the weight is kept low.
How likely, that Motorola Razr will run GrapheneOS?
The partnership is for future devices, rather than existing devices.
I just signed up on their site and got a mail with the following info:
"To catch you up:
We’ve been hard at work over the summer building out a team and searching the globe for a manufacturer to build our dream phone. It’s been a slow process, but we’re nearing completion and expect to be able to kick off this project very soon.
Once we have a manufacturer locked in, we will be reaching out with a full update on the project and our plan to move forward."
Guess they’re southern hemisphere?
https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-max
I was hoping for this too, but when I saw that Eric Migicovsky went back to building pebble I lost my hope for it
I'd love to have a smaller/cheaper phone but I continue to hold onto my Pro from a couple years ago is for the high end camera, particularly the telephoto lens.
No, I don't need it all the time.
But when you do need it, it's invaluable.
What I would like is a really good single camera. If that's even possible. One thing I find sort of irritating about the multi-camera setup on my iPhone is that using it as a magnifier is often frustrating. Get too close to something and it decides to switch cameras, which then means now you're actually looking at something else entirely. Maybe I'm missing a setting somewhere, I can't be the only person to notice how awkwardly the functionality is implemented.
It's hard to get that in a single camera because of the size.
If you consider the size of professional grade camera lenses there's a reason why they produce much better images. But conversely it's pretty impressive what phone manufacturers have been able to accomplish with such a small amount of space. For 90% of use cases camera phones are sufficient.
The latest Xiaomi has this, they call it continuous optical zoom. It's the first time I've seen it on a phone camera.
If they added a lens lock option (like the AE lock) it would fix this problem nicely.
No, it sucks (16 Pro). I've had lots of issues reading QR codes.
I have the same issue with my Pixel. It's nice to be able to use a real zoom when I need it, but that means I can't get the one that's otherwise what I really need.
same for me. the quality of photos with my 15 max is great compared to newer and simpler models. waiting to upgrade to a 18 max when available.
and I have a nice portable camera (ricoh gr 3) collecting dust.
I think the most valuable part of this “e” lineup is the in-house developed modem. The power and security benefits are probably enormous.
Indeed. I have 16e from it's launch and can't be happier. Battery life is incredible while no issues with connections whatsoever (I am heavy traveler so can test it on multitude of telco hardware)
do you run two eSIMs when traveling and if so how is stability / battery life?
Always 2 SIM/esim running simultaneously. Compared to previous non-apple modem it's night and day battery-wise.
Didn't notice any issues with connection speed/stability.
If the 17e had that chip, wouldn't it have Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6? It has neither of those.
From the press release:
> iPhone 17e also features C1X, the latest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple
But the 17e iPhone seems to lack the Apple developed N1 chip that provides Wifi 7 + Bluetooth 6. So presumably they're using off the shelf components for Wifi and Bluetooth in the 17e.
The modem chip (the C series) and the N series are two different chipsets.
For example, the 16e has the C1 modem but the standard Broadcom (or whoever) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chipset.
I really hope this makes it to the Pro line soon.
I couldn't care less about multi-gigabit 5G speeds (my 15 Pro can already practically get ~2 Gbps – who really needs that in a battery-powered phone?!); give me better battery life (my 15 Pro gets warm to the touch doing absolutely nothing in some 5G scenarios) and better security (e.g. carrier-side location tracking prevention) any day.
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I'm happy for the existence of the e line mainly because it forces them to bump up the specs on the base iPhone. 17 is so good now that there's very little reason to get the 17 Pro.
Yes, the baseline 17 has almost all of the features of previous Pro models.
Except 120 Hz display I believe, which is big reason for me
The 17 is the first base model iPhone to have a ProMotion display.
The base model has 120hz ProMotion display.
Genuinely asking -- How about the camera? I keep hearing that camera is much better on 17 pro than 17 base.
The OP article keeps saying camera on 17e is 'stunning', but again, I am waiting to find out how it compares with 17 pro.
I had an Air with the same camera system as the 17e, I believe.
Coming from a 15 Pro Max, it was perfectly serviceable if you were happy with the limited zoom options and lack of wide angle shots.
I never realized how much I used those two features, so, regrettably had to go back to the chunky 17 Pro Max.
Maybe one day…
Wide angle is rarely used by me except it’s pretty good macro capabilities. It is better than your eyes.
I don't think I ever used the ultra wide camera in my phone. I find the default wide angle already too wide for most use cases. For some reason every phone includes one but not a ~50mm equivalent. Weird.
Being better than eyes at macro vision is not hard.
You recon? Only last few years it finally became useable.
At the moment, the camera is almost the main point of getting the Pro. And battery for the Pro Max.
$599 still feels like they're setting whatever price they can get away with. It's been 20 years, why don't we have sub $500 new iPhones yet?
Taking inflation into account, a $599 iPhone in 2026 would have been $380 in 2007. Given that the actual launch price in 2007 was $499, that's a pretty hefty drop.
A technology doodad getting 25% cheaper in real terms over 15-20 years is about as far opposite as you can get from a hefty price drop.
Sure, it hasn’t crashed like the prices of televisions, or like computers did in the 80s and 90s. But it’s still meaningfully cheaper and of course much more capable (the original iPhone didn’t even launch with an App Store!).
Come on, the iPhone had:
Just to name a few. I won't even go into things like touch/faceID, wireless charging, iCloud, any form of water resistance etc.And then in terms of the specs on what it did have that got better, processor, memory, storage, screen quality, battery life, camera, it's all orders of magnitude better. There really is no comparison.
I mean look at the price of a digital camera, music player etc, hell even external battery pack in 2007, with the same specs as the iPhone today, and you'll easily find support for using the words 'hefty price drop'.
It took about three years to get all the features in your bulleted list. It's been another fifteen and a half years since.
Touch/faceID is cheap, wireless charging is cheap, the free tier of iCloud is cheap, water resistance is cheap.
Yes the specs have increased a ton. When asking for a model under $500, the idea would be giving up some of those specs. And that's clearly possible; even low end phones these days are a zillion times better than an original iPhone.
And no I will not look at non-iPhone things when I'm evaluating whether iPhones underwent a hefty price drop. The cheapest iPhone these days is slightly cheaper than a first or second generation iPhone, and the best one is a lot more expensive.
Yes it was the iPhone 4 and it was $649, or $968 in today's money for 16gb of storage.
That mean's today's cheapest iPhone is 40% cheaper than this base model you're referring to, as well as being tons better. If you don't think 40% is a hefty price drop then idk what to tell you.
That's for the 16gb by the way, the next year's 64gb would've constituted a 53% price drop today.
And that's still for a wildly different phone. You're getting way, way more value today. Longevity alone is easily twice as long, meaning the cost-per-use or cost-per-year can be halved, leading to >75% price drops.
The idea Apple should be going even beyond that to make low-end new phones for a company that positions itself at the top of the market, is just silly. Apple has a long line of phones available for purchase on the secondary market, refurbished market, old-model market, is known to replace batteries 7 years after discontinuing the sale, and can be replaced with non-official batteries as well.
Like you could literally buy an iPhone 12 on the secondary market for $50 and do a $39 battery replacement, or buy it fully refurbished for $150. You can buy a million android phones at any spec level. The idea that Apple should compete at this budget with its own old phones and android phones is a bad idea and the idea Apple entry level phones aren't much cheaper, have more longevity and have wildly better specs than before, is empirically not true.
Is it technically possible for Apple to create a $400 phone that's still much better than the original iPhone? Obviously I agree with you that it is. Does it make sense for Apple to do it? Obviously not.
In this thread you'll have people saying 60 hertz is ridiculous in 2026 on an iPhone 17, and people saying they're completely fine with iPhone 12 specs in 2026 and wanting to get more discounts for fewer specs (ignoring the fact you can indeed simply buy that iPhone 12). The remaining market is so slim it's not worth getting into, but you can't please everyone with a lineup of 5 phones.
> If you don't think 40% is a hefty price drop then idk what to tell you.
For 15 years of tech product, it's not.
For a tech product to stay the same price in dollars for so long is not great. And remember that the 17 itself is $799. This is the discount model and it's still way over the $500 bar.
> The idea Apple should be going even beyond that to make low-end new phones for a company that positions itself at the top of the market, is just silly.
It's silly because you took the thing being complained about, the positioning, and made it part of the premise. Anything sounds silly if you do that.
> you can't please everyone with a lineup of 5 phones
5 phones is plenty to cover a big range if they wanted to. Pro and Pro Max isn't needed, and the Air is totally unnecessary with how close it is to a normal model.
Though for market coverage I wouldn't say low end first, I would say new SE model. I bet a 4.3 inch screen would sell a lot better than the Air's thinness.
Alright I guess we simply disagree, it's getting a bit out of hand to argue this case, and to be honest also a bit silly. Apple's best selling phones are the Pro and Max, which you want to scrap, and you advocate for a 4.3 inch screen when the iPhone mini was Apple's biggest flop phone. I'm not really interested fleshing out why that doesn't make sense if it isn't obvious.
You also think a 50% discount is not much which we just have a disagreement about, no point arguing that further. But to expect an even cheaper lineup with lower specs just doesn't make sense and we've covered the obvious reasons already. For one, Apple has tons of competition at that price/spec level. And secondly, Apple already made hundreds of millions of such phones (they're called years-old models) which anyone can buy with new batteries at the price level you're talking about (<$400). To bring out additional new models that compete with its old models and other brands brings little additional revenue and even smaller margins, the opposite of what drives Apple's market cap. With respect it looks to me like there's a reason you're not CEO of Apple and that Apple isn't taking your advice to bring out another iPhone mini flop or low-budget competitor.
> Apple's best selling phones are the Pro and Max, which you want to scrap
I was suggesting combining them, not scrapping them.
> you advocate for a 4.3 inch screen when the iPhone mini was Apple's biggest flop phone
I'm referring to the SE, not the Mini.
Even when they released 13 Mini and SE (3rd) at the same time, I think both of them sold more than the Air, and combined they were way ahead.
At this point it's been 4 years since either an SE or a Mini, so a new SE would sell lots.
> With respect it looks to me like there's a reason you're not CEO of Apple and that Apple isn't taking your advice
The $500 thing was never supposed to be advice. It was a pricing complaint.
It's also 10000% more capable too.
Sure, but new computers are 100,000x more capable and 1/10th the cost. If we look back far enough, it's 1/100th the cost. We could do better.
And OP wants a model that's somewhat less than a 10000% improvement.
$499 with carrier subsidy too
It didn't take much longer to get a 3G for that price with no subsidy.
I’m pretty sure they determine the price upfront and then figure out what bells and whistles they can ship without eating into their margins. Their goal is to hit a certain average selling price across their massive user base when they upgrade their old phones. They are not going to jeopardize that by releasing an attractive cheap iPhone.
For the people who really don’t want to spend a lot, obviously the easiest option is to just buy an older iPhone or keep your phone for longer. My partner doesn’t care about having the latest tech. So first I use a phone for 3 years and then they use it for another 3 years. We essentially get 6 years of life out of it (Apple is good about releasing software updates for 6 years).
At least they increased the base storage to 256GB
The iPhone SE was only $400.
It's a luxury brand. You don't sell cheap and risk losing the people that are happy to pay $1400 for a new iPhone.
It’s not a luxury brand, it is a quality brand. There is a difference.
So is Mercedes-Benz. But they don't sell a $20,000 commuter car.
No, Mercedes Benz is definitely a luxury brand. They don’t want to sell to everyone. Apple (Steve Jobs) has explicitly stated that as one of their goals.
Toyota is a quality brand, Mercedes is a luxury brand.
It’s not a quality brand, it is a luxury brand. There is a difference.
Oh but they do: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Automobile
>aimed at producing Smart-badged cars
The brand is "Smart".
Mercedes-Benz sells commuter cars in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_A-Class
And this is the Mercedes-Benz commuter car I want to see more of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_Citaro
> The Mercedes-Benz A-Class is a car manufactured by German luxury automaker Mercedes-Benz
"luxury" is more of a marketing and product positioning term, it doesn't really have anything to do with engineering or quality practicalities
Last time I was in the Ruhr (okay 20 years ago), C-classes were used as taxi cabs. So basically equivalent to a caprice classic in the US.
The keyboard-doesn't-trigger-the-tapped-key-sometimes brand, just awestruck at their quality https://ios-countdown.win/
> It’s not a luxury brand, it is a quality brand. There is a difference.
It’s an attainable luxury brand. There aren’t many products that a high school kid has in common with billionaires, superstar athletes and movie stars—the iPhone is such a product.
> feels like they're setting whatever price they can get away with.
This is just a free market for any product works. No?
Why do software engineers ask for six digit salaries? Because they can get away with it — someone is willing to pay for it.
>Why do software engineers ask for six digit salaries? Because they can get away with it
No you see it's their RIGHT to demand an exorbitant salary – because that's 'what they're worth' and what the market will bear
Unfortunately they're less charitable when the shoe is on the other foot.
I'd argue that is worth the money if you're going to be using a phone every single day of their life. People will drop a few hundred on fancy shoes and wear them once a month, but they treat phones as cheap commodities.
Agreed, but its more the fact that you get a lot more peace of mind tossing around, and otherwise treating without too much care, a cheaper device. Risk of drops, theft, forgetting etc. are pretty high for something that I use every day. But then I'm a broke PhD student, so perhaps my views will change one day.
Last time I complained about the pricing of the iPhone, people pointed out that inflation included the prices wasn't to far of from the original iPhone.
Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.
The prices are, in my mind insane, and I'll be buying used, but those are also overpriced.
> Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.
This obviously isnt relevant generally though, this is not how the general public feels at all.
No, they couldn’t, because then the company would stop existing due to lack of sales.
Bell System released about 10 models over 110 years, worked out just fine for them.
Yeah, because it had a government-sanctioned monopoly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment
And now you see why they want to grow their services business so badly
There is no market for it in US at least since carriers control that selling couple year old iphones for free or close to it.
$900 is the new $600 </trump>
What can sub $500 amount get you nowadays? Just a fancy dinner, or a couple of regular ones.
The first SE in 2016, which wasn’t very far from flagship at the time, was only $399. It was a steal.
Accounting for inflation, that's $542. And considering how much everything, including phones, costs nowadays, $600 seems like a steal to me too. I was expecting a much higher price for what I'm seeing on that page.
You asked for it. Now sit back and relish the ripe comments from fruitopologists.
Because they know people will pay it.
Global crazy tariffs, supply chain issues, and RAM and storage shortages due to AI hype betting. Also greed.
Can mess up the price ladder!
I'm glad they added MagSafe with this version, that was my biggest "issue" with the 16e. Thankfully you can add a ring to the back of the device to "give" it MagSafe (the magnets part at least, if not the faster charging).
My understanding (and I don't ahve a magsafe phone so maybe I'm wrong), is that a lot of the time, you need to buy a magsafe compatible case, i.e. one with magnets in it, to get it to work (assuming you want a case on your phone). But if so, then adding such a case to a 16e would also add back the magsafe functionality. So technically, having it on your phoneb doesn't actually make a difference right? Or am I missing something? I was considering getting the 16e because its discounted now.
Isn't it nice to have a USB-C port and then use the back panel inductive charging for this?
I don't see why I would want magsafe on my phone at this point.
> I don't see why I would want magsafe on my phone at this point.
I've been charging my 13 Pro exclusively via MagSafe for a couple of years... out of necessity. The charging port has... an issue... and I've yet to get it resolved.
Honestly the only time I miss being able to use the charging port is on flights, where I'm using someone else's charging solution (i.e. a port I can plug in to).
Everywhere else (bedside table, in the car, or even out and about) it's MagSafe.
The only downside to this approach is that you need to be more specific about which case you buy (they don't all support MagSafe) but in terms of convenience it's night and day better.
I have one of those magsafe multi charger things that let you charge your iphone, watch and whatever you can lie on the base of the charger. I absolutely love it, since it doubles up as a bedside clock for me and it's nicer to snap things on the charger than to fiddle with the cables. I only use USB-C charging for my phone only if I need to charge it fast before leaving somewhere.
The biggest thing for me is not having a fragile connector involved when charging and using it at the same time. A MagSafe puck is super easy to charge your phone while browsing.
MagSafe is a must for older cars.
Good for bedside table too, but not a game changer.
Waiting for the first pro line phone with both the Apple modem and Apple wifi/BT stack in it. Battery life is always a struggle when the phone gets older.
Exactly. I guess it’s time to replace my trusty iphone se 3rd gen. It’s been a great phone though, best one i ever had.
Why not replace the battery? It's fairly cheap.
Why is it so hard to make a phone without camera bump? Not each table has a strategically placed depression so the phone would lie neatly on the table and do not wobble.
Google recently released a smartphone without a camera bump: Pixel 10a.
I believe at least some versions of Google Pixel don't have a camera bump (if you don't mind using a Google phone).
I don't mind the bump on most Pixels because it goes all the way across the phone. So it's still stable on surfaces.
the only thing i search for on these announcements is phone width. bring back the mini
I learnt it the sad way that no one wants it except very very few people.
I do not think that is really the case. What actually happens is that smaller phones are often worse, i.e less battery life, worse processor, worse camera. Because there is less space in the device (and manufacturers think that people will buy a slightly thicker phone) and the screen doesn't use that much energy, the battery has to be smaller impacting performance. And users do not accept that. So unless someone discovers that you can make a full feature, big battery phone by increasing depth and weight of the small device, it wont happen / be popular. But once one company makes one, other will probably follow. Which again reduces revenue per producer...
No. It doesn't sell. You so called mini buyers never showed up except in forums making a lot of pointless noise. If you understand anything about how businesses work you would understand how useless your comment is.
I’m sure they showed up, but if you compare to the entire market size it’s a small size like maybe 10%. They should have calibrated their expectations, but they didn’t. Also the battery life on them aren’t as good as the regular.
Hmmph, well fine then. Use that foldable phone technology everyone else apparently wants to give me a "normal" phone I can fold in half. Now everyone's happy!
Caveat: it’s gotta fold on the X axis and not the Y axis. Otherwise you are just stacking one phone on top of the other hah
Yep, let's drop the pretence that companies churning tech widgets do it for consumers. That's merely an inconvenience in the process of enriching stakeholders.
give me a monochrome e paper android device, metal case, small like the 12 mini, week long battery life. k thanks bye
The Mudita Kompakt, I've been rocking this for 6 months now: https://store.mudita.com/store/mudita-kompakt-global
It's AOSP, not Googled so things like Uber don't work. There's also no app store, but you can sideload F-Droid or Aurora using Mudita software. Case is plastic not rubber though.
Some years ago a chinese company released a phone with 2 screens, one typical mobile screen and other side a e-paper screen. But I don't remember what happened, but unfortunately this idea didn't succeed.
There are also Hisense phones, I had one for a while but having to live with stock firmware severely limited its longevity.
YotaPhone. I really wanted to try that but it was way too expensive for a gimmick
Russians had that like a decade ago. It’s dead.
Because they can't sell that to you every year.
I'm waiting for the daylight tablet screen to make its way into a phone
You should message the Pebble watches guy.
Seems like a decent deal for what it has and getting the full support lifecycle out of it instead of used. Does anyone know if this gets $50 off with the education discount?
Here in Canada, both the education pricing and regular pricing are at "From $899". So no edu discount.
Looking at the specs of this, why would anybody need a more expensive iphone. This has everything a normal phone needs.
That’s what I thought when I bought the 16 E, but liquid glass ruined it because the GPU sucks. So buyer beware.
Just disable Liquid Glass (transparency, motion). Better UX and better UI
Does this work, i.e. does this reduce the load on the processor and battery? Did someone measure it?
I tried it, the effect is unnoticeable and it ruins the UI experience.
But to say that to use a one year old phone I need to disable screen effects on a new OS should be grounds for a lawsuit.
Well, that's it. I cannot stand HN anymore. Literally my experience is being downvted and no one commenting on why what I said was negative. And just warning people to wait to by the phone is now frowned on? Nothing but a bunch of capitalist suck up fanbois here I guess.
Same thing happened on a quantum science post. If you cannot express why you disagree with me either you are a schill or your thoughts are not solid enough.
My mother still has an old iPhone because it fits her hand. They don't seem to get this anymore.
They releasee the iPhone 13 mini for all of the customers who wanted smaller phones
It sold very poorly. Despite all of the YouTubers and social media posts calling for smaller iPhones, the real demand for these is very small.
The older demographics generally prefer larger phones because they have larger screens, which are better for aging eyes.
I can't believe Apple expected the 13 mini to be a hot seller; most people holding out for a small phone probably would have already bought the 12 mini just a year prior. The 13 mini was an incremental update -- basically just alleged camera improvements that I could not discern myself in a few minutes of testing.
As are most phone updates. If there was a market, it would have sold.
The standard screen size market is so big that every year there are enough people looking for an upgrade. Apart from enthusiasts or the fashion-minded, most people upgrade every 2-3 years.
It was cannibalized by iphone 12 mini and also se and older iphones still being sold by carriers. All that going on and it still sold millions of units. If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers. In fact if it was apple 10 or 15 years ago they'd also probably be happy with those numbers.
You also have to understand the psychological profile of us "utilitarian" iphone users. We only get one when our hands are forced either hardware failure or forced software obsolescence. The iphone mini came to market and was discontinued all in the time I was still using my SE.
"If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers"
That's what sucks about these huge dominant companies. They suppress interesting products because they don't reach the huge sales they need to make a difference to a trillion dollar company. And smaller companies can't compete against these behemoths.
So I've never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why there aren't interesting niche phones that don't sell a ton (anymore: android used to be full of them, that was half the point), but are enough for a small company to make consistent (but small) profits. People who want niche phones are a tiny fraction of the market....but the smartphone market is enormous. A tiny fraction seems like it should be able to sustain a few small companies.
My best guess is that the kind of person who would found a company capable of making such a phone won't do it because they know it doesn't have potential to make them fabulously wealthy (just regular old wealthy) because it's inherently limited in scale. And the big companies don't do it because, while such a line could be profitable, in the absence of competition, it's more profitable to force their consumers to buy the "main" line and not make another product line.
My guess is they are only able to make the phones cheap if it’s sold at huge scale. If you make some niche small phone, the price goes way up and doesn’t look attractive.
Then you have to deal with the fact that the people with obscure requirements have a million other requirements. The person asking for a small phone then complains it doesn’t have a headphone jack, and AV1 decoding, and 16gb memory, and an unlocked bootloader, and whatever else.
While being more expensive even further decreases your niche size, it still isn't obvious to me that this should be enough to prevent the niche from existing. I am one of those customers you talk about who has a lot of obscure preferences (I can't call them requirements because literally not a single existing phone matches all of them and yet I still buy phones). A phone that met most of them would be something I'd be willing to pay a pretty good premium for.
Yeah, imagine being a small phone manufacturer today, trying to secure RAM supplies.
The 13 mini sold poorly because all of those same influencers just would not stop complaining that it had less battery life than a Max. I mean, of course the battery life wasn’t as good, because it was a smaller battery! But the people who want a mini aren’t influencers who need a phone that can go 18 hours without a break.
It was absolutely this manufactured “range anxiety” that killed it.
"Didn't sell very well" = "Sold better than most Android phones that year"
Smaller phones aren't great for older people because of the increased font size that they use. They can barely fit a sentence onto the screen.
Exactly, every older person I've seen has the Plus model (RIP) with screen text turned up to 150%. A small screen for someone with poor eyesight sounds like torture.
They also just two hand the phone. Left hand to hold and right hand free to tap any corner of the screen.
A 60Hz display in 2026 is quite surprising.
I doubt the target market for the 17e would notice... or care.
It definitely is less important / visible to some people. I have a 175Hz screen at home and a 120Hz iPhone, but I use a 60Hz iPad and displays at work and if I am not focusing on it I simply do not notice the difference.
Can confirm - I go for the cheapest and smallest iPhones possible (e.g. 13 mini) and could not care less about >60Hz on my phone, although I care about it quite a lot for laptop or desktop displays. 17e will likely be my next upgrade (if I can bear to part with my 13 mini).
i absolutely do notice. i just don't care, or need it, personally
I guess they need something to differentiate it from the 17.
Of the differences, it's the one that would matter most to me.
Really hate huge phones. I have an Xr. It's way too big, and you cannot actually fully lift your left while you have it in your front pocket. It restricts your movement. Even though I'm holding onto this phone as long as possible, it's not because I like it. I hate the phone. But I'm going to hate the next phone too, and they cost so much, (I got the Xr for free) and society effectively requires me to own one. So I'm just trying to avoid a phone purchase for as long as possible since the next one will be terrible as well.
I really want to like the lower cost e phones, but the lack of ultrawide band support is a deal breaker. Does adding this feature really increase the cost, or is this a calculated move by Apple to ensure those who use this for air tags or keyless entry continue to buy higher end phones.
I really thought the AirTag2 was heralding a watershed moment of UW2 in every model of phone.
Probably both.
The conventional wisdom is Apple believes anyone for whom ultra wide-band is an important feature wouldn’t be interested in a bargain iPhone.
There are a lot of foldable options in the Android world now. I wonder when Apple will create an offering of their own. An unfolded screen could be great for reading source code, not that I've tried.
Rumor has it that Apple is releasing it this year.
Interesting but ultimately still not my upgrade target.
I'm on a 14 Pro. It's fine -- plus, it's been replaced twice under AppleCare. Once was a Lightning jack failure, but the second was when it fell off my motorcycle mount and got run over back in October. (Amazingly, the phone part worked fine, but the mishap ruined the camera lenses.)
The upshot is that I have a phone that's only a few months old, and see almost no compelling reason to upgrade to anything else. It _would_ be nice to have USB-C, but that's not worth hundreds of dollars to me. And it also appears there are aspects of the 17e that aren't as nice as my 14 Pro, so ...
No compact smartphone. Apples MBAs produce just more slight variants of the same phone.
The Google Pixel 10a is superior, same chassis with flat camera. The Pixel 10 doesn’t suffer a camera bump. At least a step in the right direction.
It's a bit of a shame that the 10a introduction price was pretty much the same as the Pixel 10 by that time. The Pixel 10 has a much better SoC and PixelSnap.
10a will be worth it when the price drops down to 350 Euro.
No mention of the amount of onboard RAM. (In this press release or in https://www.apple.com/iphone-17e/specs/.)
Going back to the 2007, Apple doesn’t reveal the amount of RAM for the iPhone in their marketing.
Occasionally there’s a feature that requires a minimum amount of RAM like Apple Intelligence but that’s the exception.
I don't blame them, consumers won't exactly follow the nuance of tracing garbage collectors and why iOS can get away with less ram vs Android
Assuming it has Apple INtelligence, 8 gigs seems plausible?
Every phone since the iPhone 15 Pro has the minimum 8GB to accommodate Apple Intelligence.
Why would anyone buy this over a good as new refurb 16 pro with 100% battery and likely few months of Apple care left? Here they can be found for $650 or less
They will be bought in bulk by businesses. The same for some of the laptops what you might find in a strange place within the lineup.
Are they using binnned A19 chips like they use the binned A18 chips in the iPhone 16e that has a GPU that can’t handle liquid glass? Asking for a friend.
709 euro in Austria (828.89 us dollars), a 38% increase in price...
US prices don't include sales tax so 20% of that is VAT
VAT in Austria is 20%, so only ~16.7% of it is VAT.
Even if you subtract the VAT, iphones seem to be ~10% cheaper in the USA than in, say, the UK.
I wonder how much different factors contribute to this. I'm sure the stronger consumer protection laws are part of it.
Ironic that there are so many iPhones but such little diversity in the design. It went from "Think Different" to "Conformity & Comfort".
What do you mean? With every launch they change the orientation of the camera array so you can tell who has the new model, and thus, is a better person.
You need to be well versed in the attribution for camera disposition. I am too old for that so getting understanding who is the better person is challenging :)
Good news! they've also changed the number of cameras, and added a notch for you.
Thay aren’t making our lives easier are they?
Sad it doesn't have the dynamic island, was going to pick up one of these for testing for iOS app development. Everything else looks fine however, as expected.
I would recommend the base 17 for that.
For just testing I'd rather just get a used 14, 15, or 16.
Or one of the older models? 15/16 have it too.
Apple seems to be pushing for accessibility and volume. Cheaper phones, mac minis, and entry point mac that will be introduced on Wednesday.
Tbh, feels like the market is pushing for that and Apple is responding.
Why they don't mention that the phone is essentially a brick when new iOS will require handing over your ID?
It looks like the only changes are 256GB, OLED, MagSafe, A19 and C1X. Anything else of note?
16e has OLED, the new thing with the 17e screen is the ceramic coating on the glass.
Pink!
I wonder if CarPlay will work on that, its still broadly broken on my 17.
Must vary by car — not had any problems with my iPhone 17 + Renault.
I have an iPhone 13, would this phone be a worthy update?
If your phone is a problem for you, or is insufficient then any phone in your budget that fixes your problems is a worthy upgrade. Otherwise no phone is.
4gb ram vs 8gb ram A15 vs A19
Of course it's a considerable upgrade
The reasons for using a small-screen iPhone will become increasingly compelling with the rise of AI voice assistants.
256GB?
My laptop has 8TB. Why is Apple so stingy?
I'm using less than 100 GB of total storage on my phone. I'm not sure how your laptop is supposed to come into that but 256 GB is already plenty for the smallest possible option to select, doubly so since this is the budget variant.
The bogus part with the storage here is instead on needing to pay $200 more just to get to 512 GB.
My 256GB phone is already almost full because of all this app bloat. 6 different parking apps, 17 messaging apps because nobody uses the same thing, 13 different financial apps, EV charging apps, ...
I have one messaging app eating 40GB
On the other hand, a terabyte is cheap, they should just put a terabyte in the phone, it's what we apparently need in 2026
Because service profits makes up an outsized portion of Apple's yearly revenue, including subscriptions like iCloud+ storage plans.
iCloud subscription
> and double the starting storage at 256GB
Is massive storage on a mobile device really still a thing that's important?
I'm saying this as someone with 512GB, but I just checked and I'm using 85GB at the moment, including the OS.
Photos and videos are the likely reason why the phones have so much storage, but these days both apple and google offer decent cloud backup solutions which negates the need for massive on-device storage. I'd rather the storage be smaller, and the savings going toward more battery or whatever.
Am I the only one?
Cloud storage do not help you sharing that old photo album with friends spending the night in a cabin far from the closest cell phone coverage.
Also, cloud service typically move your older stuff to colder/slower storage which are painfully slow to retrieve whenever you decides to do it. I realized this when browsing some old pictures before closing a google account I had not been using for years except emptying the gmail inbox every few months.
I personally prefer having a local copy of my files and syncthing them to my NAS at home (which is itself backuped in a storage in the cloud).
The iCloud backup built into the iPhone for me seems quite seamless. As I mentioned in another comment, I have several thousand photos and videos that don’t fit on my phone because it’s only a 64 GB device. It’s been this way for many years. But I can still scroll back and see all the photos. And when I click one I view it instantly. I’ve never noticed any lag or any problems associated with the cloud backup. It feels to me exactly the same as if they were local.
First that’s not iCloud backup but iCloud Photo Library. Second, I’ve experienced data loss with exactly this feature. I stopped using it in 2021 after using it for six years from 2015.
Both third party developers and Apple have increasingly become terrible at respecting the user’s disk space. Recently my iPhone started crashing as it ran out of space. I found that Apple Maps was using twenty gigs. Fortunately the fix is simple as the issue is widespread and it has become the first search result. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256084682?sortBy=rank
If you have 512GB I don’t think you really experience the worst of it. A lot of bugs are just Apple creating humongous temporary files before they are deleted as they age. Unless you check every day you don’t really know how much is really being used. You don’t really experience these crashes, and you have no skin in the game to make an informed comment.
If you've never used an iPhone near it's storage limit, I wouldn't wish it on you.
Performance nosedives, then it starts bootlooping randomly, and eventually you can't even delete stuff because there's no space to delete things.
You resort to randomly trying to remove apps, but sometimes that fails because of the stability issues.
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The only reason I replaced my 12 Pro was storage, and I made up my mind never to skimp on storage again.
That phone lasted me 5 years and could easily have gone several more, so I see it as an extremely cheap investment across the lifetime of the phone.
I don't think it's inherently impossible, but Apple at least seems to do a really poor job at local cache management on iOS for Photos and Messages attachments. I am constantly amazed to find my non-tech-savvy relatives deleting stuff from their phones to free up local storage.
I've had at least 256GB on my phones for the last couple of generations after having had to deal with storage issues beforehand, and it's been much nicer.
But I picked up a 16e for my son a few months ago, with 128GB, and yes, we're running into issues with storage space when it comes time to do an OS update. Between local music and photos storage, base storage, and the image for the new update, two or three times now we've had to delete stuff temporarily in order to get the update going. So I'm happy the new base is 256GB, at least that will probably last us a couple more generations before ~~640KB~~ 256GB is enough for everyone.
I have a 64 GB iPhone and I’ve never come close to using all the storage space in many years. I’ve got thousands of photos and videos but like you say, they are automatically backed up to the cloud and then the local version is optimized away until I need it.
Unfortunately yes. Some mobile games are 30+ GB (and this is probably the major reason for increasing minimum storage), high-res videos take any amount of space and are slow to sync with cloud, in-app downloaded data caches are routinely 2-5 GB each in addition to apps themselves.
Cloud backups are great for keeping your photos long-term, but if you want those photos on your phone so you can show them to people or share them, you need to download them anyway.
I need storage because Honkai: Star Rail is 32gb and I like being able to have more than one game on my phone.
I know good network connectivity is not a privilege that everyone has, but on google photos I can scroll back all the way to 2007 when my digital photo collection started (I uploaded everything I had manually), and it's as if all those photos are local on my device.
iCloud seems to work differently. Nearly all of the photos and videos I have are stored in iCloud because my phone is only a 64 GB device. But I can scroll back many years and pull up any photo video and play or view just fine right away. I can swipe right through long sequences of photos from five years ago on a device that doesn’t have them downloaded. I’m not sure exactly how that works.
Downloading videos to play without using data. For families on road trips.
Ah dang my typical luck, just bought a 16e on friday since my old 2020 SE broke down (same price as I would've paid for a 17e also since I got the 256gb version).
Not sure where you are, but you should be well within the return period?
Bought from a retailer that has "no returns on phones with broken seals", and honestly with all accounts and everything else setup on the device now, the time taken to go exchange it and setup everything again, I'm gonna lose money by swapping it compared to possibly buying the next phone one year earlier instead.
They finally got a phone back under $1000 AUD!
Now discount the iPhone 16 so I can have one in a nice colour :D
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So the LCD TouchID single camera Lightning iPhone is the same as the OLED ProMotion FaceID multi-camera + LIDAR UWB USB-C + MagSafe iPhone?
to most end users, yes. they only care about having the "brand"
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Thought that was the entire point of the e line.
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The example photos are so bad it is laughable.
I'm trying to understand what you mean by this. Are you saying they're "bad" in terms of resolution, or artistic value, or something else? They seem good enough (far from "bad") by any definition I can think of.
Resolution != quality
A picture with a boring gaussian blur to fake a bokeh effect is low quality regardless if the end result is in high resolution.
Still no support for "actually owning your device." Disappointing.
Considering that no major phone or carrier has embraced that model why would you expect it to suddenly appear here?
Someone told me that this company "Thinks different".
Recently?
Oneplus? they consistently give you the option to unlock the bootloader and install your custom ROM
Thanks for saving me a click
No Touch ID? Too bad.
I actually don’t want a smartphone anymore. The first iPhone was fun, the new one is creepy. I survived for many years without it, I think I can do it.
What, if any, mobile phone are you using instead? Even if I would not miss all the features I do not find these feature phone companies more trustworthy. Some are in bed with AdTech companies. Less features does not necessarily mean less tracking.
It’s a nightmare regardless. There’s no trustworthy hardware either, or at least very little. Maybe I’ll build a SIP client from an FPGA.