It’s time again for one of Macalope’s quarterly anthems of the iPhone’s tiny form factor. If small phones aren’t your thing, feel free to read this week’s column at 1.5X Speed.
“Please don’t kill the iPhone Mini,” says Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge (Advice for the Centuries). nick.)
I preach.
Macalope has used the first generation iPhone SE for four years, waiting for the time Apple will ship a modern small smartphone again. Then he had to wait another six months while using the second generation iPhone SE. Finally – finally! Apple shipped the iPhone 12 mini. estate!
The sorrows did not last long.
Several months later, it was rumored that Apple would ship the iPhone 13 mini and then update it again. As Hollister notes, A recent tweet by Ming-Chi Kuo It seems to confirm this, as far as the rumors go: a small phone will not be released this fall. This is known as the tick-tick-TOOOOOOK strategy. And McCallop hates it.
Hollister and some of his colleagues agree.
… When I polled my colleagues this week, seven of us still agree that the rest of the very big phones in the world can push it.
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However, much like comic book characters, Apple products are only dead as long as they are dead. Macalope thinks there’s a good chance the company will ship another real mini phone (the 3rd generation iPhone SE is a good phone but it’s not a real mini phone) Someday. Apple definitely knows what sells more than Macalope. A company may feel that the market isn’t important enough that it can only drop our greatness when it feels like it.
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You can’t build a market on tales, but to support Hollister and his cohorts at The Verge, the nerd regularly speaks to die-hard small phone fanatics. Back when the first generation iPhone SE shipped, a friend’s father literally switched platforms in order to get a smaller phone with modern internals, something that wasn’t available on Android.
Hollister is feeling a little desperate, even if Macalope feels it.
If Apple introduced the Mini in 2023 instead of 2022…
Or Apple could bring it back in 2024…
Or … or … or!
Look, just give us the little phone and no one gets hurt, okay?
Like Hollister, the Macalope would be fine if the company took an “every few years” approach to shipping a small phone. But there is no regularity in Apple’s approach other than continued disdain.
The irony here, of course, is that Apple is notorious for being late to the big phone game.
This piece from Engadget details how Steve Jobs said “nobody would buy” bigger phones is a fun part of life from 2010. Of course, Jobs said that kind of thing all the time about things that Apple wasn’t currently shipping. “No one would buy an expensive Mac with a box on the front!” What’s funny is the size of the phone, which was considered “big” at the time.
We assume he’s probably talking about the latest range of 4, 4.3 and 5-inch phones…
Six years later, Apple’s 4.5-inch iPhone SE will be the smallest phone on the market from a major smartphone maker. Six years later, the iPhone 12 and 13 became 5.4 inches. And while Apple has made huge strides in screen space by reducing the size of the bezels, the iPhone 13 mini is generally larger overall than the original SE was. The smallest phone is now only small compared to any other phone currently being shipped.
Macalope isn’t sure how he became the strange kid and cartoonish mini iPhone sticker but he’s going to die on it. It seems over and over again.