Unfortunately both the 12 Mini and the 13 Mini did terrible numbers sales-wise. People say they want small phones but not enough of them actually buy them when they are available. :(
we remember that there was a phone released with a name "mini" which was just as large as an iPhone 6: which many people considered to be a large phone; and those who didn't were perfectly serviced by the same sized SE from 2020- which was the size of an iPhone 6...
I genuinely don't think I've seen that sentiment? "I really want a smaller phones, these gigantic bricks are too big" is a common sentiment but I don't think anyone disputes the sales figures of the mini
By expressing disappointment with the absence of a mini on every single new iPhone announcement, you’re basically ignoring the fact that Apple and other phone makers understand that small form factor phones are dead as a mainstream product.
Small phones are dead as a mainstream product, sure.
Screenreaders are also dead as a mainstream product.
Phones with a German language setting are dead as a mainstream product.
However, there are various people with severe disabilities like being blind, being german, and having small hands, so we should produce phones that are appropriate for all of those groups, and yet only the former two are serviced (even though there are more people with small hands than there are germans).
Sent from an iPhone mini, which is already about an inch too big for my hands.
No phone company is releasing a flagship SFF phone because there simply is no mainstream consumer demand for one. In fact, demand has been dead for many years now.
Good for you that you have a iPhone mini, but I would wager you won’t be seeing a new mini model anytime soon. Unless of course mainstream consumer demands shift, at which point HN dreams will become reality once more.
What is for certain is that complaining about this on every phone-related HN thread will not help change anything.
The iPhone SE 2022 was in the top ten smartphones of the year by sales figures. It may not be as astronomical as flagship phones, but it's simply a lie to say it's "dead" as a "mainstream" product.
People don't buy phones every year. People don't want to pay 95% price for 80% of performance / features.
Smaller phones as an idea isn't the problem here. Companies just don't want to make equivalent smaller phones. Making a new phone every single year is a stupid trend that causes min-max effects. A good small phone will eat into profits that's harder to make up in a yearly cycle. People will not buy nerfed smaller phones which is a positive feedback cycle.
True, also mini phones are usually of an incredible value, you can buy them very cheap. Because, surprise, actually not everyone wants them. And they are seen as crippled gimp phones. E.g. a child had this phone, then pressed their parents to buy them a normal phone. That’s how I ended up having my mini, for basically bananas. Was upgrading from SE1, so it was still a bigger phone. Yet, I’m not willing to go back, modern iPhone is still better than an obsolete one. Almost. Some bugs aren’t there in the old one.
Just checked and if I want an unscratched iPhone 13 Mini I'll be paying about $600 in Sweden. (That's for the places that have it, everywhere seems to be sold out that's cheaper).
That's for a used, 4 year old phone...
For a device that's "cheap to pick up", it's holding it's value more than any other iPhone.
I’m not very sure about the unscratched one, but I remember researching this a couple of months back, in Ukraine. And there were tens of good options (nice condition), for below $200 or $300. Which I consider a pretty decent value. I have no idea whether the war affects this, but pre war this situation was the same, more or so. Maybe that’s because the internal market is quite huge (40 M population pre-war, perhaps 30 M now), plus the country is literally the biggest in Europe. As compared to relatively small(er) Sweden, population of 10 M if I’m correct. I guess there might be cultural aspect as well. More wealthy countries and their societies (like Sweden) might actually be much less obsessed with things like newer iPhones. While they are wildly popular in Ukraine (pre-war). They may be even more popular these days, since we had very massive electricity blackouts just a year ago. And for many people their smartphones is the way to stay connected, and to check in with their loved ones. Plus, the ‘what if I’d be killed tomorrow?’ factor, I see people’s attitude is a bit different because of this either. I know at least one local friend, who said just recently he thinks of updating his 15 Pro Max (which he bought after the realease of the 16 models, saying they’re mostly the same) for the Air. He’s just a middle class guy, nothing too impressive. Other folks I know, they’re wealthy, and it looks like they won’t even think twice, and more likely to upgrade. I bet their logic is a mix of YOLO, plus they’re constantly invest into military equipment and drones for the army, so that $1K for themselves look a minute amount compared to that. All that creates pretty good market conditions for the used phones, so the folks like me could get something of a value for cheap, because others upgraded for no real reason. Personally, I see little difference after the 12th models.
After my iPhone 6 stopped getting updates I got the SE3, criteria was smallest feature phone without tonnes of shovelware and spyware pre-installed. It is still top of the list in 2025 though I will probably get another 5 years from this one.
“Terrible numbers sales-wise” is a bit of a distortion when talking about iPhones - the number that went around in 2022 was the 13 accounted for 3% of iPhone sales in 2021, which indeed sounds terrible - except Apple sold somewhere around a quarter billion iPhones that year, which means ~7.5 million iPhone 13 minis in 2021 alone. Those are numbers that anyone else would kill for. That’s just about the entire population of New York City buying an iPhone. There’s 35 states with fewer people than that. Ford sold fewer F-150s in the last decade than Apple sold iPhone 13 Minis in 2021 alone.
3% of sales means a sub-par experience for those users. Every app developer will say “oh yeah let’s test on the pro and normal sizes. Mini might break but that’s ok.”
UX cannot possibly be why Apple axed the mini since they have scalable layout APIs that did work on it. Even video-heavy social media and games worked in it just fine. It’s really just business—they make more sales out of bigger phones, so bigger phones it is.
This is false. The mini logical screen resolution still exists as the Display Zoom resolution of the Pro Max and the Pro. Developers would still need to test for those resolutions even if the mini never existed.
The problem is simply that the small form factor doesn't allow a big battery. So the iPhone 12/13 mini simply have a bad battery life compared to the bigger iPhones.
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for bigger smart phones.
And Instagram (or any other "fake universe" which pushes video-quality as a minimal requirement) algos, favor content made with a newer/better/bigger (thus more expensive) phone.
How come there's close-to-0 improvements about audio quality (both recording and listening) with respect to visual technologies?
Make the audio counterpart of Instagram/Tiktok and I'll chime in right away.
But pop-people (and markets) are mostly interested in visuals at the moment.
And for audio-sensitive people like me, it's almost a blessing.
I was extremely interested in a small phone back when the 12 Mini came out, but I didn't dare to buy it without seeing how it feels. This was during the height of the COVID lockdowns, so I couldn't go to a store and feel it in person. Ended up buying the regular iPhone 12, since that seemed like the safer choice to buy blind.
When it was time for another phone upgrade in the iPhone 15 era (because phones really don't change enough anymore to warrant more frequent upgrades than that), there was no mini option anymore. I wonder if others were like me. The Mini came out at a time where people were hesitant to try a new form factor because they couldn't try it in stores.
I think what happened here is that the target audience are people that do not feel pressure to upgrade to the latest mini every year. They do not look to have the lastest-shiniest-ohlookAI-snapdraxxon22pro phone. Just a phone that is a bit cheaper but gets the job done.
Why would you go from 12 mini to 13 mini, or to the concurrently released SEs if your phone still works?
I am also still holding on to my 13 mini. I would not have upgraded to the 14, 15 or 16mini even if they existed. I will upgrade at some point, and that point is when it either dies, or important apps stop working on the last iOS version supported by the hardware.
I do wonder if more people would buy a smaller phone if it had the same cameras and features as the pro? Time will tell if thinner sells better than shorter and less girthy.
I for one hate how even the 17 pro is creeping up in size compared to the 15 pro.
I was one of those people who bought an iphone 13 mini. When someone sees it, their first question is, "what phone is that?", unless they too own an iPhone 13 mini or owned a small iPhone before that.
People do think that being able to use the phone with just one hand is cool, but most people, even small-handed people, like to have a big screen to watch stuff on.
This meme needs to die. Normal-sized iPhones account for tens of millions of sales per year.
The fact that Apple was absolutely schizophrenic about its non-phablet market, introducing the iPhone mini 13 and iPhone SE 2022 at the same time, is utterly irrelevant to that point.
we will never really know for sute because the minis were gimped compared to the max options that had an extra telephoto lens and better ram/storage options
That's the tradeoff with a smaller phone. You can't fit as many features. And despite cutting out so much, there still wasn't enough space for an acceptable amount of battery.
