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Comment by pitched | Hacker News Reader

As the article points out, the iPhone 13 mini sold half as much as the other iPhone 13 models, while competing with the iPhone SE which was the same size at half the price. That isn’t exactly terrible.

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The lowest alternative, 13 Pro Max had double the sale volume (at 1.5x the cost), while the VAST majority chose the 6.1" models instead, how does that support the argument the desire for a >5.5" phone is from a vocal minority? The articles themselves directly state the sales of small models are poor, it's not the other way around no matter how you spin the charts.

The relative preference for the larger unit has increased over time as well, e.g.: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/28/iphone-16-q1-2025-best-...

The markets for smaller phones and the larger Pro Max models look like they’re roughly in the same order of magnitude. It doesn’t look like a negligible demand that is not worth serving.

The larger market has 2 phones (Pro and Pro Max) which release each generation, separate from the base model being >6". That one needs to compare a specific subset of a larger model type and say it's somewhere within the same factor of 10 is exactly why Apple stopped making the mini.

The articles are literally about how bad the sales were before Apple stopped making minis. There is no reasonable way to conclude that means they were actually worth serving.

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