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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone mini was a commercial flop. The sales numbers were bad. It only accounted for about 3–5% of total iPhone sales. And the product didn't make sense from a business standpoint: it required specialized/miniaturized hardware, took more engineering work than other models to design, cost more to manufacture than a regular iPhone, but had to be sold for less.

From an engineering standpoint, it was the most impressive iPhone Apple had ever made, but that fact doesn't translate to sales numbers.

There's a very vocal group of people online saying they want smaller phones, who make it sound like there's massive untapped demand for these phones, but when you actually give it to them, it turns out they're just a tiny slice of the market.

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I’m a huge fan of small iPhones and only recently replaced it with a standard size model. I pretty much hate it for all the reasons I expected.

But when I looked up the sales numbers for all of the smaller phone versions I had to admit I must be pretty far outside the normal buyer. The market really spoke on this.

We'll always wonder if the iPhone Mini would still be around if Apple positioned and priced it as a specialty premium device, like the iPad Mini, instead of a worse mainstream iPhone.

The iPad mini was released at a price point lower than the contemporary iPad, and IIRC this continued for several generations.

I thought I’d love my iPhone mini for these same reasons.

It turns out that the reachable nature of it wasn’t really that much of a benefit compared to the downsides: short battery life (going from the 12 mini to 13 mini helped, barely), small text/interface (my eyes literally started hurting), reduced area to see content while typing, compromised cameras compared to the Pro models.

Add a $30 PopSocket to your phone and all the problems with a bigger phone are resolved.

The iPhone mini competed with a $30 accessory.

> it required specialized/miniaturized hardware

Looking at the earlier smaller iPhones and the budget SE line, at least the “miniaturized” part isn’t very convincing.

Not just special miniaturized hardware, on the software side it must have been at least a non-zero pain to deal with.

The logical screen size was the same as the iPhone 11 Pro (375x812), so the iPhone mini didn’t add a new display size, and everything rendered exactly the same as on the 11 Pro (which itself was merely a vertical extension of the earlier iPhone Plus resolution). The display is rendered internally at the 11 Pro’s physical resolution (1125x2436) and then downscaled to the mini’s physical resolution (1080x2340). Similar internal downscaling had already been done on the earlier iPhone Plus models, so also nothing new. The 11 Pro is still supported by current iOS, same as the mini.

It was, to the contrary, the non-mini iPhone 12 that introduced a new resolution and required adjustments.

https://iosref.com/res

> on the software side it must have been at least a non-zero pain to deal with

Compared to the iPhone Duo now in the lineup? And the iPhone Air was announced with some pride from the Apple hardware team for its special miniaturized hardware.

There may not be a market for an iPhone Mini-sized device when looking at the buyers, but the custom hardware and tweaks to software aren't a clear consideration for Apple when you look at their behavior with other products.

By “pain” I mean “providing an acceptable experience” more than “needing to make different scaled apps.”

I think with the iPhone Duo you at least have a larger screen that the user can utilize. On the iPhone mini the screen was as big as it was going to get.

If the experience of using a specific app is bad, the user can open the phone.

My take is, the target audience for small phones is slow moving and they didn’t persist long enough.

I somehow live in a bubble where the mini has a huge market share, every third person I know have one. And guess what, they’re all non-techies.

Aka 6million units. During the same period when the Pixel sold 10 million.

So every ipad , watch, mac sku that sells < 5% of the overall product line is immediately taken out back to the wood shed?

I guess, but when my iPhone is no longer supported, I’m migrating my entire family on to something else. 3 watches, 3 ipads and 2 phones…so its not always about the % sold.

“Something else”

The SE 2 launched in April 2020 at US$399, six months before the 12 mini. Anyone who mainly wanted a small iPhone had already bought one, so the mini’s natural audience was split before it launched.

For most of the world, the phone is the only screen they have, so of course they want a big one. People who carry a laptop and want a light portable phone for messages, maps and payments are a minority, and a fairly wealthy one.

The Mini also outperformed in Japan, which sales are now declining in.

Unwieldy overpriced bricks being forced on everyone doesn't seem like a good long term strategy.

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