The choice has happened over many years. Incrementally consumers were offered the choice of the same size phone or larger, and they kept choosing larger.
If the smaller iPhones and Android phones of 10+ years ago had continued to sell well as larger models were introduced alongside them, they'd still be selling phones that size today.
I wonder what percentage of people who complain about not being able to buy smaller phones actually ever bought the smaller phones when they were available. Are these people carrying 3rd gen iPhone SEs right now? I suspect no.
It’s not as if Apple dislikes money. If they believed the market for small phones was large enough, they’d still be selling small phones.
I was still using my iPhone 13 mini until last week when I bought an Air. As a city dweller without a car, I'm constantly in situations where I'm carrying something in one hand and need to pull out my phone for something. Now with this huge form factor I can't comfortably do that. For example, I was traveling internationally and was carrying my duffel bag in one hand and needed to get information out of the Airbnb app on my phone, and I almost dropped it. The mini would have been (and was always) fine in these circumstances.
The Air doesn't even fit in my jeans comfortably, I have to carry it in my jacket now (what do I do in summer?). I'm considering returning it and switching back to my mini until it just can't run anymore.
Apple needs to realize the user base that wants a portable, one handed phone isn't the same market that wants a cheap phone. I paid more for a worse spec'd phone (Air vs 17), solely hoping it would be easier to use as a mobile, out in the world device. It's not. If they launched the same exact mini with a processor bump at $1k or more I'd be fine paying it.
> Apple needs to realize the user base that wants a portable, one handed phone isn't the same market that wants a cheap phone.
The reality is that “I want a small phone” for most seems to mean “I would prefer that the phone is small but this is actually the least important factor for my purchase decision”. The set of people who bought the mini was quite small, estimated around 3% of sales.
You didn’t even buy the smallest phone. You got seduced by the thin phone but the 17 and 17 pro are both physically smaller devices corner to corner and would fit in your pocket better.
For sure, I admit I'm an outsider in most of my life choices, including retail decisions. But for about 13 years there I was able to purchase phones that worked one handed before the market completely shifted away from that.
I purchased the phone that was the lightest, thinking that maybe it's thinness would make it nice to hold in one hand (it does), but it's still too big. And so back it goes for my 13 mini until that thing can't hold on any longer.
The people who complain about wanting phones to be smaller are like me. We don't buy phones that often. Manufacturers will never cater to us, because I didn't replace my Pixel 2 XL until this year.
I can never compete with the market that replaces their phone every year. Nobody can. They are the ones that keep buying giant phones.
>It’s not as if Apple dislikes money. If they believed the market for small phones was large enough, they’d still be selling small phones.
Apple, like almost every business that size, only does things that are profitable enough. It's not enough to sell 1 million phones for a good profit, they try to avoid doing that.
> It's not enough to sell 1 million phones for a good profit
This is true but also not the entire story. Apple also has to consider:
* How many of that million would we sell anyway in a non-mini version?
* What will the margin be on these relative to our other phones?
* How much of our engineering resources will be siphoned into creating yet another variant that we could use for other efforts or to make our flagship phones better?
* What’s the long term support cost for yet another variant?
I was still on my iPhone 12 mini until about a month ago. I was ready to buy an iPhone 16 Mini on launch day if it existed. My wife was on her iPhone 13 mini until about a week ago, and would have bought an iPhone 17 Mini if that was on offering instead of the iPhone Air. Apple's continued refusal to offer a newer Mini, combined with the iOS 26 bug & accessibility nightmare, got us to switch. We now each carry a Sunbeam F1 Pro.
I have sympathy for folks who want a small phone and legitimately would buy it if available. Unfortunately the set of people who will actually buy a smaller phone seems to be very small, which is why all the manufacturers have just stopped. Apple with their two sizes seems to be trying harder than most manufacturers.
You seem to have missed my point about manufacturers moving in lockstep.
Most people use a phone for at least two years. The way it happened in the 2010s, by the time someone is looking at buying a new one, all available phones on the market have already grown larger compared to their current one. So, they get sad and buy whatever is available.
Which is perhaps why Apple tried the iPhone Mini, to go back and see if they were missing a large market segment. Their answer was that some people bought it, but not enough to justify the product at Apple's scale.
There isn't a grand conspiracy to make everyone sad with big phones they don't want.
> Their answer was that some people bought it, but not enough to justify the product at Apple's scale.
This is the key thing. It’s not that no one wants it. But it’s a lot of engineering to produce another distinct hardware model and the market is tiny compared to the larger models.
They don't have 15 different Macbook chassis sizes. Most of those SKUs are swapping SoC and memory configurations on the same board and chassis design.
By that logic the iPhone 17 (base model) is at least 24 SKUs.
If for example the 15" MacBook Air ended up being less than 3% of Mac sales, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple killed it off.
But it somehow is enough to do that for things like the Mac Pro or the Mac Studio that are clearly niche products compared to the rest of the Mac lineup?
I'm not sure it's fair to compare cars to phones or other tech products. Phones are not very repairable these days, but even if you manage to keep a 15-year-old phone working, the unnecessarily ever-changing protocols, APIs, and standards will render it unusable for most practical purposes. So you're kinda forced to upgrade every now and then. A 15-year-old car though? It takes the same fuel and drives on the same roads as brand-new ones. And spare parts are most certainly still available.
The Mac Pro that famously gets very infrequent updates and is far behind the rest of the line on CPU generarion? I would not be at all surprised if Apple kills it off in the near future.
The comparison to cars is the market. A company makes products it wants to and that it thinks will pay back their investment, and that will be the most profitable choice among the choices of product they could make.
Sorry, you aren’t going to debate your way into Tim Cook choosing a less profitable product to make.
If the smaller iPhones and Android phones of 10+ years ago had continued to sell well as larger models were introduced alongside them, they'd still be selling phones that size today.