People make fun of me but I'll never skip a chance to complain about how large these phones are. I hate it so much. I have a standard iPhone, not a max, and it causes real pain in my wrist if I use it too much. Was honestly thinking about downgrading to the last SE model even though it's several years out of date.
I want to +1 every comment in this thread. Phones are too big now. I don't understand Apple's weird obsessions, first trying to make all the phone so thin you cut your hand holding it, and then making it too big to fit comfortably in your pocket unless you are walking around in camo pants.
You know what I would like? When I tap on the search and type the first few letters of an app on my phone, and the app appears, and I click on that -- I would like the app to open. Only happens about half the time now. UI is getting worse with every release.
I dived into a niche world of small phones recently while looking for replacement to malfunctioning Pixel 4a (which is apparently now considered compact phone). There's a few small manufacturers in China making some, with 4 inch or 5 inch screen, like Aiphor or Unihertz. And by "small" I mean "they use kickstarter to fund their R&D" small.
Other than that... Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.
> Screen size is area (x^2) and battery size is volume (x^3). As battery life is a critical feature, a bigger screen supports (a nonlinear) better battery life.
I have found the iPhone Air much easier to hold than the iPhone 13 Pro it replaced because of how light it is, even though the iPhone Air has a bigger screen.
I don’t think anyone should make fun of you for it but I’m in the opposite boat. I’m so glad that they make the pro max variants because most smartphones are so small that it hurts my fingers to bend them in the unnaturally inward way it requires to hold and interact with them.
I switched from a pixel 3 to a pixel 9 pro over a year ago, and I still miss the smaller form factor. the pixel 3 really was the perfect size for me and I am sad I can no longer get a smallish phone with a high end processor.
I’m still running an SE2020. I was expecting the latest update (with liquid) to be the death of it. But performance has actually improved significantly! Very unexpected.
Funnily, the large display is the most important thing for me. I find my efficiency directly proportional to display size (which holds for laptops too).
If a 30 second task can be done in just 20 on a device with a larger display, that's absolutely worth it for me.
Also larger device tends to imply longer battery life too.
I did downgrade back to my SE (from iPhone 16). Big selling point (aside from its size and rounded corners) is the physical button with fingerprint. I missed that even more than I disliked carrying a big phone around.
Former small phone person here: I went from a small iphone to a large one just to substitute not having to carry around my ipad. I really wish iphone fold is here sooner.
Same. The Pixel 4a was the perfect phone for me: Light, screen exactly the right size to navigate with a single thumb whilst holding the phone in one hand, enough battery life, small enough to fit in my jean pockets comfortably.
But people buy big phones in preference to small ones, so that’s what Google & Apple manufacture. Nobody (from the POV of Apple/Google decision makers) buys these smaller phones.
Yeah, I wish they would commit to doing a mini every x years. Last year I bought a 16 and this year I bought an Air. I returned both after just a few days. I can't reach across the phone with my thumb, meaning I can't use it one-handed.
The new phones have some neat tricks (satellite connectivity comes to mind), but the on-device AI seems pretty mediocre and I value pocketability and one-handed usability more than the new gizmos.
When I asked myself if I would rather keep the new Air or go back to my 13 mini with an extra thousand dollars in my pocket, it was no contest.
> I wish they would commit to doing a mini every x years
The problem is all the tooling is pipelined for annual releases. You can't just find a team to do the mini; it has to always be there, and parts of it have to always be working on the next one. Your vendors will get grumpy because it doesn't fit their product cycles.
I have large hands but the 13 Mini is roughly the maximum I can use one-handed without doing the weird finger balancing act to shift the phone around. I get why most people like large phones - media consumption - but not everyone is into that.
I don't even mind large phones if they're done right. My favorite phone of all time is the BB Passport which you have to use two-handed, but it was actually designed around that and amazing to use.
Sorry but if that’s the case you definitely don’t have large hands. If you did you’d be able to use the Pro Max one handed and reach everything except the top left corner by swiveling your thumb (Reachability enables you to reach top left corner)
I've a lot of unexpected behavior from the faceid thing. Lots of unexpected swipe-ups that drop me out of an app and put me on the home screen. Can't unlock in the dark, too close to your face, off to the side, in your pocket. Lots of "I saw your face an unlocked" that I didn't know had happened.
fingerprint sensor unlocked when you wanted it to, with haptics. switching apps was a button operation, not happening when you didn't expect it.
I get that getting rid of touchid haptic eliminates dead space but still blows my mind they couldn't or refused to figure out screen-based touch id as an option at least. Samsung has it...
What I don’t like about FaceID is the premature unlocking. If you pass your phone to someone else it can unlock, especially for taking photos. And to allow strangers to make photos is intentional that’s why the camera app doesn’t need an unlock.
Aside from that all the gestures, positions and holding points are annoying. The usage of TouchID is simpler.
Apple could at least fix the security issue by unlocking only after swiping up. FaceID? Isn’t fast enough? Well. Than TouchID is better.
Me too, but I’m going to have to upgrade. The lack of storage on my phone (64GB) is killing me - every time there is an os update I have to delete almost everything to make room
I'm also a touchID / iphone 8 size fan, but the nice cameras/zoom in flagship models are hard to give up. At least Face ID has improved significantly from the early days of iphone 10 -- it's faster and more reliable than it was on the older models if you tried it back then.
The thing I've come to like about FaceID on my 13 mini is that I can require it for certain apps to open that don't require it - e.g. messaging as opposed to banking which generally require some kind of auth by default - which is much better security in case someone snatches it out of my hand while it's unlocked. It's pretty seamless because I'm generally looking at the device anyway, and it's much less faff than it would be with TouchID.
My iPhone 12 mini is hobbling along. A few rare apps are not usable because UI is clipped, the battery is throttling and making it sluggish, and it overheats all the time as a GPS.
Many mobile websites are unusable.
But I love the form factor and I'm going to keep it going as long as it is reasonably secure.
I stuck with my 13 mini for a long time, and had recently put a new iFixit battery in it too. I did finally make the jump to a Pixel 10 but sign me up with everyone else who misses reasonably-sized phones.
i send them an iphone mini request every once in a while through the feedback form hoping it will make a little bit of difference: https://www.apple.com/feedback/
still holding on to iphone 13 mini hoping they bring back the perfect size. also trying very hard not to accidentally fat finger a ios 26 update.
That's why they stopped making them, because the people who buy minis are willing to stick with them for 5 years, whereas Apple wants you to buy a new phone every year.
Every single person I know who uses a phone of more than 4 years old, uses an iPhone 13 mini. Without exception. Now I'm sure there's plenty of HNers who use other 4+ year old phones, but I'm talking about non-tech people.
The release schedule was crap, as well as the 12 mini being an objectively bad phone.
Spring 2020, they released the iPhone SE 2020, 4 years after the previous iPhone SE. This satiated a lot of the demand for people holding out for a smaller phone. Then came the surprise with 12 mini in September of 2020, except the battery life and performance sucked, garnering bad reviews.
Then, finally in September 2021, they released the 13 mini, an objectively good, smaller phone. But over the previous 18 months, a lot of the buyers for the 13 mini had already bought the 2020 SE or were burned by the 12 mini.
Tenth of millions of devices were sold (somewhere between 20 to 35 Million?). You could build multiple plants for it, with government funding in Europe.
The MBAs at Apple noticed:
* Big size is a status symbol in Asia. And TV replacement. Their a lot of people in Asia.
* Due to vendor lock-in people need to purchase anyway. So just sell them the standard phone.
They got the sales anyway. We don’t have a “functional market”. But Apples marketing was weird. They named it Mini instead of Compact or Air. And launched it against the SE? A lot people already refused to move from the SE 1st Gen to the Mini, to due the increased size and missing TouchID.
So Apple assumed people want even bigger Max or Air. The Air which is actually much thicker most other phones. Both seem to fail.
Crazy people fixate. It’s why you get people talking about how 4o was the best AI model ever and crying for it to be brought back. (It had no internal thinking process and would believe you are the messiah without question)
Have you replaced the battery? My 13 mini shows 90% battery health but I can’t use it for the full day (and I don’t game or anything, just light use). I wonder if the battery is really ok and it’s the software that is to blame.
I still have my 12 Mini, changed the battery in a Apple store a year ago (and they broke the screen in the process so got a new screen too) for I think 99 EUR, now the battery still last ~2 days, easily worth it. Maximum capacity says "87%" right now although I don't know what exactly that's based on.
I'm keeping this phone until either Apple releses a new mini or until Motorola released a GrapheneOS phone, whichever comes first.
Just replaced my 13 mini battery this past week which was at 80%. Noticeable improvement. I'm not a very heavy user but did find that I was getting to the 20/10% range at the end of most days. Now its 30/40 and I'm happy! Many more years in the old steed yet.
My 13 mini on iOS 26 shows 83% maximum capacity but makes it through the day with light-ish use (Spotify (although generally offline playlists because of lossless audio) NYT games, email, messaging, browsing, Instapaper). I do have lots of accessibility settings enabled to stop things like transparency and animations though. See my comment here for more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45544554
I got the base 13 at launch day whose battery health now states 86%. While I have noticed degraded battery performance, the stated health has been stuck at 86% for quite a while now.
I guess it's bugged out and would opt for a battery change if you're feeling the battery pains, I'm thinking of upgrading to the new base model this year for the usb c and 120hz display.
I did! I ended up buying a kit off ifixit IIRC. It was super cheap and works great! If I did it again, I would splurge for the Apple verified battery as a third party one doesn't work with the new Battery app features.
I showed my Costco membership QR code to the cashier the other day, and they suddenly exclaimed, “oh my! What a cute little phone!!”
It took me a second to even process why someone might say such a thing about my case-less generic 12 mini. Most of my close friends have 13 mini’s so I often feel my wife’s “regular” size iPhone is the odd one out.
My next upgrade if my 12 mini gives up will be an 13 mini. And from there I will probably just stick to refurbed 13 minis until a good alternative comes out.
I highly recommend hunting down a 13 mini now (with a lot of battery left) so you can switch when you have to. I did last summer and was glad I didn´t have to organize one on short notice. And if you avoid ios26 - make sure the ios18 on the device is updated because now you no longer get updated within ios18
I moved off the mini to get satelite messaging which I use while hiking. But now that T-Mobile/starlink support satelite on the 13 mini, maybe I’ll go back.
Finally moved on from my 12 mini, but I still have it sitting in my office and when I pick it up I think "wow this feels like a phone from the future."
Wish they made a new mini instead of the Air. A friend bought one of those, and frankly I just don't get it.
The screen is too big to use it one-handed, and thickness is really the only one of the three dimension of the phone that I don't care about how small it is (within reason). They probably spent billions of dollars shaving off half a millimeter and what do we get with that technology? Phone that's too big.
If this keeps up in another 5 years I'll be looking at flip phones and a separate camera.
Same. This would be an obvious upgrade for me, if the overall size was anywhere close to the Mini. Oddly enough, the announcement doesn't even list the screen size, but I'm sure it's 6" +
Still loving mine as well. I held out with the 2016 SE for 8 years. Sadly it's looking like I might have to do that again with the 13 mini! It boggles my mind that Apple thinks it's worthwhile to sell the 16, 17, 17 Pro, and 17e all in basically the exact same form factor. And then the Air and Max in very similar form factors. Vary it up! I don't need a new mini every year, but something in the 5.4" form factor every 3-4 years would obviously have an audience. I don't care if it's a Pro or an SE/e model, I just need something that'll keep me on the latest iOS for security updates.
Sigh. Maybe the Clicks Communicator (at 13cm tall) will get my money.
I'm on my 8th year of using my 2016 SE. Have replaced the battery and screen a few times over the years. A fair few of the apps I used stopped supporting iOS 15 so I've got old versions of those apps installed, but WhatsApp, Signal and my banking app still actively support iOS 15 so it works well enough for me, for now.
I have an iPhone 13 mini sitting in a drawer for when I need to switch.
It will be even shorter than the mini, but also wider than the Pro Max. The aspect ratio is different from a normal iPhone. The weight should be in the Pro range, and of course it’ll be relatively thick. Not a mini replacement in my book.
One can only hope... My 13 mini's performance, especially for the Camera and Safari seem to have hit new lows with iOS 26. I'm sticking with the mini for its size, but also its weight. So far the Air is the only alternative I think I could switch to, but apparently that's also on Apple's chopping block due to poor sales.
Been thinking of doing the same. My 12 is showing its cycles, but it’s either I have a phone that lives in my front pocket, or I can go phone-less.
I refuse to have a phone I have to constantly carry, hold, or move from back pocket when I sit. This damn thing is in my hands enough, I don’t need to increase the surface area for potential distractions.
iPhone 11 here. Chugging along just fine. Though after the latest liquid glass update the responsiveness has noticeably degraded. They've added lot of animations & moving elements which my poor old 11 doesn't seem to handle all that well.
Are there any androids with a similar form factor?
Ideally, degoogled android, of course. (Or even not android?)
The 13 mini probably still has a few years of security fixes coming, but after that, I’m going to consider jumping ship, and would like something that’s privacy respecting.
Worst part about big phones are that fingers cannot reach around the whole screen when using one hand, so you are forced to always use two hands. They also fall out of pant pockets easily and have no holes for lanyards.
I’m in exactly the same situation. My wife just upgraded from a iPhone 11 Pro to a refurbished iPhone 13 Mini. My daughter just bought a refurbished 13 Mini too.
The second hand market for these phones seems pretty buoyant
Same. And so do many people around me. And many still cling to their 12 minis.
Maybe that’s why Apple won’t make them anymore, people like us tend to keep them forever.
> Running deepseek 6B on the Private LLM app on the iPhone 13 basically set my phone on fire
Hey, I’m the author of Private LLM. I hope you’re joking about the phone catching fire. Btw, there’s no DeepSeek 6B model, you’re likely talking about the DeepSeek Distill 7B model.
I stupidly downgraded to a 17 from the 13 mini two-weeks ago and I hate it. It’s the first time I have been earnestly tempted to just get a dumb-phone and be done with it. The constant growth of mobile phones is perplexing to me but I don’t doubt Apple knows what sells.
my wife upgraded from a 13 mini to an Air and she loves it. She thought she hated the larger size of new phones, but after holding the Air in her hand she realized the weight and thickness was the issue for her!
It’s a tough call though because the Air has a lot of pros and cons! My wife never takes nature photography or macro photography, so she was OK with the 1 camera compromise.
If you truly want a shorter phone, my condolences lol. Apple seems to be ignoring this user segment.
I tried the Air and went back to the mini because of the camera compromises. One big issue for me was losing Cinematic video, which I use all the time.
So... there is a 4" Android phone out there. It's widely available, and from a major manufacturer. It's very usable, and it runs mostly stock Android. I have it, and I like it very much. Brace yourself for the reveal because you're not going to like it.
It's a foldable. It's the Motorola Razr+ or Razr Ultra (I have the 2025 Ultra). The outer screen is 4" and you can use it for almost everything you want to do. I use the outer screen probably 80+% of the time, since I prefer small phones. Every once in a while you run into an app or website that just wasn't built to function on a 4" display, but for almost everything I've tried it works great. You can then also un-fold it into a full-size 7" phablet when you need to do high-detail stuff like Maps.
There are downsides: it's expensive; it's a foldable, so reliability is a concern; and Motorola's OS support promise is not great at only like 3-4 years. But if you're willing to make those compromises, you can get a genuinely very good, small phone, right now today.
Once you get over the shock of having a foldable suggested to you (I was initially skeptical, too), give it a look. It's really genuinely a nice phone for small-phone-likers.
I just signed up on their site and got a mail with the following info:
"To catch you up:
We’ve been hard at work over the summer building out a team and searching the globe for a manufacturer to build our dream phone. It’s been a slow process, but we’re nearing completion and expect to be able to kick off this project very soon.
Once we have a manufacturer locked in, we will be reaching out with a full update on the project and our plan to move forward."
I'd love to have a smaller/cheaper phone but I continue to hold onto my Pro from a couple years ago is for the high end camera, particularly the telephoto lens.
What I would like is a really good single camera. If that's even possible. One thing I find sort of irritating about the multi-camera setup on my iPhone is that using it as a magnifier is often frustrating. Get too close to something and it decides to switch cameras, which then means now you're actually looking at something else entirely. Maybe I'm missing a setting somewhere, I can't be the only person to notice how awkwardly the functionality is implemented.
It's hard to get that in a single camera because of the size.
If you consider the size of professional grade camera lenses there's a reason why they produce much better images. But conversely it's pretty impressive what phone manufacturers have been able to accomplish with such a small amount of space. For 90% of use cases camera phones are sufficient.
I have the same issue with my Pixel. It's nice to be able to use a real zoom when I need it, but that means I can't get the one that's otherwise what I really need.
Indeed. I have 16e from it's launch and can't be happier. Battery life is incredible while no issues with connections whatsoever (I am heavy traveler so can test it on multitude of telco hardware)
> iPhone 17e also features C1X, the latest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple
But the 17e iPhone seems to lack the Apple developed N1 chip that provides Wifi 7 + Bluetooth 6. So presumably they're using off the shelf components for Wifi and Bluetooth in the 17e.
I couldn't care less about multi-gigabit 5G speeds (my 15 Pro can already practically get ~2 Gbps – who really needs that in a battery-powered phone?!); give me better battery life (my 15 Pro gets warm to the touch doing absolutely nothing in some 5G scenarios) and better security (e.g. carrier-side location tracking prevention) any day.
I'm happy for the existence of the e line mainly because it forces them to bump up the specs on the base iPhone. 17 is so good now that there's very little reason to get the 17 Pro.
Taking inflation into account, a $599 iPhone in 2026 would have been $380 in 2007. Given that the actual launch price in 2007 was $499, that's a pretty hefty drop.
I’m pretty sure they determine the price upfront and then figure out what bells and whistles they can ship without eating into their margins. Their goal is to hit a certain average selling price across their massive user base when they upgrade their old phones. They are not going to jeopardize that by releasing an attractive cheap iPhone.
For the people who really don’t want to spend a lot, obviously the easiest option is to just buy an older iPhone or keep your phone for longer. My partner doesn’t care about having the latest tech. So first I use a phone for 3 years and then they use it for another 3 years. We essentially get 6 years of life out of it (Apple is good about releasing software updates for 6 years).
I'd argue that is worth the money if you're going to be using a phone every single day of their life. People will drop a few hundred on fancy shoes and wear them once a month, but they treat phones as cheap commodities.
Agreed, but its more the fact that you get a lot more peace of mind tossing around, and otherwise treating without too much care, a cheaper device. Risk of drops, theft, forgetting etc. are pretty high for something that I use every day. But then I'm a broke PhD student, so perhaps my views will change one day.
Last time I complained about the pricing of the iPhone, people pointed out that inflation included the prices wasn't to far of from the original iPhone.
Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.
The prices are, in my mind insane, and I'll be buying used, but those are also overpriced.
> Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.
This obviously isnt relevant generally though, this is not how the general public feels at all.
Accounting for inflation, that's $542. And considering how much everything, including phones, costs nowadays, $600 seems like a steal to me too. I was expecting a much higher price for what I'm seeing on that page.
I'm glad they added MagSafe with this version, that was my biggest "issue" with the 16e. Thankfully you can add a ring to the back of the device to "give" it MagSafe (the magnets part at least, if not the faster charging).
My understanding (and I don't ahve a magsafe phone so maybe I'm wrong), is that a lot of the time, you need to buy a magsafe compatible case, i.e. one with magnets in it, to get it to work (assuming you want a case on your phone). But if so, then adding such a case to a 16e would also add back the magsafe functionality. So technically, having it on your phoneb doesn't actually make a difference right? Or am I missing something? I was considering getting the 16e because its discounted now.
> I don't see why I would want magsafe on my phone at this point.
I've been charging my 13 Pro exclusively via MagSafe for a couple of years... out of necessity. The charging port has... an issue... and I've yet to get it resolved.
Honestly the only time I miss being able to use the charging port is on flights, where I'm using someone else's charging solution (i.e. a port I can plug in to).
Everywhere else (bedside table, in the car, or even out and about) it's MagSafe.
The only downside to this approach is that you need to be more specific about which case you buy (they don't all support MagSafe) but in terms of convenience it's night and day better.
I have one of those magsafe multi charger things that let you charge your iphone, watch and whatever you can lie on the base of the charger. I absolutely love it, since it doubles up as a bedside clock for me and it's nicer to snap things on the charger than to fiddle with the cables. I only use USB-C charging for my phone only if I need to charge it fast before leaving somewhere.
The biggest thing for me is not having a fragile connector involved when charging and using it at the same time. A MagSafe puck is super easy to charge your phone while browsing.
Waiting for the first pro line phone with both the Apple modem and Apple wifi/BT stack in it. Battery life is always a struggle when the phone gets older.
Readit News
You know what I would like? When I tap on the search and type the first few letters of an app on my phone, and the app appears, and I click on that -- I would like the app to open. Only happens about half the time now. UI is getting worse with every release.
Other than that... Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.
> Screen size is area (x^2) and battery size is volume (x^3). As battery life is a critical feature, a bigger screen supports (a nonlinear) better battery life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44588733
It’s been a great phone!
If a 30 second task can be done in just 20 on a device with a larger display, that's absolutely worth it for me.
Also larger device tends to imply longer battery life too.
It runs the latest iOS, although it's likely missing some of the new bits.
I prefer the size, although the screen that spans the entire front surface would be the superior device; I like the iPhone 13 Mini.
But people buy big phones in preference to small ones, so that’s what Google & Apple manufacture. Nobody (from the POV of Apple/Google decision makers) buys these smaller phones.
Apple suffered for decades from Microsoft's anticompetitive OS monopoly, and turned around and did the same thing to the android ecosystem.
I have no idea why this sub is full of Apple fanboys. I was an Apple fan 10 years ago, but these days they no longer deserve your support.
LMAO
The new phones have some neat tricks (satellite connectivity comes to mind), but the on-device AI seems pretty mediocre and I value pocketability and one-handed usability more than the new gizmos.
When I asked myself if I would rather keep the new Air or go back to my 13 mini with an extra thousand dollars in my pocket, it was no contest.
The problem is all the tooling is pipelined for annual releases. You can't just find a team to do the mini; it has to always be there, and parts of it have to always be working on the next one. Your vendors will get grumpy because it doesn't fit their product cycles.
I don't even mind large phones if they're done right. My favorite phone of all time is the BB Passport which you have to use two-handed, but it was actually designed around that and amazing to use.
Not looking forward to having to settle for those comically large phones with Face ID for my next one.
Wow, it has a lot of unexpected downsides.
I've a lot of unexpected behavior from the faceid thing. Lots of unexpected swipe-ups that drop me out of an app and put me on the home screen. Can't unlock in the dark, too close to your face, off to the side, in your pocket. Lots of "I saw your face an unlocked" that I didn't know had happened.
fingerprint sensor unlocked when you wanted it to, with haptics. switching apps was a button operation, not happening when you didn't expect it.
Aside from that all the gestures, positions and holding points are annoying. The usage of TouchID is simpler.
Apple could at least fix the security issue by unlocking only after swiping up. FaceID? Isn’t fast enough? Well. Than TouchID is better.
Many mobile websites are unusable.
But I love the form factor and I'm going to keep it going as long as it is reasonably secure.
If find that after the upgrade to the latest iOS my 13 mini has been struggling with framerate and just overall feeling laggy.
still holding on to iphone 13 mini hoping they bring back the perfect size. also trying very hard not to accidentally fat finger a ios 26 update.
Besides, you can always delete the update (if already downloaded) and turn automatic updates off.
If people wanted it, you wouldn’t be faking the feedback.
https://blog.bschwind.com/2025/01/11/the-original-iphone-se-...
That's why they stopped making them, because the people who buy minis are willing to stick with them for 5 years, whereas Apple wants you to buy a new phone every year.
Every single person I know who uses a phone of more than 4 years old, uses an iPhone 13 mini. Without exception. Now I'm sure there's plenty of HNers who use other 4+ year old phones, but I'm talking about non-tech people.
That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.
Half the time when I'm home I still use my iPod touch because it's even smaller than the mini.
Spring 2020, they released the iPhone SE 2020, 4 years after the previous iPhone SE. This satiated a lot of the demand for people holding out for a smaller phone. Then came the surprise with 12 mini in September of 2020, except the battery life and performance sucked, garnering bad reviews.
Then, finally in September 2021, they released the 13 mini, an objectively good, smaller phone. But over the previous 18 months, a lot of the buyers for the 13 mini had already bought the 2020 SE or were burned by the 12 mini.
The MBAs at Apple noticed:
They got the sales anyway. We don’t have a “functional market”. But Apples marketing was weird. They named it Mini instead of Compact or Air. And launched it against the SE? A lot people already refused to move from the SE 1st Gen to the Mini, to due the increased size and missing TouchID.So Apple assumed people want even bigger Max or Air. The Air which is actually much thicker most other phones. Both seem to fail.
You do understand what a "percentage" means? And that there's a lot of people in the world, right? :)
I'm keeping this phone until either Apple releses a new mini or until Motorola released a GrapheneOS phone, whichever comes first.
I guess it's bugged out and would opt for a battery change if you're feeling the battery pains, I'm thinking of upgrading to the new base model this year for the usb c and 120hz display.
I was considering swapping out the phone battery but this is a better alternative for now.
It took me a second to even process why someone might say such a thing about my case-less generic 12 mini. Most of my close friends have 13 mini’s so I often feel my wife’s “regular” size iPhone is the odd one out.
So much so that I went on to check the specs but no it's 6.1". Damn, so close, what a missed opportunity.
Wish they made a new mini instead of the Air. A friend bought one of those, and frankly I just don't get it.
The screen is too big to use it one-handed, and thickness is really the only one of the three dimension of the phone that I don't care about how small it is (within reason). They probably spent billions of dollars shaving off half a millimeter and what do we get with that technology? Phone that's too big.
If this keeps up in another 5 years I'll be looking at flip phones and a separate camera.
(Until they release a new human hand sized phone at least)
Sigh. Maybe the Clicks Communicator (at 13cm tall) will get my money.
I have an iPhone 13 mini sitting in a drawer for when I need to switch.
I refuse to have a phone I have to constantly carry, hold, or move from back pocket when I sit. This damn thing is in my hands enough, I don’t need to increase the surface area for potential distractions.
In fact, if this phone died, thanks to Liquid Glass I would likely go buy an Android phone. Maybe a Graphene OS phone from Motorola.
Ideally, degoogled android, of course. (Or even not android?)
The 13 mini probably still has a few years of security fixes coming, but after that, I’m going to consider jumping ship, and would like something that’s privacy respecting.
The second hand market for these phones seems pretty buoyant
Running deepseek 6B on the Private LLM app on the iPhone 13 basically set my phone on fire
Hey, I’m the author of Private LLM. I hope you’re joking about the phone catching fire. Btw, there’s no DeepSeek 6B model, you’re likely talking about the DeepSeek Distill 7B model.
There are some models that everyone wants but companies discontinue or never make
iPhone 13s was the last one
Another example was the Cadiallac Ciel at Pebble Beach. Only ever appeared in Entourage after that.
It’s a tough call though because the Air has a lot of pros and cons! My wife never takes nature photography or macro photography, so she was OK with the 1 camera compromise.
If you truly want a shorter phone, my condolences lol. Apple seems to be ignoring this user segment.
It's a foldable. It's the Motorola Razr+ or Razr Ultra (I have the 2025 Ultra). The outer screen is 4" and you can use it for almost everything you want to do. I use the outer screen probably 80+% of the time, since I prefer small phones. Every once in a while you run into an app or website that just wasn't built to function on a 4" display, but for almost everything I've tried it works great. You can then also un-fold it into a full-size 7" phablet when you need to do high-detail stuff like Maps.
There are downsides: it's expensive; it's a foldable, so reliability is a concern; and Motorola's OS support promise is not great at only like 3-4 years. But if you're willing to make those compromises, you can get a genuinely very good, small phone, right now today.
Once you get over the shock of having a foldable suggested to you (I was initially skeptical, too), give it a look. It's really genuinely a nice phone for small-phone-likers.
Iphone air is tempting at 165g if the screen was smaller. Unihertz Titan 2 Elite may hit the sweet spot if the weight is kept low.
"To catch you up:
We’ve been hard at work over the summer building out a team and searching the globe for a manufacturer to build our dream phone. It’s been a slow process, but we’re nearing completion and expect to be able to kick off this project very soon.
Once we have a manufacturer locked in, we will be reaching out with a full update on the project and our plan to move forward."
No, I don't need it all the time.
But when you do need it, it's invaluable.
If you consider the size of professional grade camera lenses there's a reason why they produce much better images. But conversely it's pretty impressive what phone manufacturers have been able to accomplish with such a small amount of space. For 90% of use cases camera phones are sufficient.
and I have a nice portable camera (ricoh gr 3) collecting dust.
> iPhone 17e also features C1X, the latest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple
But the 17e iPhone seems to lack the Apple developed N1 chip that provides Wifi 7 + Bluetooth 6. So presumably they're using off the shelf components for Wifi and Bluetooth in the 17e.
For example, the 16e has the C1 modem but the standard Broadcom (or whoever) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chipset.
I couldn't care less about multi-gigabit 5G speeds (my 15 Pro can already practically get ~2 Gbps – who really needs that in a battery-powered phone?!); give me better battery life (my 15 Pro gets warm to the touch doing absolutely nothing in some 5G scenarios) and better security (e.g. carrier-side location tracking prevention) any day.
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The OP article keeps saying camera on 17e is 'stunning', but again, I am waiting to find out how it compares with 17 pro.
Coming from a 15 Pro Max, it was perfectly serviceable if you were happy with the limited zoom options and lack of wide angle shots.
I never realized how much I used those two features, so, regrettably had to go back to the chunky 17 Pro Max.
Maybe one day…
For the people who really don’t want to spend a lot, obviously the easiest option is to just buy an older iPhone or keep your phone for longer. My partner doesn’t care about having the latest tech. So first I use a phone for 3 years and then they use it for another 3 years. We essentially get 6 years of life out of it (Apple is good about releasing software updates for 6 years).
This is just a free market for any product works. No?
Why do software engineers ask for six digit salaries? Because they can get away with it — someone is willing to pay for it.
No you see it's their RIGHT to demand an exorbitant salary – because that's 'what they're worth' and what the market will bear
Unfortunately they're less charitable when the shoe is on the other foot.
Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.
The prices are, in my mind insane, and I'll be buying used, but those are also overpriced.
This obviously isnt relevant generally though, this is not how the general public feels at all.
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I don't see why I would want magsafe on my phone at this point.
I've been charging my 13 Pro exclusively via MagSafe for a couple of years... out of necessity. The charging port has... an issue... and I've yet to get it resolved.
Honestly the only time I miss being able to use the charging port is on flights, where I'm using someone else's charging solution (i.e. a port I can plug in to).
Everywhere else (bedside table, in the car, or even out and about) it's MagSafe.
The only downside to this approach is that you need to be more specific about which case you buy (they don't all support MagSafe) but in terms of convenience it's night and day better.
Good for bedside table too, but not a game changer.