The number of people who aren't vocal tech people who actually want a smaller phone is a very small part of the market. In HN-like circles they're a notable minority but among the general population they are a smaller percentage. Especially when you consider huge segments of the market where your phone is your only computing device: a smaller phone is a massive anti-feature in large parts of the world.
Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.
The sales numbers just don't justify it. Like people who pine for manual transmissions: they're vocal in car forums and publications but they're a tiny minority and making one is a money-loser even in the sports car segment.
I directly addressed the hard sales numbers, we don't need to talk about overrepresentation in HN/tech circles. The napkin math off public numbers tells us the iPhone mini sold 6 million units in the same year Google sold 10 million Pixels total, across all devices. So if 6 million units isn't enough to indicate demand for a niche phone, then there isn't enough demand for the Pixel lineup to exist either, only marginally more.
It's only a small number compared to Apple's total number of iPhones sold which is an astronomical stat to compare to. I don't think it's fair to compare mini phone demand against total iPhone sales.
The problem is that smaller phones are usually fundamentally flawed in ways that aren’t about the smaller screen. Whether it’s a worse CPU, worse camera or smaller battery, people are almost never making their purchasing decision based on screen size with all else being equal. I don’t think we can conclude that most people who ask for a smaller screen don’t really want one because many just don’t want a slow phone that takes worse photos and dies by midafternoon.
I think there needs to be a recognition that bigger screens aren’t only about the bigger screens. They’re also about giving phone designers more internal space to cram in components and a larger battery.
Even with the smaller battery, iOS is so aggressive with background tasks anyway, the iPhone 12 mini was my first iPhone and I got better battery life with it than any of my Androids I used over the span of a decade, even giant ones like the Nexus 6P, despite obsessively trying to install background task killer solutions and whatnot that were supposed to save on battery.
There was very little sacrifice with the mini iPhones, for the first time in modern "small" smartphones