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iPhone 17e

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291–300 of 517 posts

Re: iPhone 17e

#291

Still holding onto my 13 mini. Dreaming of another small form factor release one of these announcements.. :'}

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 Was honestly thinking about downgrading to the last SE model even though it's several years out of date.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 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.

Re: iPhone 17e

#292
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've still got my 12 mini. Just got a new battery replacement too. Back in my day, phones were cooler if they were smaller.

curious, did changing the battery make the phone faster under the latest OS? If find that after the upgrade to the latest iOS my 13 mini has been struggling with framerate and just overall feeling laggy.

Liquid Glass has totally screwed up my 13 mini. Needing frequent soft reboots.

Re: iPhone 17e

#293
post #140

My mother still has an old iPhone because it fits her hand. They don't seem to get this anymore.

They releasee the iPhone 13 mini for all of the customers who wanted smaller phones It sold very poorly. Despite all of the YouTubers and social media posts calling for smaller iPhones, the real demand for these is very small. The older demographics generally prefer larger phones because they have larger screens, which are better for aging eyes.

"Didn't sell very well" = "Sold better than most Android phones that year"

Re: iPhone 17e

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get Air either. My guess is that Air is just a stepping stone for a foldable iphone.

I think that's it exactly. Hopefully we're not looking forward to "phone that's too big, and unfolds to be even more too big." I can see a large unfolded phone being desirable if it had a stylus and I could use it like a small notebook, but just as a "watch Netflix bigger for $2000" device, no. Especially if it has the worst camera of all of the phone models like the Air does.

You'll want a replacement stylus 10-pak.

Re: iPhone 17e

#295
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was cannibalized by iphone 12 mini and also se and older iphones still being sold by carriers. All that going on and it still sold millions of units. If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers. In fact if it was apple 10 or 15 years ago they'd also probably be happy with those numbers. You also have to understand the psychological profile of us "utilitarian" iphone users. W…

"If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers" That's what sucks about these huge dominant companies. They suppress interesting products because they don't reach the huge sales they need to make a difference to a trillion dollar company. And smaller companies can't compete against these behemoths.

So I've never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why there aren't interesting niche phones that don't sell a ton (anymore: android used to be full of them, that was half the point), but are enough for a small company to make consistent (but small) profits. People who want niche phones are a tiny fraction of the market....but the smartphone market is enormous. A tiny fraction seems like it should be able to sustain a few small companies.

My best guess is that the kind of person who would found a company capable of making such a phone won't do it because they know it doesn't have potential to make them fabulously wealthy (just regular old wealthy) because it's inherently limited in scale. And the big companies don't do it because, while such a line could be profitable, in the absence of competition, it's more profitable to force their consumers to buy the "main" line and not make another product line.

Re: iPhone 17e

#296
post #102

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. No, I don't need it all the time. But when you do need it, it's invaluable.

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…

No, it sucks (16 Pro). I've had lots of issues reading QR codes.

Re: iPhone 17e

#297
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the task can’t be done in a few taps I feel I’m better off opening a laptop anyways. However the market agrees with you so I must be missing something. I used to think it was driven by media consumption on phones, and that I try to avoid, but this isn’t the first time I have heard people tout phone productivity gains from a slightly larger screen.

At least for me, the effect is real, and is driven not by media consumption but ergonomics of use. But at the same time, I'd say you're not missing that much. I always preferred large screens because of productivity gains[2], but even as screens kept getting larger, the set of things that "I feel I’m better off opening a laptop" for remained the same for me.

That is, until I switched to a foldable phone (Galaxy Z Fold 7) half a year ago, and - I kid you not - I haven't used my personal laptop since that day.

FWIW, I still have a proper desktop PC; In the past decade+, I've been using a PC at home, and a "sidearm" on the go / away from home: always a 2-in-1 Windows laptop with top specs[0]. Being always with me, this laptop often replaced use of PC at home too, because of convenience & portability.

So by amount of productive use, for past 10+ years it was sidearm >> PC >> smartphone. But getting a foldable flipped it around. Having twice the screen size of a regular (large) phone is a big productivity win[1], but it's folding that makes the actual qualitative difference. Folded, the device becomes a regular smartphone - i.e. something that fits in my pocket, meaning it's always on me, in my hands, or less than 1 second away. Contrast that with tablets, whose form factor makes them basically just shitty laptops (same logistic as ultraportable, but toy OS of a phone).

I didn't expect this. I didn't even feel this change - I only noticed two months later that my laptop has been sitting unused on my desk, covered by a pile of stuff. Doing "laptop tasks" on a mobile device is still annoying (no keyboard, toy OS), but combining tablet-sized screen with portability of a phone makes them less annoying than logistics overhead of a laptop - and at least in my case, this eliminated the entire[3] space between "smartphone" and "PC".

--

[0] - Think Microsoft Surface, except I could get better specs at half the price if I bought an off-lease but pristine Dell or Lenovo.

[1] - It's not immediately obvious to people, but as things are today, a foldable phone isn't any better at media consumption than regular one, because almost all cinema, TV, videogames, etc. are all produced for widescreen - meanwhile, the inner screen of my Fold is approximately square, so e.g. for most TV, half or more of it is black at all times. However, all that extra space allows to effectively use multiple (3+) apps on screen, not to mention makes spreadsheets actually usable.

[2] - Bigger screen = less scrolling and tapping in menus, but also with text size scaled to minimum, my previous phone (S22) had a big enough screen that running two apps in split-screen became useful on a regular basis.

[3] - Well, almost. There are some tasks I really like physical keyboard and larger screen for - but for those, I just plug the phone into the screen via USB-C, and volia, it turns into a regular desktop. A shitty one, but good enough for occasional use.

Re: iPhone 17e

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 t…

> Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.

And the worst thing is that app developers do not bother with testing their apps on small phones. So even if someone would produce small phone, many apps would be broken on that UI. So there's no way back.

PS 4 inch is not a small phone. iPhone 4S had 3.5" display and it wasn't small, it was normal. Small is something like 2" screen I suppose. All modern phones including these "iPhone Minis" are egregiously huge.

Re: iPhone 17e

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They releasee the iPhone 13 mini for all of the customers who wanted smaller phones It sold very poorly. Despite all of the YouTubers and social media posts calling for smaller iPhones, the real demand for these is very small. The older demographics generally prefer larger phones because they have larger screens, which are better for aging eyes.

I can't believe Apple expected the 13 mini to be a hot seller; most people holding out for a small phone probably would have already bought the 12 mini just a year prior. The 13 mini was an incremental update -- basically just alleged camera improvements that I could not discern myself in a few minutes of testing.

As are most phone updates. If there was a market, it would have sold.

Re: iPhone 17e

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers" That's what sucks about these huge dominant companies. They suppress interesting products because they don't reach the huge sales they need to make a difference to a trillion dollar company. And smaller companies can't compete against these behemoths.

So I've never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why there aren't interesting niche phones that don't sell a ton (anymore: android used to be full of them, that was half the point), but are enough for a small company to make consistent (but small) profits. People who want niche phones are a tiny fraction of the market....but the smartphone market is enormous . A tiny fraction seems like it should be able to sustain a…

My guess is they are only able to make the phones cheap if it’s sold at huge scale. If you make some niche small phone, the price goes way up and doesn’t look attractive.

Then you have to deal with the fact that the people with obscure requirements have a million other requirements. The person asking for a small phone then complains it doesn’t have a headphone jack, and AV1 decoding, and 16gb memory, and an unlocked bootloader, and whatever else.

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