While I enjoy smaller phones, it makes no sense to have high end smaller phones.

It doesn’t sell.

Just look at Apple’s sales and their cancellation of the mini. I’d love it to be the opposite so I didn’t have to hold on to my iphone 12 mini, but it’s just how things are. Most people don’t like smaller phones and would be a waste of resources to make high end ones.

I buy them. I’d even suggest a deviation: make them a few mm thicker and fill the extra space with battery. I’d use a small powerful multi-day battery smartphone far more than anything else.

My own personal itch: a phone with an antenna setup allowing it to function as a hotspot just as well as an actual hotspot, combined with longer battery life. I'd actually be happy with a phone half-the thickness of my jetpack but that could replace my jetpack because its antenna setup was as good.

The fact you buy it is irrelevant. I buy them too, but if the sales don’t justify the ROI no company is gonna bother with it.

We've been seeing reports for a while that the iPhone 14 Plus is selling softly. It might not be the mini's fault; perhaps Apple simply cannot get four models to sell like it wants to.

The Mini was $100 cheaper than the "normal" iPhone. The new Plus is $100 more expensive than the normal iPhone. I think that is the biggest factor.

Plus sales were cannibalised by the Pro coming out earlier.

Mini sales were just not enough to justify having to order a miniature display by current standards.

Something to consider: small phones are a niche and producing them is a way of capturing a specific set of customers.

I was an Android guy, but one of the top two reasons my newest phone is an iPhone is due to the small form factor (the other is longer support cycles). If Apple stops making small phones, my next one may well be an Android.

On consideration, capturing a niche market segment like this may be more valuable for Apple than it is for other manufacturers, as it increases the odds of getting them locked into your ecosystem.

Yep, it's something that has been tried (e.g. Sony Xperia Compact series comes to mind) but stopped since it apparently doesn't sell enough.

It's also a bit challenging, since a powerful phone has higher battery/heat/etc needs and that is easier/cheaper to do in a larger device.

There is a huge gab between high and low and devices. Some manufacturers will want to sell - and many consumers will buy- a few models that are more expensive than $150 but less than $1000.

Maybe I’m missing the hyperbole, but almost all iPhones and Google Pixels fit into that gap. The base iPhone 14 is $799, the iPhone SE is $429, and there are older model iPhones in between. Even the base iPhone 14 Pro is $999, technically in the range. A Pixel 7 is $599, a Pixel 7 Pro is $899, and a Pixel 6a is $449.

There’s perhaps a gap in the $150-$400 range, but used phones can definitely be found there, and I would bet that there are Android manufacturers that sell new phones there.

(All prices are USA and before tax, so other markets will be a bit more expensive.)

I don't know if the US market is very different, but in Spain I'd say like 80% of the phones people buy fit into that gap...

Below $150 you only have the cheapest models by brands like Xiaomi, and over $1000 you only have the flagships.

There are plenty of models in the middle, not only Pixels but also a plethora of offerings from Oppo, Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo, Honor, Poco, etc. Name any [X,X+100] interval in that range and there are phones of that price. Last week I went with my mother to buy one for her, she settled for the Oppo Reno 8 (about $500) but there was the Lite version at about $100 less, the Pro version at about $100 more, and then other lineups from the same brand (Find X5 in Lite/normal/Pro versions, etc., and many, many others we didn't even look at); and that's within a single brand.

So your parent comment doesn't make much sense to me even if it's hyperbolic. Maybe the available offer is really different in the US, here there are definitely plenty of models of all prices. A different story is that all brands tend to make the same decisions and follow trends (e.g. ditch the headphone jack, make screens larger, etc.) so everything is sameish and even if there are hundreds of models to choose from, it's possible to not find a model that fits one's needs. I myself imported my phone (Pixel 6 Pro) from Australia because no brands other than Apple or Samsung seem to sell 512 GB storage models here...

Why? What does unlimited SMSs have to do with it? (In NL unlimited SMS is pretty common anyway.)

In American billing scheme, the receiver and the sender both pay.

For SMS? And people put up with that? Here, SMS is free for the recipient, and quite often also free for the sender.

But even if SMS costs money, why not just use free apps like Whatsapp or Signal?

And if SMS does cost money for the recipient, does that mean it doesn't get used for 2FA? I imagine some people would block it in order to prevent unexpected costs.

because most of the people there use iMessage instead of Whatsapp or other apps like that, so if you dont have an iPhone you pay.

Wait, so people in the US don't use Whatsapp but iMessage, and using iMessage on Android is possible but costs money?

I had not expected either of those, but I'd imagine if iMessage costs money on Android, that would massively increase the popularity of either Whatsapp or Signal.

Since when does a $999 phone not count as high-end? As far as I'm concerned, everything over $600 does. So the iPhone SE and the Pixel 6a would count as midrange, with all the other phones you mentioned being high-end in my book. Or at least priced that way.

So you know better what "they" need than corporations like Apple, that add trilions of dollars to their market cap based on their smartphone sales?

There is a very small minority of people who prefer smaller phones, but they make a lot of noise.

No one buys small phones - hence why iPhone mini was abandoned and most Android OEM's smallest models have at least 6.43'' screen

There's no significant market for a 4.5" screen phone in 2023. It's not like manufacturers haven't tried.

I would also argue that small screens are awful for consuming content nowadays. People with bad eyesight struggle with bigger fonts in a small screen, and publishers tend to try to fit more and more content in each screen. It's systemic.

> I would also argue that small screens are awful for consuming content nowadays

I wouldn't. Most content is time wasting nonsense and ads.

> People with bad eyesight struggle with bigger fonts in a small screen,

My experience with Presbyopia is that a bigger screen is still impossible to read without glasses. Without glasses my only hope is to pinch zoom or browser zoom which works on both large and small screens.

You cannot pinch to zoom in most apps.

Also, if you think that most content is not worth consuming, thus smaller screens are “good enough”, perhaps you are not part of the target market anyway. There are still feature phones out there for the minority who holds that sentiment.