More iPhone Minis sold in 2 years than SteamDecks in its whole life, and only one of those devices is considered a failure. It’s not that nobody wants them it’s that no company wants to make a phone that can’t run all the services they are trying to get you to subscribe to. Why else wouldn’t Apple chuck the innards from one of their watches into a small phone case and call it the iPhone Nano? It would literally cost them nothing more than they are already spending on R&D.
It’s not that nobody wants them it’s that no company wants to make a phone that can’t run all the services they are trying to get you to subscribe to
That doesn’t really make that much sense. A toaster can run most apps people use nowadays. Apple would sell you a brick if it had their App Store on it. There is an argument that they want to upsell you to bigger phones so that you pay more for the device itself, but if it was really worth it for them to offer smaller versions, I’m sure they would. Their biggest profits by far are from the App Store. And if they really were ignoring that market in the hopes of upselling people, then other companies would offer mini phones and people that want them would switch. But they’re basically nonexistent.
Do you really think that Fairphone, a company with sales in the thousands, should cater to five percent of the market? And comparing this to the SteamDeck is also not really fair, because Valve owns Steam and they subsidize SteamDecks via purchases from Steam. Fairphone doesn’t earn anything from purchases made on the Play Store. And in addition the SteamDeck is considered a success because it captured like 50% of the market when it released. The market is in general really small for these devices, but the SteamDeck was a notable success because it managed to become the go-to device. Were the market for handheld consoles as big as the phone market, the SteamDeck very much would not be considered a success.
Toasters don’t run on batteries. There is a physical limit to how small they can make something and still have it not overheat while running AI bullshit both from the voltage and the frequency.
I didn’t mention fairphone I mentioned Apple. Who currently sell the Vision Pro which has sold about as well as the Virtualboy. Even by your own argument if the Mini has more than %50 of the small phone market it should have been considered a success. They make an iPad mini that is well known to be the worst seller of all the iPads too and doesn’t have all the features of the other iPads… but it can run their AI.
I didn’t realize you weren’t the original commenter. But still, AI is a fairly new focus and small phones have been on the way out for a long while. I don’t know the reason why they discontinued the iPhone minis and didn’t discontinue the iPad mini, but ultimately, the conversation was about Fairphone and my point was that the actual demand for small form factor phones isn’t as large as some people make it out to be, and as such, it would not make sense for Fairphone to make one.
And as a side another note, the Apple Vision Pro is a strategic investment into future technologies. The product isn’t meant to be successful in and of itself, it’s meant to be a first step, so Apple could get a foothold into the market. And when hopefully VR becomes big in the future, they can capitalize on it. Small form factor phones aren’t a new technology, so this isn’t really comparable.
They technically already did this. There’s an apple watch that you can put a sim card in that works like a phone. Maybe that’s what you were referring to?
I’m not referring to 5G enabled smartwatches, just using the watch hardware to make a smaller, lesser powered phone. AFAIK you still need an iPhone to activate an Apple Watch even if it’s the cellular version.
More iPhone Minis sold in 2 years than SteamDecks in its whole life, and only one of those devices is considered a failure. It’s not that nobody wants them it’s that no company wants to make a phone that can’t run all the services they are trying to get you to subscribe to. Why else wouldn’t Apple chuck the innards from one of their watches into a small phone case and call it the iPhone Nano? It would literally cost them nothing more than they are already spending on R&D.
That doesn’t really make that much sense. A toaster can run most apps people use nowadays. Apple would sell you a brick if it had their App Store on it. There is an argument that they want to upsell you to bigger phones so that you pay more for the device itself, but if it was really worth it for them to offer smaller versions, I’m sure they would. Their biggest profits by far are from the App Store. And if they really were ignoring that market in the hopes of upselling people, then other companies would offer mini phones and people that want them would switch. But they’re basically nonexistent.
Case and point, mini version accounted for barely 5% of sales in 2021: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-iphone-13-mini-is-over-ending-this-small-screen-fan-favorite/
Do you really think that Fairphone, a company with sales in the thousands, should cater to five percent of the market? And comparing this to the SteamDeck is also not really fair, because Valve owns Steam and they subsidize SteamDecks via purchases from Steam. Fairphone doesn’t earn anything from purchases made on the Play Store. And in addition the SteamDeck is considered a success because it captured like 50% of the market when it released. The market is in general really small for these devices, but the SteamDeck was a notable success because it managed to become the go-to device. Were the market for handheld consoles as big as the phone market, the SteamDeck very much would not be considered a success.
Toasters don’t run on batteries. There is a physical limit to how small they can make something and still have it not overheat while running AI bullshit both from the voltage and the frequency.
I didn’t mention fairphone I mentioned Apple. Who currently sell the Vision Pro which has sold about as well as the Virtualboy. Even by your own argument if the Mini has more than %50 of the small phone market it should have been considered a success. They make an iPad mini that is well known to be the worst seller of all the iPads too and doesn’t have all the features of the other iPads… but it can run their AI.
I didn’t realize you weren’t the original commenter. But still, AI is a fairly new focus and small phones have been on the way out for a long while. I don’t know the reason why they discontinued the iPhone minis and didn’t discontinue the iPad mini, but ultimately, the conversation was about Fairphone and my point was that the actual demand for small form factor phones isn’t as large as some people make it out to be, and as such, it would not make sense for Fairphone to make one.
And as a side another note, the Apple Vision Pro is a strategic investment into future technologies. The product isn’t meant to be successful in and of itself, it’s meant to be a first step, so Apple could get a foothold into the market. And when hopefully VR becomes big in the future, they can capitalize on it. Small form factor phones aren’t a new technology, so this isn’t really comparable.
They technically already did this. There’s an apple watch that you can put a sim card in that works like a phone. Maybe that’s what you were referring to?
I’m not referring to 5G enabled smartwatches, just using the watch hardware to make a smaller, lesser powered phone. AFAIK you still need an iPhone to activate an Apple Watch even if it’s the cellular version.
Oof, that sucks