thoughts on the slow death of small phones

Performance and results are far more important than hou you look. A business won't succeed on appearance.

Some employers have ethics clauses and dress codes. What you call shallow, others call policy. Think on that.

Having worn many business suits over many years, I am thoroughly relieved to have finally reached that stage in life when I never need wear another suit ever again. I also hate ties with a passion.

Suits themselves are pretty cool, though. Two big inside breast pockets that could probably hold an iPad mini. Three outer pocket, although two are often sewn shut. Dress shirts (meaning shirts to be worn when wearing a suit) have a large pocket over the heart that can easily accommodate an iPhone max of any persuasion.

Suit pants also have enormous pockets, a pair up front (often with a small inside key pocket in the right front) and a pair behind.

The vest in 3 piece suits, on the other hand, usually have one or two quite small pockets for a pocket watch. Remember the old manual wind up pocket watch we old folks used to use? Smile. I kept mine in my vest pocket with a chain attached to a button hole.

So, counting it all up, when I used to wear a suit, I actually had enough pockets to have a single large phone in each of ten pockets. That would be ten phones, unless I doubled up somewhere.

Personally, I prefer small phones. I have never owned an iPad because I've never seen any reason to. My phone has always done it all. I do have a Mac, though. smile

I'm a hippie in disguise. Please don't tell anyone. So I get what you are saying about clothing. I must note in passing, though, that youu might not be well receiv ed if you showed up in nothing but a bathing suit at a funeral, wedding, or at court for an important case. But, shrug, smile, as we hippies like to say, to each their own.

I am lucky I suppose, that my chosen profession has never required me to be any more dressed up than a polo, a pair of khaki's, and a pair of business casual sneakers. Thankfully the khaki's I wear have deep pockets, and while I will never own a "Pro Max device if I can help it, at least I know I can carry one relatively well in a pants pocket. 👍🏼

Ironically I minored in the (American) Criminal Justice System in college, while majoring in Computer Science. And while I respect Bingo's profession, I do (not) have a mind for legal disputes and litigation.

On the plus side, I have only ever had to wear a suit 4 times in the entirety of my life; those were weddings. one of which was my own. 😅

Back in 2000. . . maybe it was 2001, anyways, I had to sit on a jury and for that Jury Duty, i wore a 2 tone polo that was gray and black and a pair of black slacks.

However for the Jury Summons, I showed up in a tee shirt and super baggy jeans. 😇

At the end of the day, small phones don’t sell very well because there are too many trade-offs for the majority of customers.
I absolutely loved my 12 Mini, it had an incredible form factor that I couldn’t help feel nostalgic about, because it reminded me so much of the early days of smartphones.
But the battery degraded quite quickly, the phone would heat up and become unresponsive quite often, and after updating to a 15 Pro Max it’s clear that they wouldn’t even be able to begin trying to fit this type of camera system in a tiny form factor. The camera would take up half of the phone, and the battery and performance would suffer. Still, it was quite the phone.
But money is money, and the fact of the matter is that companies are only going to continue producing what will bring in the money. It’s unfair, but that’s business.
At the end of the day, even though they’ve done some absolutely incredible things especially in the world of accessible tech, Apple is not a charity.

Let’s just break down the stats.
In 2014, after years and years of requests, Apple finally gave the iPhone a screen bigger than four inches with the iPhone 6 and 6+. How were those phones greeted? Well…
They became the best selling smart phones of all time. Even to this day, the best selling smart phones of all time are the iPhone 6 and 6+.
222 Million Units! That is a lot of units.

Six years later, they tried to introduce the 12 and 13 mini, more than likely to gauge if there was any interest left in a smaller iPhone line.
The market answered with a resounding no.
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopular-march-quarter/
The regular iPhone 13 was able to gather 38% of iPhone sales in a quarter.
The Mini? 3%. That’s it.
So they had two choices, keep producing that small phone for the 3%, or follow the money.
Of course they followed the money, that’s literally why they exist. Apple exists first and foremost to make money, just like every other consumer electronics company.

Even on the tablet side people want the biggest screens they can get, which is probably why Apple has been rumored to be working on a 12.9 inch iPad Air, and Samsung continues pushing tablets even further towards laptop sized 14+ Inch screens.
And it’s the biggest selling point of their new Vision Pro headset, it’s your own personal screen that can be literally as big as you want it. Not particularly something that interesting to someone like me, but it’s clear that people don’t want to compromise on screensize.

Call me common then because I really couldn't care about dressing smartly.

Yes; I'm the type of person to meet the king in pants, trousers, t-shirt, maybe a hoody, coat, socks and shoes, if he doesn't like it,, tough.

I've never seen and don't see the value in fancy smancy clothes.

Personally, I think the size of an iPhone 6s+ is just right, not too big and not too small. But at present, its size is likely to be much larger than this, as many opinions have said.