this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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People have been saying this for the last 5 years and will continue saying this for the next 5 years. They make less smaller phones cuz people don't buy them
That will be a side effect of them locking abitrary features behind the bigger and thus more expensive models, if there was feature parity smaller phones would probably still be the norm.
Yeah, I only got the Pixel 6 Pro because of the zoom lense...i would not have chosen it otherwise. It's too big...
Me for the pixel 8 pro. I'd rather the regular pixel 8 but if I'm going to keep this thing for 7 years (which I will; typing from a pixel 2) then I want it to be as feature rich as possible. Not looking forward to how big it's going to be when it finally gets delivered
Good lucky keeping it for so long... I'm having lots of little issues with my 6 Pro...
There is simply less space inside smaller phones to add same features and battery as a larger model.
And then they can't justify small model having same, high price as pro versions, so they cut features to go along with reduced price.
There are some features that just can't be equal between a bigger phone and a smaller one (or would require gimping the bigger phone) like a bigger screen (obviously), bigger battery and more size for larger camera sensors
Not true. Many of the smaller phones on the market have additional features that the bigger ones don't. Or at least they used to when they existed.
If you can figure out a way to cram all of the shit in a 15 Pro Max into a form factor the size of an iPhone 4 not only will Apple suck your dick in the form of a well-earned half million dollar salary but you'll likely get a Nobel Prize for breakthroughs in quantum computing and also making atoms smaller.
Is this bait?
No, I agree with his point. Features do take space. Maybe we can make space for a headphone jack (🙄), but consumers demand more cameras, with a larger sensor, faster and more power hungry processors, bigger batteries. With any space limitation (even the Pro Max comes with a space limitation because it can't become an iPad...) there are feature tradeoffs, and obviously a smaller phone will fit fewer cameras, less cooling, a smaller battery, etc.
Of course they do. The S23 for example is smaller than the iPhone 15, was the same price on release (came out Feb 2023) and has features beating the iPhone 15 Pro Max, a much bigger and more recent device. Most features/hardware on the bigger phones exist in smaller phones, most of the extra space on larger phones is usually just taken up by a larger battery anyway. They can go watch some teardowns, look into all the software locked features like with the recent Pixel 8 phones, instead of blindly jumping to the defence of these mega-corporations who only want to upsell.
But yes, obviously some features are a lot harder to fit in a smaller space, but I thought that was the obvious asterisk to my comment. Perhaps they should spend some R&D on figuring that out though, rather than rehashing the same devices year after year which is just leading to e-waste.
(I'd love the 3.5mm port back too, but they all want to sell their wireless 'buds' now, so not going to happen for that reason alone :c)
So in other words it wasn't bait and you fucking knew that but you wanted to be willfully obtuse.
Are you that dense?
It's a very realistic example of what you would have to do to cram all of the shit from a large phone into a small phone. The features that are cut aren't fucking "arbitrary" unless you want to classify every feature difference as "abitrary" thereby making your definition of arbitrary meaningless.
So yes, it was bait.
Sure, just make it fatter.
That solution has been rejected every time it has been tried.
Rejected by who though? And has it really? All phones used to be fatter
As a woman: I'd love to use bigger phones - as soon as they give me pockets I can fit them into.
It's one of the reasons I find foldables so interesting. The Google Pixel Fold has the perfect form factor. If only it wasn't so expensive...
As a woman - I don't have a problem with pockets, I usually get them enlarged. The problem is with our small hands, which would make using a large phone one-handed impossible. The older smartphone I am still sometimes using as a modem/mp3 player is 7x14 cm, and this is absolutely my maximum. I mostly use a dumbphone, it is smaller than my palm and fits even in a shirt pocket.
Fewer people buy them. But maximizing for only the bestest thing is not how capitalism is supposed to work. Even the goddamn sugar-water companies know they can crank out eleven different kinds of citrus-flavored diabetes, because they want to cover all their bases.
Some industries just hate niches. Your TV channel's doing well because it shows stuff nobody else does? Cool, bet it'd make all the money if it showed the same stuff as everyone else. Your website got big thanks to weird shit that's not welcome elsewhere? Wow, let's scrape that off and it might be the next Facebook.
Smartphone choice has suffered immensely from this confusion. 'People tend to buy thinner phones' gets warped into 'no phone will ever sell unless it can slice cheese!' In these very comments - people are scoffing their hardest at the idea of putting all the guts of a modern millimeter-thick 5G postcard into anything more compact. Like it's gotta be that big because the antenna's six inches long.
Guys: the iPhone 14 only weighs one ounce more than the original iPhone. It does not need to be 50% larger.
Huh? That's not how that works.
Talking about mass is definitely more how-it-works than scoffing about features per square inch.
I feel like hopefully with a potential paradigm shift, maybe one SIM card and number shared between several devices, one large phone or tablet for work or movies and a smaller feature phone for on demand urgent communications, we'll hopefully see the market for OEMs open up a bit wider and allow for further competition/collaboration across the whole portable electronics sector
Absolutely untrue. It’s a heat dissipation issue. iPhone minis had so many issues with heat they can’t make em anymore.
Apple wants you to think that bigger phones are better only because they can’t make them smaller.