Ah yes the iPhone mini project. No doubt Apple wanted to try out the possibilities of a smaller X gen, a kind of equivalent of the ”old” 5s/SE, and it’s logical in my eyes. The concept was clear and simple; make a smaller phone of the base phone and meet the wish of a specific market group (don’t forget it was many who asked for it at the time), making their customer base happy and also hoping to broaden the total market shares. To make a smaller pro phone was never feasible, still isn’t I’m afraid, they just went the other way and made it bigger…
In the end Apple had to realise that needed revenue of the mini just didn’t reach the needed levels to motivate keeping producing it and develop new gens. We’ve all seen the numbers, nothing strange here. Apple was bleeding too much here and it’s not a charity, they need to direct efforts and investments to products that give them a reasonable base to work with. If customer sales are votes, the results was unfortunately clear here; not many was voting on it. I think apple genuinely went in to the mini venture hoping to see higher figures matching base or plus models, otherwise they would never have launched it. It ended up as an inflamed appendix in their books, had to be cut.
Why didn’t the mini concept work this time around? I think, as mentioned, it basically came down mostly to the poor battery life. Many who wanted the mini just had to realise they didn’t want this much energy restraint, on a device that costs fairly much. I think most mini buyers were/are not YtY buyers, they are more a 3-5 year cycle minded group. I might be wrong here but that’s my theory. And in this case, the battery capacity becomes a bigger and more important parameter. I had myself both the 12 and 13 mini, came from the X, and loved the thought of the concept, but couldn’t get it to work with my usage in the long run. The restraints was mainly battery life and screen size, of course the very obvious ones. If it had an amazing battery life on par with base phone, I don’t know if I would have stayed anyway. So, I have to ask if it’s really down to screen size for major part of the customer base? Apple seem to be heading in a specific direction with more lighter phones with larger screens, even if it’s been in small steps. A possible iPhone air/ultra coming up according to rumours, bigger then base model but lighter…? That’s where we are today.
As a former mini fan I’m now trying to see how the 16P will work. I just very much like the pro features but will the weight and battery life vs extra features really be worth it? Let’s see.
