I’d just add that the US telephone system was highly regulated during pretty much all of the era of (rented!) corded handsets and per-minute toll calls and long distance, so the Bell System had a lot of money to spend on R&D (for example, Bell Labs), hardware design, and shareholder dividends. The gigantic menu of additional monthly cost add-ons (such as unlisted numbers and Call Waiting) also generated a lot of cash. Nowadays, most of these revenue streams are gone. So landline and cellular providers don’t get involved with handsets or end-to-end call quality or universal service.
Personally, I prefer earbuds+mic for the few voice calls I make and receive. I don’t miss all of the à la carte components that went with landline plans either.
I believe that consumer cell phones could always use earbuds (Apple used to supply wired ones) and have speaker phone capability.
Holding a phone to the ear was never comfortable. There used to be an accessory that was attached to the bridge between the earpiece and mouthpiece that hooked over your shoulder to free your hands. Old-style wall phones with the microphone in the body and a separate speaker held up to your ear were probably more comfortable.
For calls that last more than a few minutes, I use a speakerphone (internal to the phone or an external device such as Homepod or Mac)
I am happy with the size of my trusty iPhone 7. It does what I need while I’m away from home, and fits in a side pocket of my jeans: texting, email, and my MTA transit app are what I use most, plus some social media.
My iPhone 6s is just about the right size. Physically small enough and screen big enough. It fits well enough into my front pants pockets and my hands. I would not have minded if it were a few millimetres shorter, but what it really needed was to be thicker, for more battery capacity, less rounded and slippery.
I’ve never seen the point of a huge phone that is too big to be easily portable yet still isn’t big enough to be a substitute for a tablet. Even the largest iPhone model is too small to replace a tablet while at the same same they’re absolutely unwieldy to use for core things like making a phone call.
Regardless of the size of the phone I am going to need to take out my reading glasses if I want see the screen properly anyway.
Unless I am actively using my phone it stays in my pocket if I am carrying it. I have never and will never put it down anywhere, except when I am at home. At home it obviously just gets put somewhere and mostly forgotten about. The only times I make sure to keep it near me at home is if I am on call.
I’d happily give up some screen area to have Touch ID. I don’t want to have to look at my phone to unlock it and I don’t trust Face ID to prevent someone from unlocking my phone using my face.
Why would I be loyal to a company? Such a bizarre concept.
I run apps on my phone all the time. If I didn’t there would be no reason to have a smartphone.
The irony is that phones have reached the point where I am probably going to need to carry my backpack to carry my phone, which means a tablet or laptop could just come with me too.
I was stating that from Apple’s perspective, as a suggestion of why they aren’t making smaller phones.
If the “small phone” market, in addition to being small, doesn’t care about brand and is just as happy with feature phone, why would Apple waste resources making a phone for that market?
Why does it need to be a tablet size to be more useful? On my iPhone Max I can comfortably edit phones, read books, write emails, etc. I don’t necessarily do that if I have a Mac nearby, but I can and it’s not too painful.
I would say 99% of my phone calls are done via speakerphone, CarPlay, or AirPods. I rarely hold up the phone to my ear and talk. In my use cases, the size of the phone is irrelevant for phone calls.
That’s a good point! (Though I generally make the type bigger instead of using glasses, so the bigger phone means I can still have enough content on the screen at one time to be useful.)
Your face is a lot more secure than your finger! You can be asleep or dead and your finger can unlock your phone, but Face ID requires the attention of your eyes.
This is another area where for me the large phones fail. They’re both the wrong aspect ratio and too small to really be a substitute for an eReader or tablet. They might do for some brief reading if I have nothing else, but then so does the 6s.
This is the fundamental problem with trying to make a device be all things, it ends up being bad at all of them.
It’s actually probably particularly true where I live that most people only have a phone. At the same time those people are also going to be almost 100% Android users. If they had enough money for even the cheapest Apple phone then they’d spend the extra to get themselves a computer as well.
Just wanted to say that I’m very loyal to Apple and that I use tons of apps on my iPhone and YET I still want the smallest phone I can get.
My work is in digital products and it was actually helpful to have a smaller device for staying disciplined with what fits in a UI. I regularly read very long books on my phone, and actually really enjoyed the idea of 1,000+ pages fitting into my shirt pocket. I often used the smaller device with just one hand and it felt so much more ergonomically efficient. My Mini fit into more of my clothes pockets, slid more easily into my brief case or backpack and was just generally more pleasant to carry.
I upgraded from an iPhone 12 mini to an iPhone 16 last year and I really, really miss the smaller size. I’d gladly pay the price of a Pro for a Mini form factor.
As a journalist I spend a lot of time on the phone. I quickly discovered that pushing my shoulder against the phone to hold it could a serious pain in the neck, and used a similar accessory that balanced the phone. Once I discovered headsets I started using them all the time for work or any extended calls from the landline on my desk. When Zoom came along, I turned to that calling from my desk, with the microphone on a webcam on top of my display or an top of a shelf. Speakerphones on the surface of the desk or in a noisy environment can make for very poor audio.
My answer to original question: lower price for same phone. For example, the iPhone 12 mini was identical to the iPhone 12 in all respects other than smaller display and slightly reduced battery. But it was $100 cheaper. And weighed less.
And, coming from an iPhone 8, it wasn’t actually a smaller display! The display was larger! So that’s a win-win.
I tried expanding the type in cell phones so I could read them with reading glasses, but I found that making the text large enough to read cut off part of the text including the last few digits of a phone number, so I couldn’t tell who was calling. Smaller type takes longer to me to decipher, so it can be a no-win situation.
Different strokes… I far prefer reading on the iPhone to anything else because I can hold it and switch pages with one hand, and the line lengths are newspaper-column short, which aids reading.
My iPhone Mini 12 fits in most of my pockets and is small enough for me to take almost anywhere. If I wanted to take a large screen I would buy an iPad / TV. So the smaller form is perfect. I am not looking forward to upgrading to something larger. In the same way I want a small nippy car that I can easily park, not a big SUV that does not fit anywhere (I live in the UK). So just a personal preference.
When I read on a larger iPad, I often use a two-page view, which is more like a printed book and gives me shorter line lengths, or I enlarge the type to be huge so the line lengths are shorter. You can also (in most reading apps) adjust the leading (space between lines) to help make longer line lengths easier to read (your eye won’t jump to the wrong line when scanning back and forth).
In ancient days I read quite a few books on my Palm Pilot, which had a tiny screen. It was actually quite nice because in those days Macs were so slow and had poor multitasking so that tasks like printing or generating PDFs or even saving a large Photoshop file look several minutes, during which I could read a few screens on my Palm. Years later I discovered reading on iPad in short bursts like that was more difficult because each screen had so many lines it took me 30 seconds to find where I’d left off reading and by that time, my time to read had elapsed. On the Palm I’d just read to the end of the screen and I always knew exactly where I left off!
I think this is where I get confused by the smaller phone desire: to me the size difference is neglible (about one inch). The bigger screen is a huge benefit, and I don’t find the compact size that helpful. It’s more like the size different between a small nippy car and a regular sedan. An SUV is a iPad.
(To be fair, I never carry a phone in my pocket. I have always used a belt holster, so the size doesn’t matter much.)
I will continue using my iPhone 13 Mini as long as it works or until Apple introduces a new small phone. I need to carry my phone in a pocket with whatever clothing I’m wearing - pants packet, vest inner pocket, jacket …, etc. Yes, at 75 my eyes aren’t as sharp, but I get around on my bike and would not think of riding with a big phone sticking out of my back pocket because it won’t fit in front. If I take along a pack or briefcase, then I have room for my cellular iPad Mini. A bigger phone would force a lot of small changes on me for no gain in my use cases.
An inch is huge though when you are talking things like zippered pockets or bicycle saddle bags. Width matters for the phone holder in the car. Before I bought my SE, I tested a friends 6-something in my phone holder to see if it would work (it didn’t)
I use a purse maybe 3x/year. I may carry a larger bag another half a dozen times if I’m working on a project.
I drive a small zippy car - maybe there’s an analogy there with small iPhone users ;)
Your Palm Pilot story is funny and I could see that happening to me!
Years later I discovered reading on iPad in short bursts like that was more difficult because each screen had so many lines it took me 30 seconds to find where I’d left off reading and by that time, my time to read had elapsed. On the Palm I’d just read to the end of the screen and I always knew exactly where I left off!