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Small Phones are Dead and We Killed Them
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Not... Really... Sure it makes some difference, but the much more constraining factor is the money. Cameras arent that big, but they're one of the priciest pieces of hardware in the device.
The problem is more that they keep trying to sell small phones at cheaper price points. So they end up with much worse screens, socs, and cameras so they perform like shit. People don't want a small phone because they don't care about their phone. People want small phones because the standard size is fucking huge. They need to make a high-ish tier small phone instead of low tier small phone that performs like the 50 Walmart shit.
There's isn't enough physical space for three sensors on a smaller phone especially if it's the size of the iPhone mini. They can fit them on a 6.1-6.2 inch device, that's why the S24 and iPhone 15 Pro have them. However the 16 Pro is supposedly getting larger because it's getting a larger sensor for 5x optical zoom. If you look at a periscope lens, it needs a substantial amount of extra width as well. A teardown of any recent flagship reveals that camera modules occupy more space than they did if you look at tearsowns from three or four years back. This makes sense because the sensor itself is increasing in size and the size needs to go up both length and width wise to maintain the aspect ratio of the sensor. Heck in some cases like the Xiaomi 14 Ultra and Oppo Find X7 Ultra, the camera modules occupy more space than the rest of the motherboard.
The iPhone mini was cheaper but it had pretty much the same specs as the regular iPhone except for wireless charging speed iirc. Sales were much lower than the regular model despite that (around or less than 5% of total iPhone 12 and 13 sales). If Apple couldn't make a smaller phone sell particularly well, I doubt anyone else could.
I wouldn't go as far as to claim that "more cameras" is the complaints being made here. Sure, telephotos make sense as things that take up more space. But most people are using them for like 1 in 50 shots or something. I have an extremely hard time believing that someone would genuinely notice the difference unless they're an extreme case or they've been told the other ones are better. Within reasonable effective focal lengths, these are pretty negligible in the sizes we're talking about.
I hard disagree with this. Apple is literally the worst company to try to make this shit work. Apple's core selling point is the status symbol of it all. People trying to show off having the flashiest phone are not going to buy a product being touted as a half baked smaller and cheaper version of something else. Their entire marketing was about it being mini. Apple customers are not the core audience for something like this, and Apple marketed it as exactly what people disliked about small phones.
I find it more surprising that this was below expectations than I do that only 5% of people bought a smaller phone. I doubt much more than 1 in 20 people really is after a smaller phone. I'm sure they exist, but based on the people I know and the number of people I've heard interested in smaller phones, I'd estimate it more like 1 in 20 to 1 in 40. It's not for most people by any means. But 1 in 20 is still a decent number of people.
First of all sorry for the delayed reply but i only got the notification a few hours back for some reason.
It is one of the most common complaints cited against buying a smaller phone especially in tech enthusiast circles. Some people say they ended up getting the bigger phone because it had better cameras or the presence of the telephoto was enough.
We'll have to disagree. Apple have been one of the best at maintaining equality between a larger phone and a smaller phone in recent times since they manufacture phones in enough volume to actually care about miniaturizing components. The minis had feature parity with the regular iPhones of that year. The Pros are larger but they've maintained feature parity with the Pro Max in most instances except for the 12 Pro/12 Pro Max and 15 Pro/15 Pro Max. Even with those two instances the only difference was in the cameras. I'll acknowledge there's no fair comparison with Google or Samsung but that's only because they don't make a smaller Pro/Ultra phone. Even if they did, I'm fairly sure the cameras would be different.
In the volumes Apple sells, that probably equates to a couple of million units. 5% would not be a very attractive proposition for other manufacturers since they'd need to increase profit margins to actually make money from making a smaller phone as they deal with much smaller volumes.