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I want to +1 every comment in this thread. Phones are too big now. I don't understand Apple's weird obsessions, first trying to make all the phone so thin you cut your hand holding it, and then making it too big to fit comfortably in your pocket unless you are walking around in camo pants.

You know what I would like? When I tap on the search and type the first few letters of an app on my phone, and the app appears, and I click on that -- I would like the app to open. Only happens about half the time now. UI is getting worse with every release.

I dived into a niche world of small phones recently while looking for replacement to malfunctioning Pixel 4a (which is apparently now considered compact phone). There's a few small manufacturers in China making some, with 4 inch or 5 inch screen, like Aiphor or Unihertz. And by "small" I mean "they use kickstarter to fund their R&D" small.

Other than that... Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.

The phones get larger and the UI gets less information dense every release. More padding, more offsets, more dead space.

I have a pet theory about increasing phone sizes

> Screen size is area (x^2) and battery size is volume (x^3). As battery life is a critical feature, a bigger screen supports (a nonlinear) better battery life.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44588733

We made fun of phablets, only for them to become the default.

I have found the iPhone Air much easier to hold than the iPhone 13 Pro it replaced because of how light it is, even though the iPhone Air has a bigger screen.

I don’t think anyone should make fun of you for it but I’m in the opposite boat. I’m so glad that they make the pro max variants because most smartphones are so small that it hurts my fingers to bend them in the unnaturally inward way it requires to hold and interact with them.

I switched from a pixel 3 to a pixel 9 pro over a year ago, and I still miss the smaller form factor. the pixel 3 really was the perfect size for me and I am sad I can no longer get a smallish phone with a high end processor.

I’m still running an SE2020. I was expecting the latest update (with liquid) to be the death of it. But performance has actually improved significantly! Very unexpected.

It’s been a great phone!

I just bought a refurbished SE. It works great with newest iOS, Liquid Glass, etc. Do it!

Funnily, the large display is the most important thing for me. I find my efficiency directly proportional to display size (which holds for laptops too).

If a 30 second task can be done in just 20 on a device with a larger display, that's absolutely worth it for me.

Also larger device tends to imply longer battery life too.

I did downgrade back to my SE (from iPhone 16). Big selling point (aside from its size and rounded corners) is the physical button with fingerprint. I missed that even more than I disliked carrying a big phone around.

I'm typing this on an iPhone SE (2020).

It runs the latest iOS, although it's likely missing some of the new bits.

I prefer the size, although the screen that spans the entire front surface would be the superior device; I like the iPhone 13 Mini.

Former small phone person here: I went from a small iphone to a large one just to substitute not having to carry around my ipad. I really wish iphone fold is here sooner.

Same. The Pixel 4a was the perfect phone for me: Light, screen exactly the right size to navigate with a single thumb whilst holding the phone in one hand, enough battery life, small enough to fit in my jean pockets comfortably.

But people buy big phones in preference to small ones, so that’s what Google & Apple manufacture. Nobody (from the POV of Apple/Google decision makers) buys these smaller phones.

Completely agree. And to make matters worse, I can't even switch to android without losing the ability to reliably send quality video to iPhone users.

Apple suffered for decades from Microsoft's anticompetitive OS monopoly, and turned around and did the same thing to the android ecosystem.

I have no idea why this sub is full of Apple fanboys. I was an Apple fan 10 years ago, but these days they no longer deserve your support.

You should look into grips that attach via Magsafe.

>it causes real pain in my wrist if I use it too much

LMAO

> I wish they would commit to doing a mini every x years

The problem is all the tooling is pipelined for annual releases. You can't just find a team to do the mini; it has to always be there, and parts of it have to always be working on the next one. Your vendors will get grumpy because it doesn't fit their product cycles.

Sorry but if that’s the case you definitely don’t have large hands. If you did you’d be able to use the Pro Max one handed and reach everything except the top left corner by swiveling your thumb (Reachability enables you to reach top left corner)

I "adapted" to losing the fingerprint reader.

Wow, it has a lot of unexpected downsides.

I've a lot of unexpected behavior from the faceid thing. Lots of unexpected swipe-ups that drop me out of an app and put me on the home screen. Can't unlock in the dark, too close to your face, off to the side, in your pocket. Lots of "I saw your face an unlocked" that I didn't know had happened.

fingerprint sensor unlocked when you wanted it to, with haptics. switching apps was a button operation, not happening when you didn't expect it.

Same. Home button is sooo much better than swiping gestures

I get that getting rid of touchid haptic eliminates dead space but still blows my mind they couldn't or refused to figure out screen-based touch id as an option at least. Samsung has it...

What I don’t like about FaceID is the premature unlocking. If you pass your phone to someone else it can unlock, especially for taking photos. And to allow strangers to make photos is intentional that’s why the camera app doesn’t need an unlock.

Aside from that all the gestures, positions and holding points are annoying. The usage of TouchID is simpler.

Apple could at least fix the security issue by unlocking only after swiping up. FaceID? Isn’t fast enough? Well. Than TouchID is better.

Me too, but I’m going to have to upgrade. The lack of storage on my phone (64GB) is killing me - every time there is an os update I have to delete almost everything to make room

I'm also a touchID / iphone 8 size fan, but the nice cameras/zoom in flagship models are hard to give up. At least Face ID has improved significantly from the early days of iphone 10 -- it's faster and more reliable than it was on the older models if you tried it back then.

The thing I've come to like about FaceID on my 13 mini is that I can require it for certain apps to open that don't require it - e.g. messaging as opposed to banking which generally require some kind of auth by default - which is much better security in case someone snatches it out of my hand while it's unlocked. It's pretty seamless because I'm generally looking at the device anyway, and it's much less faff than it would be with TouchID.

My iPhone 12 mini is hobbling along. A few rare apps are not usable because UI is clipped, the battery is throttling and making it sluggish, and it overheats all the time as a GPS.

Many mobile websites are unusable.

But I love the form factor and I'm going to keep it going as long as it is reasonably secure.

curious, did changing the battery make the phone faster under the latest OS?

If find that after the upgrade to the latest iOS my 13 mini has been struggling with framerate and just overall feeling laggy.

I just eBay'd a 12 mini after my camera started getting blurry. There isn't a viable flagship replacement.

You need a passcode to update. There's no way to fat-finger it.

Besides, you can always delete the update (if already downloaded) and turn automatic updates off.

Being the crazy person that spams the feedback form isn’t supporting the argument for a new mini.

If people wanted it, you wouldn’t be faking the feedback.

> Every single person I know who uses a phone of more than 4 years old, uses an iPhone 13 mini

That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.

Half the time when I'm home I still use my iPod touch because it's even smaller than the mini.

*typing this from my iPhone 11 purchased in... early 2021 I think?

The release schedule was crap, as well as the 12 mini being an objectively bad phone.

Spring 2020, they released the iPhone SE 2020, 4 years after the previous iPhone SE. This satiated a lot of the demand for people holding out for a smaller phone. Then came the surprise with 12 mini in September of 2020, except the battery life and performance sucked, garnering bad reviews.

Then, finally in September 2021, they released the 13 mini, an objectively good, smaller phone. But over the previous 18 months, a lot of the buyers for the 13 mini had already bought the 2020 SE or were burned by the 12 mini.

It was 3-5%, if I remember the numbers correctly. There are rumors that the Air didn’t sell better.

Tenth of millions of devices were sold (somewhere between 20 to 35 Million?). You could build multiple plants for it, with government funding in Europe.

The MBAs at Apple noticed:

    * Big size is a status symbol in Asia. And TV replacement. Their a lot of people in Asia.
    * Due to vendor lock-in people need to purchase anyway. So just sell them the standard phone.  

So Apple assumed people want even bigger Max or Air. The Air which is actually much thicker most other phones. Both seem to fail.

1% of iPhone sales is more people than live in most countries.

"1%" of the massive Apple base is still more phones than sales of iPhone 1, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and many others.

You do understand what a "percentage" means? And that there's a lot of people in the world, right? :)

Crazy people fixate. It’s why you get people talking about how 4o was the best AI model ever and crying for it to be brought back. (It had no internal thinking process and would believe you are the messiah without question)

I still have my 12 Mini, changed the battery in a Apple store a year ago (and they broke the screen in the process so got a new screen too) for I think 99 EUR, now the battery still last ~2 days, easily worth it. Maximum capacity says "87%" right now although I don't know what exactly that's based on.

I'm keeping this phone until either Apple releses a new mini or until Motorola released a GrapheneOS phone, whichever comes first.

Just replaced my 13 mini battery this past week which was at 80%. Noticeable improvement. I'm not a very heavy user but did find that I was getting to the 20/10% range at the end of most days. Now its 30/40 and I'm happy! Many more years in the old steed yet.

My 13 mini on iOS 26 shows 83% maximum capacity but makes it through the day with light-ish use (Spotify (although generally offline playlists because of lossless audio) NYT games, email, messaging, browsing, Instapaper). I do have lots of accessibility settings enabled to stop things like transparency and animations though. See my comment here for more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45544554

I got the base 13 at launch day whose battery health now states 86%. While I have noticed degraded battery performance, the stated health has been stuck at 86% for quite a while now.

I guess it's bugged out and would opt for a battery change if you're feeling the battery pains, I'm thinking of upgrading to the new base model this year for the usb c and 120hz display.

I did! I ended up buying a kit off ifixit IIRC. It was super cheap and works great! If I did it again, I would splurge for the Apple verified battery as a third party one doesn't work with the new Battery app features.

I’m down to 75% on my 13mini. I recently picked up a magsafe battery pack that gets me through the day when I’m traveling and can’t charge.

I was considering swapping out the phone battery but this is a better alternative for now.

13 mini user here. I have 86% battery health, and it is "okay". I need to charge it about once a day. Also holding out due to the smaller size.

I highly recommend hunting down a 13 mini now (with a lot of battery left) so you can switch when you have to. I did last summer and was glad I didn´t have to organize one on short notice. And if you avoid ios26 - make sure the ios18 on the device is updated because now you no longer get updated within ios18

Where are you finding refurb’ed 13 Minis? Apple only goes back to 14s now on store.apple.com in the U. S.

I don't get Air either. My guess is that Air is just a stepping stone for a foldable iphone.

6.1" vs. 6.3" on the regular 17

It’s basically iPhone 14-sized.

I'm on my 8th year of using my 2016 SE. Have replaced the battery and screen a few times over the years. A fair few of the apps I used stopped supporting iOS 15 so I've got old versions of those apps installed, but WhatsApp, Signal and my banking app still actively support iOS 15 so it works well enough for me, for now.

I have an iPhone 13 mini sitting in a drawer for when I need to switch.

Get an SE 3rd gen!

It will be even shorter than the mini, but also wider than the Pro Max. The aspect ratio is different from a normal iPhone. The weight should be in the Pro range, and of course it’ll be relatively thick. Not a mini replacement in my book.

That's true, some foldables like that exist. The problem for me is that I don't want to pay for the folding part, not interested in that.

One can only hope... My 13 mini's performance, especially for the Camera and Safari seem to have hit new lows with iOS 26. I'm sticking with the mini for its size, but also its weight. So far the Air is the only alternative I think I could switch to, but apparently that's also on Apple's chopping block due to poor sales.

Been thinking of doing the same. My 12 is showing its cycles, but it’s either I have a phone that lives in my front pocket, or I can go phone-less.

I refuse to have a phone I have to constantly carry, hold, or move from back pocket when I sit. This damn thing is in my hands enough, I don’t need to increase the surface area for potential distractions.

Still rocking mine

> Running deepseek 6B on the Private LLM app on the iPhone 13 basically set my phone on fire

Hey, I’m the author of Private LLM. I hope you’re joking about the phone catching fire. Btw, there’s no DeepSeek 6B model, you’re likely talking about the DeepSeek Distill 7B model.

for me it's the comfort/ability to put the thing in my pocket.

I tried the Air and went back to the mini because of the camera compromises. One big issue for me was losing Cinematic video, which I use all the time.

Now imagine an iPhone Mini Air. I'd be all over that, camera compromises or not.

The weight is an issue for me at 189g. I've been looking for something compact, light weight, secure with a decent OS for 2 years without luck.

Iphone air is tempting at 165g if the screen was smaller. Unihertz Titan 2 Elite may hit the sweet spot if the weight is kept low.

How likely, that Motorola Razr will run GrapheneOS?

Guess they’re southern hemisphere?

It's hard to get that in a single camera because of the size.

If you consider the size of professional grade camera lenses there's a reason why they produce much better images. But conversely it's pretty impressive what phone manufacturers have been able to accomplish with such a small amount of space. For 90% of use cases camera phones are sufficient.

The latest Xiaomi has this, they call it continuous optical zoom. It's the first time I've seen it on a phone camera.

If they added a lens lock option (like the AE lock) it would fix this problem nicely.

No, it sucks (16 Pro). I've had lots of issues reading QR codes.

do you run two eSIMs when traveling and if so how is stability / battery life?

From the press release:

> iPhone 17e also features C1X, the latest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple

But the 17e iPhone seems to lack the Apple developed N1 chip that provides Wifi 7 + Bluetooth 6. So presumably they're using off the shelf components for Wifi and Bluetooth in the 17e.

The modem chip (the C series) and the N series are two different chipsets.

For example, the 16e has the C1 modem but the standard Broadcom (or whoever) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chipset.

Except 120 Hz display I believe, which is big reason for me

I had an Air with the same camera system as the 17e, I believe.

Coming from a 15 Pro Max, it was perfectly serviceable if you were happy with the limited zoom options and lack of wide angle shots.

I never realized how much I used those two features, so, regrettably had to go back to the chunky 17 Pro Max.

Maybe one day…

At the moment, the camera is almost the main point of getting the Pro. And battery for the Pro Max.

A technology doodad getting 25% cheaper in real terms over 15-20 years is about as far opposite as you can get from a hefty price drop.

$499 with carrier subsidy too

It’s not a luxury brand, it is a quality brand. There is a difference.

>Why do software engineers ask for six digit salaries? Because they can get away with it

No you see it's their RIGHT to demand an exorbitant salary – because that's 'what they're worth' and what the market will bear

Unfortunately they're less charitable when the shoe is on the other foot.

Agreed, but its more the fact that you get a lot more peace of mind tossing around, and otherwise treating without too much care, a cheaper device. Risk of drops, theft, forgetting etc. are pretty high for something that I use every day. But then I'm a broke PhD student, so perhaps my views will change one day.

> Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.

This obviously isnt relevant generally though, this is not how the general public feels at all.

No, they couldn’t, because then the company would stop existing due to lack of sales.

Accounting for inflation, that's $542. And considering how much everything, including phones, costs nowadays, $600 seems like a steal to me too. I was expecting a much higher price for what I'm seeing on that page.

> I don't see why I would want magsafe on my phone at this point.

I've been charging my 13 Pro exclusively via MagSafe for a couple of years... out of necessity. The charging port has... an issue... and I've yet to get it resolved.

Honestly the only time I miss being able to use the charging port is on flights, where I'm using someone else's charging solution (i.e. a port I can plug in to).

Everywhere else (bedside table, in the car, or even out and about) it's MagSafe.

The only downside to this approach is that you need to be more specific about which case you buy (they don't all support MagSafe) but in terms of convenience it's night and day better.

I have one of those magsafe multi charger things that let you charge your iphone, watch and whatever you can lie on the base of the charger. I absolutely love it, since it doubles up as a bedside clock for me and it's nicer to snap things on the charger than to fiddle with the cables. I only use USB-C charging for my phone only if I need to charge it fast before leaving somewhere.

The biggest thing for me is not having a fragile connector involved when charging and using it at the same time. A MagSafe puck is super easy to charge your phone while browsing.

MagSafe is a must for older cars.

Good for bedside table too, but not a game changer.

I don't mind the bump on most Pixels because it goes all the way across the phone. So it's still stable on surfaces.

I do not think that is really the case. What actually happens is that smaller phones are often worse, i.e less battery life, worse processor, worse camera. Because there is less space in the device (and manufacturers think that people will buy a slightly thicker phone) and the screen doesn't use that much energy, the battery has to be smaller impacting performance. And users do not accept that. So unless someone discovers that you can make a full feature, big battery phone by increasing depth and weight of the small device, it wont happen / be popular. But once one company makes one, other will probably follow. Which again reduces revenue per producer...

I’m sure they showed up, but if you compare to the entire market size it’s a small size like maybe 10%. They should have calibrated their expectations, but they didn’t. Also the battery life on them aren’t as good as the regular.

Yep, let's drop the pretence that companies churning tech widgets do it for consumers. That's merely an inconvenience in the process of enriching stakeholders.

There are also Hisense phones, I had one for a while but having to live with stock firmware severely limited its longevity.

YotaPhone. I really wanted to try that but it was way too expensive for a gimmick

Russians had that like a decade ago. It’s dead.

Just disable Liquid Glass (transparency, motion). Better UX and better UI

Well, that's it. I cannot stand HN anymore. Literally my experience is being downvted and no one commenting on why what I said was negative. And just warning people to wait to by the phone is now frowned on? Nothing but a bunch of capitalist suck up fanbois here I guess.

Same thing happened on a quantum science post. If you cannot express why you disagree with me either you are a schill or your thoughts are not solid enough.

I can't believe Apple expected the 13 mini to be a hot seller; most people holding out for a small phone probably would have already bought the 12 mini just a year prior. The 13 mini was an incremental update -- basically just alleged camera improvements that I could not discern myself in a few minutes of testing.

It was cannibalized by iphone 12 mini and also se and older iphones still being sold by carriers. All that going on and it still sold millions of units. If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers. In fact if it was apple 10 or 15 years ago they'd also probably be happy with those numbers.

You also have to understand the psychological profile of us "utilitarian" iphone users. We only get one when our hands are forced either hardware failure or forced software obsolescence. The iphone mini came to market and was discontinued all in the time I was still using my SE.

The 13 mini sold poorly because all of those same influencers just would not stop complaining that it had less battery life than a Max. I mean, of course the battery life wasn’t as good, because it was a smaller battery! But the people who want a mini aren’t influencers who need a phone that can go 18 hours without a break.

It was absolutely this manufactured “range anxiety” that killed it.

"Didn't sell very well" = "Sold better than most Android phones that year"

Exactly, every older person I've seen has the Plus model (RIP) with screen text turned up to 150%. A small screen for someone with poor eyesight sounds like torture.

It definitely is less important / visible to some people. I have a 175Hz screen at home and a 120Hz iPhone, but I use a 60Hz iPad and displays at work and if I am not focusing on it I simply do not notice the difference.

Can confirm - I go for the cheapest and smallest iPhones possible (e.g. 13 mini) and could not care less about >60Hz on my phone, although I care about it quite a lot for laptop or desktop displays. 17e will likely be my next upgrade (if I can bear to part with my 13 mini).

i absolutely do notice. i just don't care, or need it, personally

The conventional wisdom is Apple believes anyone for whom ultra wide-band is an important feature wouldn’t be interested in a bargain iPhone.

I don't blame them, consumers won't exactly follow the nuance of tracing garbage collectors and why iOS can get away with less ram vs Android

Every phone since the iPhone 15 Pro has the minimum 8GB to accommodate Apple Intelligence.

VAT in Austria is 20%, so only ~16.7% of it is VAT.

Even if you subtract the VAT, iphones seem to be ~10% cheaper in the USA than in, say, the UK.

I wonder how much different factors contribute to this. I'm sure the stronger consumer protection laws are part of it.

You need to be well versed in the attribution for camera disposition. I am too old for that so getting understanding who is the better person is challenging :)

For just testing I'd rather just get a used 14, 15, or 16.

Or one of the older models? 15/16 have it too.

My 256GB phone is already almost full because of all this app bloat. 6 different parking apps, 17 messaging apps because nobody uses the same thing, 13 different financial apps, EV charging apps, ...

I have one messaging app eating 40GB

On the other hand, a terabyte is cheap, they should just put a terabyte in the phone, it's what we apparently need in 2026

The iCloud backup built into the iPhone for me seems quite seamless. As I mentioned in another comment, I have several thousand photos and videos that don’t fit on my phone because it’s only a 64 GB device. It’s been this way for many years. But I can still scroll back and see all the photos. And when I click one I view it instantly. I’ve never noticed any lag or any problems associated with the cloud backup. It feels to me exactly the same as if they were local.

I know good network connectivity is not a privilege that everyone has, but on google photos I can scroll back all the way to 2007 when my digital photo collection started (I uploaded everything I had manually), and it's as if all those photos are local on my device.

iCloud seems to work differently. Nearly all of the photos and videos I have are stored in iCloud because my phone is only a 64 GB device. But I can scroll back many years and pull up any photo video and play or view just fine right away. I can swipe right through long sequences of photos from five years ago on a device that doesn’t have them downloaded. I’m not sure exactly how that works.

Bought from a retailer that has "no returns on phones with broken seals", and honestly with all accounts and everything else setup on the device now, the time taken to go exchange it and setup everything again, I'm gonna lose money by swapping it compared to possibly buying the next phone one year earlier instead.

to most end users, yes. they only care about having the "brand"

Resolution != quality

A picture with a boring gaussian blur to fake a bokeh effect is low quality regardless if the end result is in high resolution.

Someone told me that this company "Thinks different".

Oneplus? they consistently give you the option to unlock the bootloader and install your custom ROM

It’s a nightmare regardless. There’s no trustworthy hardware either, or at least very little. Maybe I’ll build a SIP client from an FPGA.