Hacker News

People make fun of me but I'll never skip a chance to complain about how large these phones are. I hate it so much. I have a standard iPhone, not a max, and it causes real pain in my wrist if I use it too much. Was honestly thinking about downgrading to the last SE model even though it's several years out of date.

I have large hands but the 13 Mini is roughly the maximum I can use one-handed without doing the weird finger balancing act to shift the phone around. I get why most people like large phones - media consumption - but not everyone is into that.

I don't even mind large phones if they're done right. My favorite phone of all time is the BB Passport which you have to use two-handed, but it was actually designed around that and amazing to use.

I showed my Costco membership QR code to the cashier the other day, and they suddenly exclaimed, “oh my! What a cute little phone!!”

It took me a second to even process why someone might say such a thing about my case-less generic 12 mini. Most of my close friends have 13 mini’s so I often feel my wife’s “regular” size iPhone is the odd one out.

I stuck with my 13 mini for a long time, and had recently put a new iFixit battery in it too. I did finally make the jump to a Pixel 10 but sign me up with everyone else who misses reasonably-sized phones.

Same. Many developers are "desktop"-native for their work and reading-focused for their media, so they don't value the gauche pocket TV-era of phones.

They'll pry mine from my cold dead hands!

(Until they release a new human hand sized phone at least)

SE 3rd gen here as my daily driver. Small form factor and Touch ID. The perfect iPhone IMO.

Not looking forward to having to settle for those comically large phones with Face ID for my next one.

I moved off the mini to get satelite messaging which I use while hiking. But now that T-Mobile/starlink support satelite on the 13 mini, maybe I’ll go back.

It always surprises me that the mini was ~1% of sales and yet the pro mini comments get so many upvotes

Finally moved on from my 12 mini, but I still have it sitting in my office and when I pick it up I think "wow this feels like a phone from the future."

Wish they made a new mini instead of the Air. A friend bought one of those, and frankly I just don't get it.

The screen is too big to use it one-handed, and thickness is really the only one of the three dimension of the phone that I don't care about how small it is (within reason). They probably spent billions of dollars shaving off half a millimeter and what do we get with that technology? Phone that's too big.

If this keeps up in another 5 years I'll be looking at flip phones and a separate camera.

Same holding on the 13 mini, love the form factor.

Same. This would be an obvious upgrade for me, if the overall size was anywhere close to the Mini. Oddly enough, the announcement doesn't even list the screen size, but I'm sure it's 6" +

Have you replaced the battery? My 13 mini shows 90% battery health but I can’t use it for the full day (and I don’t game or anything, just light use). I wonder if the battery is really ok and it’s the software that is to blame.

Just upgraded from a 12 mini to a 13 mini with more storage. I intend for it to last another 5 years.

Same here, just replaced the battery.

If we could get a 13 mini sized phone with some better battery that would be great

My next upgrade if my 12 mini gives up will be an 13 mini. And from there I will probably just stick to refurbed 13 minis until a good alternative comes out.

Wow, I thought I was the only one.. or very few. Bring back small phones please

Maybe the iPhone Fold won’t be two 8” slabs of glass glued together, I think that’s the only hope for those holding out for another Mini.

my wife upgraded from a 13 mini to an Air and she loves it. She thought she hated the larger size of new phones, but after holding the Air in her hand she realized the weight and thickness was the issue for her!

It’s a tough call though because the Air has a lot of pros and cons! My wife never takes nature photography or macro photography, so she was OK with the 1 camera compromise.

If you truly want a shorter phone, my condolences lol. Apple seems to be ignoring this user segment.

Exactly. I guess it’s time to replace my trusty iphone se 3rd gen. It’s been a great phone though, best one i ever had.

If the 17e had that chip, wouldn't it have Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6? It has neither of those.

[flagged]

Yes, the baseline 17 has almost all of the features of previous Pro models.

I have the same issue with my Pixel. It's nice to be able to use a real zoom when I need it, but that means I can't get the one that's otherwise what I really need.

Probably both.

Tbh, feels like the market is pushing for that and Apple is responding.

Taking inflation into account, a $599 iPhone in 2026 would have been $380 in 2007. Given that the actual launch price in 2007 was $499, that's a pretty hefty drop.

It's a luxury brand. You don't sell cheap and risk losing the people that are happy to pay $1400 for a new iPhone.

At least they increased the base storage to 256GB

Last time I complained about the pricing of the iPhone, people pointed out that inflation included the prices wasn't to far of from the original iPhone.

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.

The prices are, in my mind insane, and I'll be buying used, but those are also overpriced.

The iPhone SE was only $400.

I'd argue that is worth the money if you're going to be using a phone every single day of their life. People will drop a few hundred on fancy shoes and wear them once a month, but they treat phones as cheap commodities.

Can mess up the price ladder!

Because they know people will pay it.

Global crazy tariffs, supply chain issues, and RAM and storage shortages due to AI hype betting. Also greed.

US prices don't include sales tax so 20% of that is VAT

Cloud storage do not help you sharing that old photo album with friends spending the night in a cabin far from the closest cell phone coverage.

Also, cloud service typically move your older stuff to colder/slower storage which are painfully slow to retrieve whenever you decides to do it. I realized this when browsing some old pictures before closing a google account I had not been using for years except emptying the gmail inbox every few months.

I personally prefer having a local copy of my files and syncthing them to my NAS at home (which is itself backuped in a storage in the cloud).

Both third party developers and Apple have increasingly become terrible at respecting the user’s disk space. Recently my iPhone started crashing as it ran out of space. I found that Apple Maps was using twenty gigs. Fortunately the fix is simple as the issue is widespread and it has become the first search result. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256084682?sortBy=rank

If you have 512GB I don’t think you really experience the worst of it. A lot of bugs are just Apple creating humongous temporary files before they are deleted as they age. Unless you check every day you don’t really know how much is really being used. You don’t really experience these crashes.

I've had at least 256GB on my phones for the last couple of generations after having had to deal with storage issues beforehand, and it's been much nicer.

But I picked up a 16e for my son a few months ago, with 128GB, and yes, we're running into issues with storage space when it comes time to do an OS update. Between local music and photos storage, base storage, and the image for the new update, two or three times now we've had to delete stuff temporarily in order to get the update going. So I'm happy the new base is 256GB, at least that will probably last us a couple more generations before ~~640KB~~ 256GB is enough for everyone.

I don't think it's inherently impossible, but Apple at least seems to do a really poor job at local cache management on iOS for Photos and Messages attachments. I am constantly amazed to find my non-tech-savvy relatives deleting stuff from their phones to free up local storage.

Cloud backups are great for keeping your photos long-term, but if you want those photos on your phone so you can show them to people or share them, you need to download them anyway.

I need storage because Honkai: Star Rail is 32gb and I like being able to have more than one game on my phone.

Here in Canada, both the education pricing and regular pricing are at "From $899". So no edu discount.

I would recommend the base 17 for that.

16e has OLED, the new thing with the 17e screen is the ceramic coating on the glass.

Going back to the 2007, Apple doesn’t reveal the amount of RAM for the iPhone in their marketing.

Occasionally there’s a feature that requires a minimum amount of RAM like Apple Intelligence but that’s the exception.

Assuming it has Apple INtelligence, 8 gigs seems plausible?

So the LCD TouchID single camera Lightning iPhone is the same as the OLED ProMotion FaceID multi-camera + LIDAR UWB USB-C + MagSafe iPhone?

Thought that was the entire point of the e line.

Considering that no major phone or carrier has embraced that model why would you expect it to suddenly appear here?

Thanks for saving me a click

I'm trying to understand what you mean by this. Are you saying they're "bad" in terms of resolution, or artistic value, or something else? They seem good enough (far from "bad") by any definition I can think of.