The other thing with the Air is that you can’t really use it one-handed, which is what most people who like small phones are after, besides pockability.
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.
However the market agrees with you so I must be missing something. I used to think it was driven by media consumption on phones, and that I try to avoid, but this isn’t the first time I have heard people tout phone productivity gains from a slightly larger screen.
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.
The new phones have some neat tricks (satellite connectivity comes to mind), but the on-device AI seems pretty mediocre and I value pocketability and one-handed usability more than the new gizmos.
When I asked myself if I would rather keep the new Air or go back to my 13 mini with an extra thousand dollars in my pocket, it was no contest.
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.
Not looking forward to having to settle for those comically large phones with Face ID for my next one.
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.
It makes one look completely like a tool to pull out their iPhone and stare at it for ten seconds while checking out with a cashier. Deeply embarrassing and very annoying.
(I also wish for smaller screens and no-adhesive battery swaps though, neither of which seems likely to happen.)
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.
(Until they release a new human hand sized phone at least)
Sigh. Maybe the Clicks Communicator (at 13cm tall) will get my money.
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.
I'm keeping this phone until either Apple releses a new mini or until Motorola released a GrapheneOS phone, whichever comes first.
Huh, I had a 12 mini and had the same thing happen at an independent repair shop I used to frequent. I've been pretty salty with the shop, but I guess it's an easier fuckup than I've been giving them credit for.
I was considering swapping out the phone battery but this is a better alternative for 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.
Running deepseek 6B on the Private LLM app on the iPhone 13 basically set my phone on fire
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.
My worst is buying a 13mini that is already updated to IOS26, then I think I would be screwed.
Thanks.
(I'm also looking to "refresh" my iPhone 13 mini)
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.
Easy way to bring my phone, sunglasses, wallet, keys, etc with me. Pockets can be pretty annoying.
Maybe 2027 will be the year of the mini? :)
No, I don't need it all the time.
But when you do need it, it's invaluable.
For example, the 16e has the C1 modem but the standard Broadcom (or whoever) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chipset.
> 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 brand is "Smart".
"luxury" is more of a marketing and product positioning term, it doesn't really have anything to do with engineering or quality practicalities
It’s an attainable luxury brand. There aren’t many products that a high school kid has in common with billionaires, superstar athletes and movie stars—the iPhone is such a product.
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.
This obviously isnt relevant generally though, this is not how the general public feels at all.
Is massive storage on a mobile device really still a thing that's important?
I'm saying this as someone with 512GB, but I just checked and I'm using 85GB at the moment, including the OS.
Photos and videos are the likely reason why the phones have so much storage, but these days both apple and google offer decent cloud backup solutions which negates the need for massive on-device storage. I'd rather the storage be smaller, and the savings going toward more battery or whatever.
Am I the only one?
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).
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.
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.
Performance nosedives, then it starts bootlooping randomly, and eventually you can't even delete stuff because there's no space to delete things.
You resort to randomly trying to remove apps, but sometimes that fails because of the stability issues.
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The only reason I replaced my 12 Pro was storage, and I made up my mind never to skimp on storage again.
That phone lasted me 5 years and could easily have gone several more, so I see it as an extremely cheap investment across the lifetime of the phone.
I need storage because Honkai: Star Rail is 32gb and I like being able to have more than one game on my phone.
Occasionally there’s a feature that requires a minimum amount of RAM like Apple Intelligence but that’s the exception.