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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Yeah, the small car thing is a perfect parallel. The market doesn’t necessarily fit preferences perfectly: instead, companies optimise for whatever MOST folks will buy that nets them the most money.

    They make more money selling a large phone with a bigger sticker price and a bigger profit margin, so they make big phones. And the most phone-hungry people, power users, who buy a new phone every year or so, tend to buy big phones. So they cater to that group.

    Think of it this way: when I bought my iPhone SE 2016 7 years ago, I cast maybe $100 of profit “vote” in the marketplace.

    Every time someone buys a $1700 folding phone, they cast something between $500 and $1000 of profit “vote” in the marketplace. And they do that every year, not once every 7.

    Of course, I’d be willing to spend a lot more on a really decent small phone. But nobody in the market has really experimented with that model yet. And it is admittedly harder to fit components into a smaller phone body (though not as hard as Apple would have you believe – after all, the 14 and 15 literally takes up more space with a useless empty plastic SIM card spacer than the headphone jack used to take.







  • From the article:

    “The problem is Apple has exclusive rights to [the iPhone Mini’s] display — so, even with the line being discontinued, [Samsung Display] isn’t going to give us access,” he told supporters last month.

    Sounds like we’re splitting hairs: no other OEM is ordering the Mini-sized display, and this line certainly implies some kind of exclusivity. I’ve been following the thread on the Small Android Phone discord as well, and what I’ve seen there aligns with that understanding.

    As far as I know, no small manufacturer ever gets displays built specifically for them. Even Pebble, which was a lot more popular than Small Android Phone, used preexisting displays. It just takes a lot of time, knowledge, and money to create a custom display.