It's a foldable. It's the Motorola Razr+ or Razr Ultra (I have the 2025 Ultra). The outer screen is 4" and you can use it for almost everything you want to do. I use the outer screen probably 80+% of the time, since I prefer small phones. Every once in a while you run into an app or website that just wasn't built to function on a 4" display, but for almost everything I've tried it works great. You can then also un-fold it into a full-size 7" phablet when you need to do high-detail stuff like Maps.
There are downsides: it's expensive; it's a foldable, so reliability is a concern; and Motorola's OS support promise is not great at only like 3-4 years. But if you're willing to make those compromises, you can get a genuinely very good, small phone, right now today.
Once you get over the shock of having a foldable suggested to you (I was initially skeptical, too), give it a look. It's really genuinely a nice phone for small-phone-likers.
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.
"To catch you up:
We’ve been hard at work over the summer building out a team and searching the globe for a manufacturer to build our dream phone. It’s been a slow process, but we’re nearing completion and expect to be able to kick off this project very soon.
Once we have a manufacturer locked in, we will be reaching out with a full update on the project and our plan to move forward."
No, I don't need it all the time.
But when you do need it, it's invaluable.
> 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.
I couldn't care less about multi-gigabit 5G speeds (my 15 Pro can already practically get ~2 Gbps – who really needs that in a battery-powered phone?!); give me better battery life (my 15 Pro gets warm to the touch doing absolutely nothing in some 5G scenarios) and better security (e.g. carrier-side location tracking prevention) any day.
The OP article keeps saying camera on 17e is 'stunning', but again, I am waiting to find out how it compares with 17 pro.
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…
- no app store
- no video recording at all
- no copy/paste function
- no selfie camera
- no GPS
And then in terms of the specs on what it did have that got better, processor, memory, storage, screen quality, battery life, camera, it's all orders of magnitude better. There really is no comparison.
I mean look at the price of a digital camera, music player etc, hell even external battery pack in 2007, with the same specs as the iPhone today, and you'll easily find support for using the words 'hefty price drop'.
Touch/faceID is cheap, wireless charging is cheap, the free tier of iCloud is cheap, water resistance is cheap.
Yes the specs have increased a ton. When asking for a model under $500, the idea would be giving up some of those specs. And that's clearly possible; even low end phones these days are a zillion times better than an original iPhone.
And no I will not look at non-iPhone things when I'm evaluating whether iPhones underwent a hefty price drop. The cheapest iPhone these days is slightly cheaper than a first or second generation iPhone, and the best one is a lot more expensive.
That mean's today's cheapest iPhone is 40% cheaper than this base model you're referring to, as well as being tons better. If you don't think 40% is a hefty price drop then idk what to tell you.
That's for the 16gb by the way, the next year's 64gb would've constituted a 53% price drop today.
And that's still for a wildly different phone. You're getting way, way more value today. Longevity alone is easily twice as long, meaning the cost-per-use or cost-per-year can be halved, leading to >75% price drops.
The idea Apple should be going even beyond that to make low-end new phones for a company that positions itself at the top of the market, is just silly. Apple has a long line of phones available for purchase on the secondary market, refurbished market, old-model market, is known to replace batteries 7 years after discontinuing the sale, and can be replaced with non-official batteries as well.
Like you could literally buy an iPhone 12 on the secondary market for $50 and do a $39 battery replacement, or buy it fully refurbished for $150. You can buy a million android phones at any spec level. The idea that Apple should compete at this budget with its own old phones and android phones is a bad idea and the idea Apple entry level phones aren't much cheaper, have more longevity and have wildly better specs than before, is empirically not true.
Is it technically possible for Apple to create a $400 phone that's still much better than the original iPhone? Obviously I agree with you that it is. Does it make sense for Apple to do it? Obviously not.
In this thread you'll have people saying 60 hertz is ridiculous in 2026 on an iPhone 17, and people saying they're completely fine with iPhone 12 specs in 2026 and wanting to get more discounts for fewer specs (ignoring the fact you can indeed simply buy that iPhone 12). The remaining market is so slim it's not worth getting into, but you can't please everyone with a lineup of 5 phones.
For 15 years of tech product, it's not.
For a tech product to stay the same price in dollars for so long is not great. And remember that the 17 itself is $799. This is the discount model and it's still way over the $500 bar.
> The idea Apple should be going even beyond that to make low-end new phones for a company that positions itself at the top of the market, is just silly.
It's silly because you took the thing being complained about, the positioning, and made it part of the premise. Anything sounds silly if you do that.
> you can't please everyone with a lineup of 5 phones
5 phones is plenty to cover a big range if they wanted to. Pro and Pro Max isn't needed, and the Air is totally unnecessary with how close it is to a normal model.
Though for market coverage I wouldn't say low end first, I would say new SE model. I bet a 4.3 inch screen would sell a lot better than the Air's thinness.
You also think a 50% discount is not much which we just have a disagreement about, no point arguing that further. But to expect an even cheaper lineup with lower specs just doesn't make sense and we've covered the obvious reasons already. For one, Apple has tons of competition at that price/spec level. And secondly, Apple already made hundreds of millions of such phones (they're called years-old models) which anyone can buy with new batteries at the price level you're talking about (<$400). To bring out additional new models that compete with its old models and other brands brings little additional revenue and even smaller margins, the opposite of what drives Apple's market cap. With respect it looks to me like there's a reason you're not CEO of Apple and that Apple isn't taking your advice to bring out another iPhone mini flop or low-budget competitor.
I was suggesting combining them, not scrapping them.
> you advocate for a 4.3 inch screen when the iPhone mini was Apple's biggest flop phone
I'm referring to the SE, not the Mini.
Even when they released 13 Mini and SE (3rd) at the same time, I think both of them sold more than the Air, and combined they were way ahead.
At this point it's been 4 years since either an SE or a Mini, so a new SE would sell lots.
> With respect it looks to me like there's a reason you're not CEO of Apple and that Apple isn't taking your advice
The $500 thing was never supposed to be advice. It was a pricing complaint.
For the people who really don’t want to spend a lot, obviously the easiest option is to just buy an older iPhone or keep your phone for longer. My partner doesn’t care about having the latest tech. So first I use a phone for 3 years and then they use it for another 3 years. We essentially get 6 years of life out of it (Apple is good about releasing software updates for 6 years).
"luxury" is more of a marketing and product positioning term, it doesn't really have anything to do with engineering or quality practicalities
This is just a free market for any product works. No?
Why do software engineers ask for six digit salaries? Because they can get away with it — someone is willing to pay for 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.
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.
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.
It's AOSP, not Googled so things like Uber don't work. There's also no app store, but you can sideload F-Droid or Aurora using Mudita software. Case is plastic not rubber though.
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.
It sold very poorly. Despite all of the YouTubers and social media posts calling for smaller iPhones, the real demand for these is very small.
The older demographics generally prefer larger phones because they have larger screens, which are better for aging eyes.
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.
That's what sucks about these huge dominant companies. They suppress interesting products because they don't reach the huge sales they need to make a difference to a trillion dollar company. And smaller companies can't compete against these behemoths.
My best guess is that the kind of person who would found a company capable of making such a phone won't do it because they know it doesn't have potential to make them fabulously wealthy (just regular old wealthy) because it's inherently limited in scale. And the big companies don't do it because, while such a line could be profitable, in the absence of competition, it's more profitable to force their consumers to buy the "main" line and not make another product line.
Then you have to deal with the fact that the people with obscure requirements have a million other requirements. The person asking for a small phone then complains it doesn’t have a headphone jack, and AV1 decoding, and 16gb memory, and an unlocked bootloader, and whatever else.
It was absolutely this manufactured “range anxiety” that killed it.
I'm on a 14 Pro. It's fine -- plus, it's been replaced twice under AppleCare. Once was a Lightning jack failure, but the second was when it fell off my motorcycle mount and got run over back in October. (Amazingly, the phone part worked fine, but the mishap ruined the camera lenses.)
The upshot is that I have a phone that's only a few months old, and see almost no compelling reason to upgrade to anything else. It _would_ be nice to have USB-C, but that's not worth hundreds of dollars to me. And it also appears there are aspects of the 17e that aren't as nice as my 14 Pro, so ...
The Google Pixel 10a is superior, same chassis with flat camera. The Pixel 10 doesn’t suffer a camera bump. At least a step in the right direction.
10a will be worth it when the price drops down to 350 Euro.
Occasionally there’s a feature that requires a minimum amount of RAM like Apple Intelligence but that’s the exception.
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.
My laptop has 8TB. Why is Apple so stingy?
The bogus part with the storage here is instead on needing to pay $200 more just to get to 512 GB.
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
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, and you have no skin in the game to make an informed comment.
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.
-
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.
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 need storage because Honkai: Star Rail is 32gb and I like being able to have more than one game on my phone.
Now discount the iPhone 16 so I can have one in a nice colour :D
A picture with a boring gaussian blur to fake a bokeh effect is low quality regardless if the end result is in high resolution.
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.
They might be right, but the "Mini" was more like a return to the size of the 6 & 8; not the same size as the 5 or prior SE. So for me it was still too large.
https://imgur.com/a/iphone-mini-vs-iphone-5-vs-iphone-6-case...
The "usable screen" is where my thumb can reach, not whatever idea people have in their heads about the total size of the phone or anything, truthfully.
Anyway; hit recognition of the keyboard is so far behind where it was in the iPhone 4/5 generation that I doubt modern iOS would even be functional; even if you excused the padding issues that would inevitably be an issue.
Right?? It is worse than I remember right? I'm not crazy.
I wasn't sure I wanted another Apple Watch, but it was the easiest thing to buy, and I don't have to figure out how to transfer all the data and set it up somewhere else.
But I definitely regret going the "easy" way; iOS 26 is truly awful, what the fuck.
I'm going to figure out what fitness/sport watch I really want to use next because I doubt I'll be sticking to iPhone with what they have on offer these days...
In the early days of the phablets I had an observation that has mostly held true all these years later. At the time I noticed you could accurately predict whether someone wanted the large or small form factor based on their usage patterns. Did they tend to use their device while sitting down? Or did they tend to use their device while on the move? This indicated whether or not they typically used 2 hands vs 1 hand.
It turned out the 2 handers dominated the market, unfortunately for people like you & I.
And I kind of get it. Philosophically I want a small phone. Realities of age and eyesight forbid.
The market is basically people who don’t read or watch videos on their phone, and who have excellent eyesight, and who don’t care about having the best cameras. 100% legit market segment, but that Venn intersection is too small to be worth it.
I think the problem is that the product folks don't actually listen to the market. They read Jobs' biography and are convinced that they will tell their users what product they will like and that they will see the light later on.
The sad reality is: they are not Jobs (and even he was not faultless). So, we get Mac like Windows interfaces, we get mail clients losing features, we get AI in every single app you see, etc.
Just my 2c.
And if you’re convinced that most people don’t like most products… why don’t you make a fortune building what people actually want?
Apple is very good at market research and understanding users… but not perfect. I think they genuinely believed the Air would sell a lot more than it did.
And “millions” is not necessarily a lot. Apple sells 250 million phones a year. A SKU that sells 3 million is a distraction with much lower ROI against R&D than a mainline phone. It takes just as much engineering to create and as much manufacturing to produce, so fixed costs are spread among many fewer units.
Am old. Am experiencing presbyopia. Am still very much tied to my mini on the default font size. When I can't read something I just pinch/zoom. Meanwhile it's easy to hold & use in one hand while walking down the street, and fits into normal sized pockets.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/about-siri-suggestion...
[2]: https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/about-siri-suggestions-...
[3]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/turn-siri-suggestions...
I wish there were more size choices on both ends of the spectrum. While most people prefer more choice below 6", I would like some choice above 7", since I keep my phone in my belly pouch, and never use it one-handed. My current Huawei Mate20X is actually ok at 7.2" (but worse than the Mediapad X1 I had before which at 7" was actually wider) but is way behind on Android updates, and will soon stop running my banking app.
- 7" used to be tablet category, e.g the Nexus 7
- anything above 6" would be considered phablet
Phones are really just like cars now, size inflation included.
"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
"Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.' But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do."
"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
"If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse."
Except the cameras that stick out. Why do I want a phone thinner than the camera lenses?
Selling you Apple Watch ?
Other than that... Nobody's really bothering with compact phones anymore, in the US or in the rest of the world. Bummer.
And the worst thing is that app developers do not bother with testing their apps on small phones. So even if someone would produce small phone, many apps would be broken on that UI. So there's no way back.
PS 4 inch is not a small phone. iPhone 4S had 3.5" display and it wasn't small, it was normal. Small is something like 2" screen I suppose. All modern phones including these "iPhone Minis" are egregiously huge.
Agreed - going from the original SE to the mini meant a big downgrade in usability for me, as it's now hard to reach the top of the screen.
Built in ones work fine - mail, safari, music, maps, photos
Major ones work fine - bbc sounds, slack+teams, whatsapp, various authenticator programs
Unihertz Jelly Star has 3 inch screen, that's way too small for me.
But they exist and so do people who buy them.
They need to show all that ad somewhere right?
> 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
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.
Incredibly small. Incredibly light. Pretty thin, even in a case. Had a headphone jack, Lightning and Touch ID.
The only thing I like about the new iPhone designs is the action button. Having an automation which automatically turns silent mode off or on based on whether I'm home or not is pretty cool. You can't do that with a physical switch.
It’s been a great phone!
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphone-models-compati...
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 wouldn't assume that.
The expression 'fat fingers' concerns the phenomena where users (including myself) lack the eyesight and finer motor skills required to type accurately on a small keyboard, so a slightly larger display makes all the difference.
Perhaps you simply have those fine motor skills (and good eye sight) so a larger device isn't necessary to prevent typos and remain productive.
I've banned social and don't use my phone much anymore, so it's less of an issue than it used to be, but it's really frustrating when I'm clearly hitting the right key and it insists on pretending I hit an adjacent key.
Instead, after 20 years of iPhone usage, I am not allowed to type the names of projects I use all the time without fixing the autocorrect every time, or (as you say) carefully hitting the left side of the F key because dead center will produce a G.
That's a bug, not a feature. You don't need to be able to do every task all the time. In fact, it's nice to be able to separate that aspect.
Have you ever thought that with 80% of web traffic coming from mobile, you might be the outlier?
What next? The old Slashdot meme “I haven’t watched TV in 20 years. Do people still watch TV?”
I said you don't have to do every task, not do no tasks.
> Have you ever thought that with 80% of web traffic coming from mobile, you might be the outlier?
Wow, snark too. In recent years, I've taken a much more luddite stance against mobile device usage for my own mental wellbeing. Maybe other people should follow suit.
"You should do your taxes on the train". No, I don't think that I will. You're free to stress yourself out like that. Have fun.
> You should do your taxes on the train". No, I don't think that I will. You're free to stress yourself out like that. Have fun.
I along with 90% of the taxpayers in the US take the standard deduction - meaning my taxes are stupid simple.
I logged into the TurboTax app, it offered to download my w2’s, I answered five questions, entered the date that I wanted IRS to take out the taxes we owed and we were done. I don’t have to even file state taxes for the state I live in?
How would that have been easier from a computer? In fact it would have been harder if I had to use a computer because the other option I had to submit my W2 was to take a picture of it.
It’s a fair trade off. My company gives me a lot of leeway during the day and I am flexible about time zones.
The feigned ignorance on HN that most normal people don’t pull their laptops out to do everything in 2026 is amazing
So I tend to assume that these stories are often the outliers, and that my personal experience is more common. I recognize the fallacy, and I suspect we're both wrong and we're both right. I just honestly don't know which one of us is more of which.
It probably devolves to a question of what kind of work we're talking about. The work that I do (or the way I do it), I do not believe could be done effectively on a phone or tablet, most of the time. I work with people whose work can be done there. And there are probably more of them that there are of me. But that does not mean I could become one of them.
(addressing your comment on another subthread): if music, camera, and web are a person's "work", then sure. But that does not resemble "work" for me in any way.
Again, you can look at the worldwide penetration of cell phones vs laptops, where most web traffic comes from, the amount of resources spent on mobile development vs desktop, the amount of revenue globally of phone sales vs PC sales, etc
I also don’t spend all day working and I definitely don’t take out my laptop when I’m not working
Mobile-vs-web dev is probably a better metric. And developed, mature markets only. Anything else introduces the second- and third-generation tech gap inconsistencies.
Are you really arguing in 2026 about time spent on mobile vs PCs?
Also, you're being unnecessarily unpleasant in these threads; I wish I had read down further before replying initially, but I'm done now.
This is completely responsive to your thread if you think countries that use their phones more than the US is some type of signal they are 3rd world countries.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/228589/notebook-or-lapto...
(English is her 3rd language)
Can I file my taxes on my phone? Probably. But I could also set myself on fire, and I think that might be more fun. Why would I not want to use a tool that is 100x faster and 1000x easier to use for any task more complex than writing a sentence?
I'm a developer. I've heard of developers SSH'ing from their phone and developing that way. It's impressive, in the same way removing all your fingernails is impressive.
90% of taxpayers claim the deduction - meaning their taxes are really simple.
I launched TurboTax, it offered to download my and my wife’s W2s, I clicked through a few buttons on a wizard and I was done. It had all of my information from the prior year so it already knew my employer.
As far as speed, have you compared the speed of the fastest iPhone to a low to midrange x86 PC? The latest A series chips in the iPhone are faster in single core performance than an M1 MacBook Air which is no slouch. But all that is besides the point. How fast of a computer do you think you need to file taxes? There was tax filing software for the 1Mhz Apple //e in 1986. You just had to print it out.
I entered maybe one number?
I live in a state without state taxes so I didn’t even have to file states.
FWIW, I also shopped for, did all of the paperwork before closing, for the house we had built in 2016 from my phone.
Are you suggesting that o just queue everything up until I set my laptop up?
Again you realize you’re the odd one right with most activity these days taking place on mobile?
If it's the former, you lead a very different life from me. There are very few things in my life that show up and require immediate action (or action within 24-ish hours for that matter. Most things can wait). If it's the latter, I try to fill that time with reading.
Is it really that hard to look at stats and realize that you might not be the normal one?
You also didn't answer my question. Nothing in your travel scenario there, if I were in your shoes, would need me to use my phone for more than a few taps per actual task, while the rest of my phone use would go to mindless browsing or reading. What specific tasks are you imagining popping up here that I would then queue to my laptop?
And no I’m not a young guy - my first computer was in 1986 in 6th grade…
But if you have no desire to actually respond to my inquiry, I shall remain in the dark.
You know sending email via mobile has been popular since 2003 right?
The same principles apply to Slack, Teams or whatever else you may use. I don't do work outside of work hours, so what would I know. Email was just the example I thought of in the moment. Again, I'm asking you a question out of a desire to better understand your situation.
Personal correspondence doesn't take many taps to do. It's rarely more than 25 characters at a time in my experience.
> You know sending email via mobile has been popular since 2003 right?
'sending' and 'popular' are doing some pretty heavy lifting here. Reading, sure, I'll buy that. Sending? I'm not sure sending emails longer than two sentences from any device without a keyboard has ever been popular, for values of. It's probably more popular than ever given that touch keyboards make it reasonably possible, but James S. Casual isn't sending a lot of emails from his phone just through the sheer power of not sending many emails to begin with.
And 'popular' for that matter. Possible, sure, but how many people ever even had a mobile device that could send email before the iPhone came out?
I'm sure sarcasm and implying I'm stupid are great ways to convince your interlocutor, or the unseen masses for that matter.
Myself personally, I work remotely. I might be running errands during the day and still be monitoring Slack so I can be on a call at 6 or 7 at night with someone in another time zone.
I also travel for work - consulting - and travel personally during the work day and may work after I land. Even if not for work, do you wait to get to your computer to respond to text messages? Check HN?
> Myself personally, I work remotely. I might be running errands during the day and still be monitoring Slack so I can be on a call at 6 or 7 at night with someone in another time zone.
> I also travel for work - consulting - and travel personally during the work day and may work after I land.
See, I would never do this. A.) I don't work remotely (not out of a desire not to, but it's just not viable with my current line of work), and B.) If I did, that work would be zoned off away from my personal life. If there's downtime, I can kill time by browsing whatever, but I wouldn't be out and about but also 'at work' at the same time. Work-time and personal time basically never mix in my life, and I'd like to keep it that way.
If you're 'at work' for 48 hours at a time, while travelling, then having to respond instantly at any given time makes a lot more sense, although I'd probably still want to defer those responses until I can get some downtime during any given travels to then type up my responses on an actual keyboard. I can however understand if that's not really viable in your life of work.
> do you wait to get to your computer to respond to text messages?
I've never(?) sent a text message longer than maybe 100 characters. Most are a fair bit shorter than that, and I don't send that many to begin with. Same goes for Discord, although confirming that is harder, since it's contaminated with messaged written with an actual keyboard.
> Check HN?
To read? Sure. I even read books on my phone. Respond to a comment? Not unless my response is really short.
Most on HN know the data: healthier people tend to enforce boundaries with their devices. The average person is addicted, yes, but I'm not sure being "the odd one" in an era of actually decreasing literacy and numeracy and attention span is the insult that you seem to think.
Again, look at the statistics..
Then I cam across this, showing about even split between laptop and phone
https://tgmstatbox.com/stats/united-kingdom-device-usage-bre...
I'd assumed it was more like 80% phone
Were you out to dinner with your wife?
I’m sure you would have thought we should have waited to take out my laptop when we got back home.
HN seems to have some really weirdly prescriptive view of how people ought to use their devices in a way that is almost like Steve jobs.
I don't have my work email on my phone, and personal emails basically never need any actual response.
> call a uber
This is a few clicks and not a big ask regardless of the exact device. You can order an Uber regardless of screen size.
> look up where is the nearest coffee shop that is open at an odd hour?
Google Maps works fine on smaller screens. Ask me how I know.
Because some of us read the original comment and thought maybe the discussion should be responsive to it:
> If the task can’t be done in a few taps I feel I’m better off opening a laptop anyways.
Talking about Uber, email and directions in Maps are literally "task[s] that can be done in a few taps". Perhaps being less "weirdly" defensive and taking the time to think about the discussion you're about to jump into would be helpful?
Things like KDE Connect provide a direct bridge and a bit of imagination does the rest.
If your laptop isn't cutting the mustard then ditch it ...
... Oh your phone has a tiny screen and a shit mic and speakers, unless you stick it in your ear?
Horses for courses.
Yes most people use KDE Connect..
That is, until I switched to a foldable phone (Galaxy Z Fold 7) half a year ago, and - I kid you not - I haven't used my personal laptop since that day.
FWIW, I still have a proper desktop PC; In the past decade+, I've been using a PC at home, and a "sidearm" on the go / away from home: always a 2-in-1 Windows laptop with top specs[0]. Being always with me, this laptop often replaced use of PC at home too, because of convenience & portability.
So by amount of productive use, for past 10+ years it was sidearm >> PC >> smartphone. But getting a foldable flipped it around. Having twice the screen size of a regular (large) phone is a big productivity win[1], but it's folding that makes the actual qualitative difference. Folded, the device becomes a regular smartphone - i.e. something that fits in my pocket, meaning it's always on me, in my hands, or less than 1 second away. Contrast that with tablets, whose form factor makes them basically just shitty laptops (same logistic as ultraportable, but toy OS of a phone).
I didn't expect this. I didn't even feel this change - I only noticed two months later that my laptop has been sitting unused on my desk, covered by a pile of stuff. Doing "laptop tasks" on a mobile device is still annoying (no keyboard, toy OS), but combining tablet-sized screen with portability of a phone makes them less annoying than logistics overhead of a laptop - and at least in my case, this eliminated the entire[3] space between "smartphone" and "PC".
--
[0] - Think Microsoft Surface, except I could get better specs at half the price if I bought an off-lease but pristine Dell or Lenovo.
[1] - It's not immediately obvious to people, but as things are today, a foldable phone isn't any better at media consumption than regular one, because almost all cinema, TV, videogames, etc. are all produced for widescreen - meanwhile, the inner screen of my Fold is approximately square, so e.g. for most TV, half or more of it is black at all times. However, all that extra space allows to effectively use multiple (3+) apps on screen, not to mention makes spreadsheets actually usable.
[2] - Bigger screen = less scrolling and tapping in menus, but also with text size scaled to minimum, my previous phone (S22) had a big enough screen that running two apps in split-screen became useful on a regular basis.
[3] - Well, almost. There are some tasks I really like physical keyboard and larger screen for - but for those, I just plug the phone into the screen via USB-C, and volia, it turns into a regular desktop. A shitty one, but good enough for occasional use.
Now I'm having second thoughts on what I'll do myself because I would have never guessed a foldable would be ideal as you described.
I've been trying to avoid building an $8,000 tech stack of redundant devices that I don't need. Which is what Apple is all about, and then some. It's not the initial investment that bothers me, it's calculating replacement costs over time. It's pretty quickly that you have half a new vehicle in redundant electronics. It leaves you asking: why?
So while I appreciate the longevity and durability of my iPhone 12 mini, along with seamless Airdrop and the Airtag network being as handy as it gets, I'm thinking about going back to Android for docking support. This is a feature I don't think Apple will ever add until the end of time, so I may as well bite the bullet now and get another OS switch over with.
I'm not entirely convinced I would love a foldable like you do, but I am rethinking that now. I've been on the idea that Microsoft's partnership with Samsung for Phone Link features will make my life delightful at my desktop battlestation, and DeX with a lapdock will cover any mobile needs. A lapdock really does create an alternative to the battery life offered by the M-series Macbooks, while leaving me with only two devices to maintain and replace with my desktop and phone.
It's amazing with the flexibility and options offered in the Android space, whether it be my proposal or your foldable experience, how they don't have more marketshare. I think the issue is marketing, people need to be shown what they can do with a product and Apple makes Continuity and closed ecosystem features seem like a value add. When it's kind of a lure to an iCloud subscription and $8,000 personal tech stack.
I find my efficiency directly proportional to the distance from my smart phone.
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.
It's the very last reasonably sized iPhone and one of the very last in this category overall.
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.
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.
Just curious but why? Is it iMessage lock in?
iMessages work using SMS 1-to-1, but group chats require the telcos to enable RCS instead of SMS.
Of the 3 telco network operators in Australia, none of them have enabled it.
LMAO
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.
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.
an every-two-or-three year release cycle would be fine, ideal even
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 thought it goes without saying that poorly made accessibility features don't mean the device is very usable. The existence of that feature by itself is already evidence against that.
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.
These new Gemini shill-agents are not very compelling.
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.
(I also wish for smaller screens and no-adhesive battery swaps though, neither of which seems likely to happen.)
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.
If find that after the upgrade to the latest iOS my 13 mini has been struggling with framerate and just overall feeling laggy.
https://blog.bschwind.com/2025/01/11/the-original-iphone-se-...
still holding on to iphone 13 mini hoping they bring back the perfect size. also trying very hard not to accidentally fat finger a ios 26 update.
Besides, you can always delete the update (if already downloaded) and turn automatic updates off.
If people wanted it, you wouldn’t be faking the feedback.
That's why they stopped making them, because the people who buy minis are willing to stick with them for 5 years, whereas Apple wants you to buy a new phone every year.
Every single person I know who uses a phone of more than 4 years old, uses an iPhone 13 mini. Without exception. Now I'm sure there's plenty of HNers who use other 4+ year old phones, but I'm talking about non-tech people.
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.
They also haven't come out with another iPhone with a headphone jack, yet no one kept using those.
I get what you're saying, but what I think is that the average mini buyer is inherently someone (on average!) who changes their phone a lot less often. They're less likely to be glued to their phones. Bigger phones = more infinite scroll addiction, and so on. Apple doesn't want to cater to the mini buyers.
I kind of agree with the previous comment. I think if you spend a lot of time on the phone, have a lot of apps then it makes sense to upgrade your phone more frequently and also makes sense to have a larger screen and better battery life. So conversely, there is a correlation between people who have smaller phones and upgrade less frequently.
I have my iPhone 12mini for 5-6 years now, and I'd upgrade it now if there was a new small iPhone. But I would upgrade it 3 years ago.
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 still use my 12 mini; it's by far my favorite iphone I've had since my 5s. It might have had sucky battery life but I was just happy to have a phone that could fit in my pocket.
I've replaced the screen twice, battery once (by myself) and I have really very little intentions on moving to anything newer than the 13 mini.
I'm not sure why Apple doesn't care about the mini apple users. My friends, when they pull out a 17 pro look absolutely ridiculous, constantly having to pull the phone out when doing any real work since the phone just keeps getting in the way.
Count me in this group. I wound up buying the 13 mini right before it was going to be discontinued because I knew that would be the last small phone they would produce and I'm keeping it until it dies (or I can't get a battery for it).
(source: keeping an eye out on the NY subway, which I have found to be a pretty damned good gauge of consumer electronics popularity)
Camera quality is the second most important thing to me (after not needing finger enhancement surgery to hold the phone).
So, they designed it to fail, and it still was 3-5% of sales vs. ones that actually got good spec bumps every year. (If you’re upgrading the phone every 12 months, why buy the one with cameras a few years behind the curve?)
Anyway, I like my mini. I wish it had touch id instead.
The MBAs at Apple noticed:
They got the sales anyway. We don’t have a “functional market”. But Apples marketing was weird. They named it Mini instead of Compact or Air. And launched it against the SE? A lot people already refused to move from the SE 1st Gen to the Mini, to due the increased size and missing TouchID.So Apple assumed people want even bigger Max or Air. The Air which is actually much thicker most other phones. Both seem to fail.
You do understand what a "percentage" means? And that there's a lot of people in the world, right? :)
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 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 was considering swapping out the phone battery but this is a better alternative for now.
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.
My worst fear 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)
So much so that I went on to check the specs but no it's 6.1". Damn, so close, what a missed opportunity.
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.
I can see a large unfolded phone being desirable if it had a stylus and I could use it like a small notebook, but just as a "watch Netflix bigger for $2000" device, no.
Especially if it has the worst camera of all of the phone models like the Air does.
Suspect this is a mindset thing if you mostly use 10 cent Bic pens you'll never care to make a habit of keeping them, and then when you're using an expensive gadget pen those habits carry over.
Even a pen that costs a few bucks (Signo UM-151 for instance) I know where they're at.
(Until they release a new human hand sized phone at least)
Sigh. Maybe the Clicks Communicator (at 13cm tall) will get my money.
I have an iPhone 13 mini sitting in a drawer for when I need to switch.
Small form factor and security updates are literally my only criteria for phones.
In fact, if this phone died, thanks to Liquid Glass I would likely go buy an Android phone. Maybe a Graphene OS phone from Motorola.
The second hand market for these phones seems pretty buoyant
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.
Ideally, degoogled android, of course. (Or even not android?)
The 13 mini probably still has a few years of security fixes coming, but after that, I’m going to consider jumping ship, and would like something that’s privacy respecting.
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.
The last model I tried to run was Dolphin 3B but even Zephyr1.6B kills the phone pretty fast even with a full battery
Even Dolphin completely killed my phone so yeah I can’t really use the Private LLM app for anything heavier than the default 1.6B
There are some models that everyone wants but companies discontinue or never make
iPhone 13s was the last one
Another example was the Cadiallac Ciel at Pebble Beach. Only ever appeared in Entourage after that.
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? :)