Apple bids farewell to the iPhone mini. Yesterday – along with a few other things – it unveiled the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, but nothing from iPhone 14 mini. The youngest of the family has said goodbye, and it seems hard to think that this goodbye is not permanent.

The decision seems logical. According to available data, the iPhone 12 mini sold very little and the iPhone 13 mini sold even less. Compact mobile phones may arouse sympathy, but people don’t buy them because the facts are overwhelming: people want big screens.

One thing is what we love and the other is what we want (and buy)

In recent years the iPhone mini has become the absolute reference for those who love compact mobile phones. Apple defended that segment with smartphones that offer exceptional performance despite being quite limited in size.

Almost no one has done the same on Android. Formerly the most compact mobile phones were second division devicesand only recently, really competent offers have begun to appear, which are at 6 inches or even below this limit, as with the recent and very interesting Asus Zenfone 9.

But market rules and it does this especially for Apple like many other companies. cruel to money. If a product or service is not caught, it destroys it. The iPhone 13 mini was still great, but it was by far the lowest selling model in the entire 2021 lineup.

Considering that the iPhone 12 mini was also not successful, Apple’s decision seems more than justified. The company had resisted acknowledging a reality that had struck us for years. Large diagonals are preferred by users.

Remembering the iPhone 6 and the transition to “big” screens

actually the company took longer than expected while jumping on these diagonals in the past. While Apple still retained the four inches of the iPhone 5, all Android manufacturers had jumped on models between five and six inches.

iPhone sales through 2018: Sales skyrocketed in 2015, only because of the arrival of the iPhone 6/Plus and its larger screens. Source: Statistics.

Sales skyrocketed when the iPhone 6 (4.7″) and iPhone 6 Plus (5.5″) launched in 2014: they finally gave users what they wanted in Cupertino: bigger screens.

This now again seems to be the decisive argument for saying goodbye to the iPhone mini. Apple seems to have noticed its slippage and not only eliminated that compact model This equation has been replaced by the iPhone 14 Plus, which is precisely to offer a larger diagonal and also a larger battery.

We will see how sales behave after this decision: higher prices than ever are not helpful in a context where our salaries are no longer adequate. What seems difficult is that we’re seeing a new iPhone mini.And that, dear readers, is sad.

Image | Jeremy Bezanger