The cult of the iPhone mini is alive and thriving

FastCompany: My phone has some existential problems. It’s nearly out of storage, the battery lasts half a day, and every so often, when it thinks a little too hard, it heats up like a brick fresh from the kiln. I should probably get a new phone, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not until the experience of using my iPhone 13 mini becomes so miserable that I have no other choice but to trade it in for a bigger, better model. From left: iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini [Photo: Apple] I’m not alone in my stubborn act of technological resistance. There is a small but passionate group of like-minded people who refuse to let go of their minis.

They gather in online forums, trading advice on how to keep an iPhone mini running after years of use. They smugly set their beat up hardware on the table next to their friend’s PopSocket-ed phablet. Often, they can be found digging in their bag for a charger because their phone is probably almost dead. The cult of the iPhone mini is alive and well. And why shouldn’t it be? It’s the perfect phone for our moment. Holding on to an older, smaller phone represents an intriguing path forward at a time when people are whiplashing between the promises of rapid tech advancements and an earnest desire to reclaim their life from their devices.

iPhone mini devotees are not dumbphone Luddites, nor are they the type to pick up the iPhone Duo at launch. They sit somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, acknowledging a truth that most Silicon Valley companies can’t afford to accept: that sometimes it’s okay for technology to just be good enough. [Photo: Kim Kulish/Corbis/Getty Images] A compact history of growing phones “We’ve designed something wonderful for your hand, just wonderful,” Steve Jobs told a rapt crowd in 2007, holding up the first-generation Apple iPhone. “It’s got a 3-and-a-half-inch screen on it. It’s really big.” Jobs wasn’t exaggerating.

At the time, the first iPhone (measuring 4.5-by-2.4 inches with a 3.5-inch screen) was a departure from the compact, low-resolution screens of BlackBerries and Palm Pilots. Instead of relying on a physical keyboard or stylus like its smartphone predecessors, Apple introduced a totally new mode of interaction for the iPhone called multitouch. Multitouch allowed people to navigate the screen with a series of gestures—swipes, taps, and pinches. This new way of interacting with a phone presented an interesting ergonomic constraint: The iPhone had to fit comfortably into the average person’s palm.

It feels strange to imagine it now, at a moment when phone screens have grown well beyond the reach of our thumbs, but this simple idea shaped the design of the earliest iPhones. Jobs was famously anti-big phone. He once called larger phones “Hummers” and said no one would want to buy a phone that they couldn’t wrap their hand around. That prediction didn’t age well. In 2012, Apple introduced the iPhone 5, the first phone to feature a meaningful jump in screen size—to 4 inches. The iPhone 5 was a response to the market, which had already tasted the big-phone future.

A year prior, in 2011, Samsung had introduced the 5.3-inch-screen Galaxy Note, effectively creating the phablet—that’s a hybrid phone/tablet—category. Though Samsung considered the phone an experiment, Apple saw it as a proof point that people were big-screen curious (the iPhone 5 became 2012’s best-selling phone ). iPhone 5, 2012 [Photo: Rick Friedman/Corbis/Getty Images] As Apple’s phones grew, they started to require a bit of ergonomic gymnastics. In 2014, with the launch of the 5.5-inch-screen iPhone 6 Plus, it became clear that the average person could no longer navigate their phone with one hand.

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The article highlights a niche market trend that could influence brand strategy, but the concept of prioritizing user experience over capability is not entirely new.