Sure, it is totally reasonable that a particular phone doesn’t fit your needs/desires, and any accessory that makes it do that isn’t nearly as good as having it built into the phone in the first place. If you don’t like the trade offs presented by the combination of phone plus accessory then it ain’t good for you.
It may well be true that an entire set of other people’s needs/wants can only be satisfied by making the phone lighter (and maybe thinner) starting from your perfect phone there would be no way to use an accessory to turn it into the phone other people want. That doesn’t make the thinner smaller battery phone something you like or are required to accept.
On the other hand I doubt Apple cares about what you or I want in a phone except in the aggrate. If there are 800 of you and a million people that want the lighter phone despite a lower battery life (or more likely “holding the line on battery life”) they are absolutely going to make something that the millions will buy and not bother with the thing that might move 800 units. Actually to be honest I don’t think Apple would bother to design a phone that would only sell a million units either, 10x or 100x both the numbers I guess.
My guess is if a smaller thicker phone would sell 10% as well as the “flagship” it would be profitable enough to justify a place in the line up and the R&D costs to design, and marketing to sell it. However I’m not in Apple marketing, so I could be way off on the numbers (maybe 1%…maybe 20%?). However Apple tends to prefer a simpler product lineup. They let some get messy, but they do tend to stick to a smaller set of base models then most companies. Which I guess they have a reason for, but they are also basically one company competing against a whole industry.
You can get micro sized Android phones because a half dozen companies think that enough people buy them that they will plant a flag there. You can get cameras with phones built around them for the same reason. If I were in charge of products at Apple (and I very much am not) I would totally try a few of those things.
Beats me if they had loftier goals for the iPhone mini when they made it, but whatever their internal targets were it didn’t hit them because it isn’t around anymore.
Cool, I mean that is a thing I hear a lot of people say. Before Apple started making big phones it was a thing a whole lot of iPhone owners said, and for sure something Apple said when it referred to the larger Android phones of the era as “Phablets”. However the people that do actually prefer larger phones appear to dramatically outnumber people that like small phones. Anytime Apple brought out a larger phone it became the more popular phone of that rough price category, sometimes more popular then a much less costly smaller variant.
Apple may not like doing focus groups, and when SJ was running the company it didn’t do them, but it has pretty much always payed attention to which of it’s products sold better then which of it’s other products.
You may dislike big phones, but the majority of people love them. Or maybe they hate them, but they buy them in preference to the smaller ones, that’s for sure.
