Considering the sheer ramp up for manufacturing at the scale of iphone sales, and how unpopular tiny phones are, it’s completely understandable they’re not interested in catering to the < 1% of users they’d gain by making a small phone. You have to remember lost sales only truely include people who literally leave the platform or never upgrade again instead of just grumbling and buying the new phone anyway.
What ramp up? It's been less than a year since they discontinued the SE 2022.
Apple could have kept improving the CPU and camera and not much else and would have had a steady stream of income from those of us who want to use our actual pockets (not a weird swaddle) to carry our phones.
The iPhone SE accounted for 5-12% of the market, depending on year. The iPhone mini accounted for about 5%. Let's conservatively call it 13%.
Apple had iPhone revenue of $205bn in 2022. The average smaller iPhone is about .5-.67 the cost of a flagship model.
So fuzzy math, but .13 * .5 * 205000000000 = a $1.3bn market for iPhones you can use with one hand.
Thats nothing to sneeze at. Way more of a market than something like a Magic Trackpad.
Apple is making like 100bn a quarter. 102.4bn last quarter to be exact. 1.3bn in a whole year is indeed something for apple to sneeze at.
And the ramp up is to design and organise manufacture of a whole new phone line. They also would likely have received a hit in sales in general if they didn’t upgrade the design as people would feel insulted and also it would stick out like an ignored pig in the lineup, which isn’t good for apples brand either.
The truth is, you’d likely make the same decision if you were CEO, especially if you have to justify it to shareholders.
