Apple is good at many things, but perhaps its most underrated corporate quality is the willingness to charge its small devices.
From the optical drive and FireWire and headphone port, to the iMac Pro and HomePod, few companies are smarter at recognizing the exact moment when a beloved product or popular feature is about to overtake its. mark. usefulness, not felt so little when it comes to hanging it when it happens.
Apple now needs to harness that superpower and put an end to the mini iPhone project before things get out of hand.
Mini iPhone case
The iPhone 12 mini made a lot of sense back then. There seemed to be a niche in the market: People with small hands, small pockets, and tight budgets seemed to be overlooked, as Android makers strove to offer the largest screens possible, and Apple followed suit.
Everywhere you looked, a minority of users told you how much they missed the 2016 iPhone SE and the other 4-inch phones that came before it, and how much they expected Apple launches another phone of the same size.
So Apple did what any self-respecting populist would do, and gave people what they wanted. And the launch in late 2020 included an unprecedented number of four new iPhone models, with an all-new 5.4-inch screen size offered by the iPhone 12 mini. (A 5.4-inch display might not look particularly small compared to the older SE, but when contained in a notched full-screen design, the result is a truly pocket-friendly chassis that’s about the same size as the 4.8 inch SE).
Now you have to sit down and wait for the money to come. But unfortunately there have been some issues with this plan.
Nobody knows what he wants
The first problem was the overestimation of interest in a small iPhone. The problem with vocal minorities is that they focus on their voice and not on the fact that in many cases they are a very small minority, giving the impression of being many through the force of persistence.
Another is that when people said they wanted another small iPhone, what they really wanted was another cheap little iPhone. This market would never pay more than 700 dollars for the 12 mini, but instead opt for the iPhone SE (2020).
And Apple found that it had made a phone that was too expensive to interest half of its customers, and that it had sacrificed too many battery life and screen size to satisfy the other.
But the biggest problem is that most people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. They may think they know. But when the money is at stake, you find out what really matters to a person.
It might sound very patronizing to say about your customers, but that’s the approach Steve Jobs built the business on. His quote is famous: “It’s very difficult to design products through focus groups. A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
The joys of an enclosed garden
Apple has built its success on a model of patronizing prescriptivism: no, no, no, it used to say, you want this, you want this. Please d on’t over-personalize the user experience, you’ll ruin it. You stand up badly.
This philosophy sounds terrible, but it’s incredibly successful because you know what? Apple’s world-class team of engineers and designers really know how to design a phone and its interface better than I do.
Today, Apple is more open to the idea of relinquishing control. This allows us to switch from your own preinstalled iOS apps to third-party alternatives, and even set those alternatives as default. You’ve loosened your grip on the App Store a bit. And now it’s making the kind of phones that people say they want.
This madness must stop.
We’ll know if Apple answered my call in September, when the iPhone 13 debuts. In the meantime, you can get a good deal on a current model with our roundup of the best iPhone deals. Maybe even the iPhone 12 mini. But I doubt it.
Original article published in English on our sister website igamesnews UK.
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