They just didn't sell very well at all. I've seen estimates that the little phones represented just 5-6% of total iPhone sales while they were around. They're darling little devices, but they were simply not very popular.

Now, sure: You or I would probably love to have a product that "failed" by selling only as much as 5% of iPhone sales. We'd either be rolling in dough, or working our nuts off trying to figure out how to keep up production and sustain this beast, or both. "Only" five million units sold (or whatever), at ~$700 each? Fuck yeah!

But we're not Apple. Apple is already rolling in dough. They want product lines which work on a much bigger scale than that or it simply isn't worth their time -- those engineering and marketing expenses are more-profitably spent elsewhere, where they get 20x the return.

5-6% of sales ABSOLUTELY matters. The biggest question is really will the majority of these purchasers substitute the absent "Mini" model with another iPhone model? If 90% of those users will just buy a different model then there is little advantage to offering the mini, given the additional design/engineering costs of the smaller size.

Anecdotally, I'm a techie but a small phone die-hard. I help onto my original SE until they finally released a mini model and will likely do something similar with mini 13. They definitely lost some potential upgrade sales from me, but despite that Apple STILL has the best tiny phone offerings, they are still software and hardware supported by Apple, although you have to purchase refurbished. There just isn't a serious Android competitor, with any sort of long term commitment to small phones, that would justify the switching cost.

My opinion is that Apple botched their positioning with the mini. "Mini" is a diminutive term, it implies less than. It was the lowest pricing outside of their SE model. They released the 12 mini shortly after an SE release, leading to cannibalized sales. And they released it at the beginning of a period (ongoing) where Apple leaned into the messaging of "Bigger is Premium". The only people left to buy the mini were people obsessed with small phones.

I think a more successful product would have been to lean into their "Air" brand, leveraging Apple's known ability to engineer premium devices in the smallest, most-elegant packages; positioning it as a premium product orthogonal to their main iPhone line. And from the rumors, it sounds like this might be Apple's next move in a device market that is increasingly undifferentiated.

Air would have been a much better name. We will see if the rumored iPhone “Slim” (probably not what they would call it but it’s what I’ve seen some rumors call it) comes out in a smaller size as well.

Re: bigger is better

Yeah and it doesn’t help that they sometimes put features only on the Max phones (like the 5x zoom last year). I like the Max but I like it even better when the difference between the Pro and Pro Max is only size. I’m fairly certain that is due to other constraints (not product differentiation) but I hate it for the “normal”-size phone people when their options are “Go big or miss out on feature X”.

But is a sale of a mini at the cost of a non-mini? Like if 3/4 of the mini buyer would have just gotten the next smallest form factor then you might not want the large time responsibility of another product.

I understand that, and obviously the line has to be drawn somewhere. I just think a company of Apple’s size/means is perfectly capable of maintaining and producing a mini for the people that want it. Then again, that’s easy for me to say I don’t run Apple.

Of course they're capable of doing it. Scarlet Johanson is also capable of dating me. They just don't want to.