charlesn

Oh, F*CK ME with this announcement! Trump promised me a great manufacturing job screwing in tiny screws on the iPhone and now he just pulls the rug out from under that dream?! Promises made and broken! Who the hell is gonna pay me back now for the expensive set of precision screwdrivers I bought?! 

Toroidal said:

As noted above, nobody else is addressing that market, which Apple could have to itself - and do it at a premium. Apple is no stranger to high margin low volume markets. 

Apple DID have the "mini" market to itself and at a premium price to boot. So what's your theory about why they abandoned it? Do you think the meeting in Cupertino went something like this:

TIM: Hey, guys, this Mini is selling pretty well for us, the margins at its selling price are great, so tell you what: let's just cancel it so we can piss off the buyers who love the Mini. Show of hands for that idea? Great, it's unanimous. Let's cancel after the 13 Mini. Yeah, I know that means we won't even make back our R&D, tooling and marketing costs for that model, but it's worth it to piss off Mini buyers!" 

Listen: I get why people who want a smaller form factor phone are really upset that one is no longer available. I tried a Pro Max for a year and hated it, couldn't wait to get back to the smaller form factor of the regular Pro. What I don't get are the wild explanations and conspiracy theories about why the Mini was cancelled when the obvious and only sensible answer is that a Mini form factor wasn't a good enough business for Apple to stay in it, even when it had that whole market of buyers to itself. 

prof said:

hmlongco said:
People say they want one. Apple makes one. People don't buy one. Apple stops making one.

Rinse. Repeat.

People did buy it, one dealer I know told me that they sold more iPhone Minis months for months than any other non-Apple or Samsung brand model. Sometimes it's not entirely clear why Apple ditches a product; all bad sales rumours are only unconfirmed speculation. 

Please. Stop your descent into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. It's really pretty simple: Apple is a publicly owned, for profit company that is in the business of making products that sell well enough to generate sufficient profit to justify keeping them in the product lineup. It keeps making the products that earn their keep and stops making the ones that don't. End of story, The Mini would still be in the lineup if it sold in sufficient numbers, and the story of what one dealer told you for a product that sells globally is absolutely meaningless. Do you think Apple is happy about EOL'ing a new product after just two cycles? Absolutely not. It's questionable if they even made back their costs for research and development of the Mini, costs for tooling and production, design, marketing, etc. after just two years. This isn't to say that the Mini didn't have its fans, and a lot of them, just not enough to make it worthwhile to keep around. Notice also that no major Android manufacturer, even though they seem to run with every new gimmick feature they can dream up, has stepped in to produce a truly premium mini phone--there's no high end Galaxy or Pixel Mini. That's further confirmation that a sufficiently big market for a premium mini phone is simply not there. It's also worth noting that Apple's low-priced and smaller iPhone SE was always the worst selling model in the whole iPhone lineup. 

I would have upgraded both my M1 iMac and M2 MBA this year, but it's a pass until Apple supports Wifi 7. Bizarre to me that iPhones which launched in Sept support it, but other hardware launched after iPhone don't. Longer upgrade cycles pose a real challenge for Apple as it is, and not supporting the latest standards for Wifi and bluetooth protocols when introducing new models sure doesn't help. 

mpantone said:

However it's also important to point out that Siri is not a P&L center unlike Apple TV+ or iCloud or Fitness+ or the Apple Watch hardware division.

Technically true, but,,, how does an all-in Apple guy like myself end up with Alexa and 3 Echo Dots in my home? Simple: Alexa has always worked much better as a voice assistant than Siri, plus there's an entire world of products with voice-control capability that support Alexa but don't support Siri. The most glaring for me is probably my Sonos system, but I have a long list of others in my home. So in the ongoing battle for control of the home, I don't know how Apple wins without a more capable and reliable Siri.