Small Phones are Dead and We Killed Them

Small Phones are Dead and We Killed Them

you've noticed a certain sentence that I've been saying for years. I've been saying, small flagship phones are a rare breed. And I say that countless times over the years, but today, that's no longer true. That breed is now extinct. RIP to the small flagship phone. Okay, we don't even have to rewind that far to the days when phones were all smaller across the board. But then really quickly, we shot up to four-inch screens, then five inch screens were popular, then six inch flagships were everywhere. We never quite got to seven inch phones being mainstream, but it seems like all of the biggest flagships now are teetering right around that. But the funny part is smartphone manufacturers have had the same realization over and over again, which is that, oh, smartphone screens are getting bigger. And so there's room for the smaller alternative phone to slot in underneath that. So like I just reviewed every single Samsung Galaxy S ever. The year that they started to get really big, they, of course, also introduced a Galaxy S Mini. It's the most Samsung thing ever. But guess what? Now that's dead. Same thing from Apple. We finally got huge iPhones, and then sure enough, we got an iPhone Mini for two years, but now that's dead too. And this kept happening and happening all over the place until there was basically just one good small flagship phone left. The Asus Zenfone, the rare breed. So this thing, the Zenfone 9 came out in 2022 and was a nearly perfect flagship phone. Like seriously flagship specs, incredible performance, physics defying battery life, like rock solid cameras. This phone won my small phone of the year by a landslide, even with the few tiny flaws it had, you know, the back material being a little less durable and it didn't have wireless charging. So then in 2023, they came out with a sequel, the Zenfone 10. And that took a good thing and basically perfected it. They fixed the back material, they gave it wireless charging, they upgraded it to the latest flagship chips. They didn't lose anything. Nothing went wrong. It was just this singular, excellent flagship phone with a less than six inch screen in 2023. So now it's 2024, and the new Zenfone is a gigantic 6.8 inch ultra phone. Now, honestly, we probably should have seen this coming, right? When has a small flagship ever lasted more than a year or two, right? But it just, I don't know, it hits a little harder when this was the last small one. Like here's something to think about, right? I think Apple is, you could argue, one of the best supply chain companies in the world, right?That's how they built their business. That's how Tim Cook took the stock price from here to here. That's what they do. Tim Cook is the supply chain guy. So every time they come out with a new product or a range of products, they have to do the supply chain thing and figure out exactly how many they need to produce. So they have these complex studies and they're ways of estimating how many they think will be sold of every single SKU. And then that's how many they need to make. Not too many, just the perfect amount, perfect inventory management. That's the supply chain thing. That's Tim Cook's thing. So in 2020, for the first time, Apple decided to release a new lineup of four new iPhones. It was iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, the 12 Pro Max, and the 12 Mini. Of course, the 12 and the 12 Pro are the same size, right in the middle, this nice little sweet spot of the lineup, and the 12 Pro Max just being this absolute maxed out, biggest screen, biggest price. But then the cheapest most pocketable new iPhone in the lineup is this cute new little Mini phone. Now, Apple, Tim Cook, the all the supply chain knowledge and the studies they've put in, they already know small phones don't sell particularly well. So they make all of their changes and line up how many of each they're going to produce. And then they send it, they send it all into production. And you know, reviews, honestly, for the most part, were super positive across the board. People love the Mini phone. Yes, the battery life is weaker on the smaller phone, but to put a flagship shape and a flagship chip and a flagship camera in a Mini phone, it is just such a rare thing. So it was extremely well received. Tech reviewers love it. Real users are loving it. And the Mini iPhone still sold dramatically less than what Apple had prepared for it to. There are some surveys that have the Mini iPhone at like 5% of the total sales of the entire new iPhone 12 lineup, sometimes even less. I mean, it was really, really unpopular in the grand scheme of things to actually buy an iPhone 12 Mini. So suddenly it went from being the darling of the lineup to the least successful new iPhone of all time. And the headlines were all over this and sort of wondering if they would even try this again. And they did for one more year, they did an iPhone 13 Mini. It did even worse than the 12 Mini. And then it was quietly discontinued. And guess what was in its place? A brand new plus sized iPhone. Because of course. So the moral of the story is the Mini iPhone experiment reinforced what we already knew, which is not enough people actually buy small phones to be worth it for a company even of Apple size, to put in all the research and development to keep making these things.

Like some people think, 

oh, this thing is getting positive reviews, so it must be a success. Not always true. And also the counter, if things are getting negative reviews from YouTubers, that must be why it died. Also, not always true.So now here we go with the Zenfone.

Now, here's the thing, not to discount the Zenfone

it's actually a really good phone. In fact, it's a perfectly fine, large flagship phone. It brings all the good things about Zenfone 10 to a bigger scale, bigger battery, awesome battery life. The latest chips and specs, again, lightweight software and smooth performance, rock solid cameras. It actually added a third telephoto camera. So it's all here!

It just loses the biggest thing,

or I guess the smallest thing that really made it different. Just the fact that it was actually small and reachable from corner to corner and didn't require huge pockets or huge hands to comfortably dil it. All of that is gone. And now it's just like a ROG phone minus the gamer stuff. Actually, seriously, that's basically what it is. This is the new Zenfone next to the new ROG phone. If you take away the screen on the back, the 165 hertz display, the side USBC port, the shoulder triggers, honestly, it's basically the same phone. So this Zenfone just feels like it's blending into the sea of other giant phones. If I was guessing, Zenfone 9 and Zenfone 10, despite how much we loved them, didn't sell very well. And so they moved on, kind of the same way, that iPhone 12 Mini and 13 Mini didn't sell particularly well. The last part of that equation, the fun fact is, even today, the most popular new iPhone is still the Pro and Pro Max, the super high end biggest phone. And so what did Asus do? They made a super high-end big phone. Now, to be perfectly super clear, Asus technically hasn't confirmed that they're not going to make a regular Zenfone 11, but the body language suggests that this is the only one. They just sort rename it the way Apple just stopped making the Mini and started making a Plus. We just assume the Mini's gone. So there's no solution to this. It's right in line with the enthusiast phone dilemma. Whenever a phone manufacturer comes along and starts making an enthusiast phone,it gathers a really, really hot audience for that specific device, but it's small, and so when they end up trying to branch out and make it more successful, they lose the core fans. And I don't know if this Zenfone's gonna lose the core fans, but people who liked it for being small certainly aren't gonna like this one anymore. And this even applies to budget phones too. You know, small budget phones are getting bigger. Pixel 7A is a 6.1 inch phone. The Nothing Phone 2a that just came out is literally an ultra sized phone. And rumors of the next iPhone SE also point to that being not small. So the void is now open You know, someone might come along and make another small flagship phone to briefly fill that void, but don't expect it to last too long. RIP, the small flagship phone.