More iPhone Minis sold in 2 years than SteamDecks in its whole life, and only one of those devices is considered a failure. It’s not that nobody wants them it’s that no company wants to make a phone that can’t run all the services they are trying to get you to subscribe to. Why else wouldn’t Apple chuck the innards from one of their watches into a small phone case and call it the iPhone Nano? It would literally cost them nothing more than they are already spending on R&D.
It’s not that nobody wants them it’s that no company wants to make a phone that can’t run all the services they are trying to get you to subscribe to
That doesn’t really make that much sense. A toaster can run most apps people use nowadays. Apple would sell you a brick if it had their App Store on it. There is an argument that they want to upsell you to bigger phones so that you pay more for the device itself, but if it was really worth it for them to offer smaller versions, I’m sure they would. Their biggest profits by far are from the App Store. And if they really were ignoring that market in the hopes of upselling people, then other companies would offer mini phones and people that want them would switch. But they’re basically nonexistent.
Do you really think that Fairphone, a company with sales in the thousands, should cater to five percent of the market? And comparing this to the SteamDeck is also not really fair, because Valve owns Steam and they subsidize SteamDecks via purchases from Steam. Fairphone doesn’t earn anything from purchases made on the Play Store. And in addition the SteamDeck is considered a success because it captured like 50% of the market when it released. The market is in general really small for these devices, but the SteamDeck was a notable success because it managed to become the go-to device. Were the market for handheld consoles as big as the phone market, the SteamDeck very much would not be considered a success.
They technically already did this. There’s an apple watch that you can put a sim card in that works like a phone. Maybe that’s what you were referring to?
I’m not referring to 5G enabled smartwatches, just using the watch hardware to make a smaller, lesser powered phone. AFAIK you still need an iPhone to activate an Apple Watch even if it’s the cellular version.
More iPhone Minis sold in 2 years than SteamDecks in its whole life, and only one of those devices is considered a failure. It’s not that nobody wants them it’s that no company wants to make a phone that can’t run all the services they are trying to get you to subscribe to. Why else wouldn’t Apple chuck the innards from one of their watches into a small phone case and call it the iPhone Nano? It would literally cost them nothing more than they are already spending on R&D.
That doesn’t really make that much sense. A toaster can run most apps people use nowadays. Apple would sell you a brick if it had their App Store on it. There is an argument that they want to upsell you to bigger phones so that you pay more for the device itself, but if it was really worth it for them to offer smaller versions, I’m sure they would. Their biggest profits by far are from the App Store. And if they really were ignoring that market in the hopes of upselling people, then other companies would offer mini phones and people that want them would switch. But they’re basically nonexistent.
Case and point, mini version accounted for barely 5% of sales in 2021: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-iphone-13-mini-is-over-ending-this-small-screen-fan-favorite/
Do you really think that Fairphone, a company with sales in the thousands, should cater to five percent of the market? And comparing this to the SteamDeck is also not really fair, because Valve owns Steam and they subsidize SteamDecks via purchases from Steam. Fairphone doesn’t earn anything from purchases made on the Play Store. And in addition the SteamDeck is considered a success because it captured like 50% of the market when it released. The market is in general really small for these devices, but the SteamDeck was a notable success because it managed to become the go-to device. Were the market for handheld consoles as big as the phone market, the SteamDeck very much would not be considered a success.
They technically already did this. There’s an apple watch that you can put a sim card in that works like a phone. Maybe that’s what you were referring to?
I’m not referring to 5G enabled smartwatches, just using the watch hardware to make a smaller, lesser powered phone. AFAIK you still need an iPhone to activate an Apple Watch even if it’s the cellular version.
Oof, that sucks