When Apple announced its new lightweight iPhone last month, my heart momentarily fluttered before disappointment set in. The new model is admittedly very thin, but I don’t want a thinner phone. I want a smaller one. And I don’t think I’m alone.
It’s no secret that smartphone manufacturers’ flagship devices have become bigger and bigger. But the disappearance of smaller alternatives represents an interesting puzzle. Dynamic market economies are usually very good at catering to many different segments of consumer demand, from the mainstream to the niche. So when it comes to small phone aficionados like me, even if we aren’t the majority, why won’t capitalism give us what we want?
We used to have a powerful ally in Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who mocked the idea of big smartphones in 2010, saying “you can’t get your hand around it” and “no one’s going to buy that”.
In 2012 Apple’s advert for the iPhone 5 demonstrated how comfortably the human thumb could reach across its 4-inch screen – something it called “a dazzling display of common sense”.
How times change. The battery health of my iPhone 13 mini, which has a 5.4-inch screen, is waning fast, but Apple has discontinued the line, and I have not found anything else of a similar quality and size. The consumer magazine Which? says it has not reviewed a phone with a screen smaller than 6.1 inches since 2022. Its survey of 1,000 readers suggests my frustration puts me in a minority, but not a negligible one: 33 per cent complained that modern smartphones were too large in general, while 19 per cent said the same about their own device.
I have met plenty of men who dislike big smartphones, but for women, the inconvenience is compounded by the smallness of our pockets. When digital publication The Pudding measured the pockets of the US’s 20 most popular jeans brands, it found that on average women’s pockets are 48 per cent shorter and 6.5 per cent narrower than men’s.
In other words, women must now live in a world in which phone manufacturers think we have hands the size of bears and jeans manufacturers think we have hands the size of pixies.
So why did big phones take over? In part, it is because our relationship to these devices has changed. People’s phones have become their maps, their computers, their cameras, their torches, their newspapers, their games consoles, their wallets and their televisions. Many of those activities are simply much better on bigger screens. I prefer to use my laptop or TV for some of them but not everyone owns multiple devices for different activities – especially in big markets such as China and India.
Technology analyst Carolina Milanesi at Creative Strategies says there are also technical constraints: because we now use our sophisticated multifunctional phones all the time, the batteries need to be bigger in order to last the whole day. The best cameras require room too.
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Given this direction of travel, analysts say it just doesn’t make business sense for manufacturers to make smaller alternatives right now. My own iPhone 13 mini didn’t sell particularly well relative to Apple’s bigger models. “What I hear back from the manufacturers is they say they do get these requests, and they accept there is a chunk of the market who would want something smaller, but that market is not big enough to justify the cost,” Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight, told me.
Innovation is happening, though. Some manufacturers, including Samsung and Motorola, have brought out “flip” smartphones that fold down small. But this only serves to highlight the final reason that capitalism is not giving me what I want: I’m not behaving like a good free market consumer myself. Rather than shopping around, I have allowed myself to grow too comfortable in the Apple ecosystem in which all my devices synchronise with one another, which makes me reluctant to switch brands.
According to a CCS Insight survey of consumers across the UK, Germany, Spain and the US, 58 per cent of smartphone users would not consider switching to a different brand next time – and 72 per cent of iPhone users. Wood calls the iPhone the “Hotel California” of smartphones, because once you’re in, it’s very hard to leave. “Do you have an Apple Watch?” he asked me. “I do,” I replied. “Then you’re done. You’ll take an iPhone to your grave.”
Perhaps it is time to change tack. If smartphones aren’t going to get smaller, we will just have to start a campaign for women’s pockets to get bigger. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
