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The iPhone SE atop an iPhone 5 and 5S.
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From left to right: iPhone 5, 5S, and SE.
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The iPhone SE has an “SE” on it, which is one of the ways you can tell it apart from the 5S.
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Modern iPhones in three sizes.
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Personally, I think the antenna cutouts on the 5/SE design are more elegant than on the 6.
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A thicker phone means no camera bump.
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Bottom to top: 5, 5S, SE.
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The ports, buttons, and speakers are all perfectly aligned, meaning that cases designed for an SE should work on a 5S and vice versa (that may not be true for the 5, which had a different camera flash and may need different cutouts.
Andrew Cunningham
I’ve written before about how aging lithium ion battery technology is a burden to the modern smartphone. That’s still true now. A significant percentage of the bulk in modern smartphones is dedicated to batteries. The bigger the phone, the bigger the battery, and bigger batteries mean more battery life. This scale still tells the same story even if you account for the added battery drain of larger screens.
Today’s smartphone cameras are modern marvels, but there’s a reason Apple and Google have leaned so heavily on computational photography to improve the pictures taken with them: space limitations make it especially challenging to make these cameras batter, especially as popular new features call for additional lenses.
All that is to say that while some smartphone buyers might say they want a small smartphone, a big chunk of those who say that might change their tune when told that means worse battery life and poorer-quality photos.
Companies like Apple do market research and adapt their product lineups accordingly. This isn’t something former CEO Steve Jobs was known for, but Apple’s current lineup seems to suggest Tim Cook is not so averse to that approach to product development. And market research is probably telling smartphone makers that the great majority of consumers want big phones—either because they want big screens, or because other desires like longer battery life are easier to deliver in larger devices.
There is surely still a niche audience for small phones, though, and it’s not being served very well. Part of that may be because supply lines can only produce so many components in a given time frame, and it may make sense in many cases for Apple and its partners to focus those supply lines on products that have the widest possible appeal.
But nevertheless, a case can be made that Apple and Android OEMs are not adequately serving the market by leaving small phones like the original iPhone SE out of the mix.
Why Apple should keep making small phones anyway
There was a time when Apple’s product lineup reflected the philosophy that one product can meet the needs of all users, but that has changed under CEO Tim Cook. There’s a wide range of iPhones, Macs, and iPads available now. While this does undermine one of the original pitches behind the Apple ecosystem for some consumers—freedom from the burden of choice—it’s generally a good thing. It’s important for the future of Apple’s platforms that they address a diverse range of users, from low-income to high-income, from one region to another, and so on.
To that point offering small, iPhone 5-sized phones would fill in some critical gaps.
There have been numerous op-eds written over the past couple of years by women in the tech media space lamenting that it doesn’t feel like today’s smartphones are made with them in mind. And it’s a complaint I’ve heard time and again. It’s so common, in fact, that I can recall multiple times that a woman I have just met asked me what I did for a living, and as soon as I answered that I review gadgets, they responded with the question, “Why don’t they make phones that suit women’s hands anymore?”
Whether those individuals speak for all women or not, they’re large enough in number that it’s perplexing companies like Apple aren’t offering solutions.
And, of course, there are men with small hands, too. It shouldn’t be difficult to find a phone that fits how your body is built, but for many it is. Some people with small hands purchase phone grip attachments like the ones pictured below. These attachments serve a few functions, but one of them is to help people with small hands hold gigantic phones securely. It seems obvious to me that there’s something absurd going on when people have to purchase things like this to hold their phones.
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An entire industry of phone grips has popped up as phones have gotten larger. These from PopSockets are among the most popular.
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The Spygen Style Ring is another popular choice.
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Or there’s the LoveHandle.
Beyond that, there are accessibility concerns. Many users don’t have full use of both of their hands or other disabilities that would make small phones more practical for them. Apple has lately been an industry leader in offering powerful software accessibility features in iOS software for iPhones, so it’s surprising that the company isn’t doing as good a job addressing the diversity of human ability in hardware, too.
Phone size matters for software design, too. Apple’s phones became so large that users began demanding that app developers move UI elements previously placed at the top of the viewport to the bottom. And Apple introduced a feature called Reachability that lets users pull the top of the viewport down so you can reach it with their hands.
It seems to me that when you have to introduce a feature called “Reachability” so users can conveniently access your entire user interface, you have a serious design problem without a good solution.
Luckily, there is a pretty simple solution: offer consumers a smaller phone as one of many options. Failure to offer options to address the entire available market has been one of the key factors preventing Apple from achieving majority market share in some of its product categories. Bringing back the original size of the iPhone SE would be one of many ways the company could remedy that.
Sadly, with the recent unveiling of that 4.7-inch iPhone SE successor, it unfortunately doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon.
