7 years in, foldables are still where they were. You had your fun wasting this r&d money, now give us smaller devices.

Imagine if that approach was taken when the early iPhone antenna didn’t work, or the screens broke more easily. Cheer up mate !

> now give us smaller devices

Yeah, there's TENS of us :')

Make that eleven.

Twelve. Those bastards at the Apple Store broke my mini when I brought it in for a battery replacement. RIP mini

They're more reliable than at the start, that's something.

And smaller meaning what? Z flip not small enough?

I would love if the next air was just half of the duo (the iphone solo?)

A square I can actually reach all the corners of

No one wants your smaller devices. Why do you assume people want what you want? Most don’t, they’ve tried it and no one buys them, that’s why they don’t make them. The market has spoken.

Well, Apple is still trying to hang on to the iPhone Air, and according to various reports it has sold only about half the total units that the mini sold. And Air sales have cratered to virtually zero.

Folding phones will likely be an even smaller market.

I don't think the problem is that there isn't a dedicated percentage of people who would buy smaller phones like the mini, or that the sales couldn't be profitable. The problem is that the screen size to battery volume ratio is or least was particularly bad for the mini. (The Air has this problem too.) I'd love to see them try again with modern hardware. I wouldn't use one personally, but know many people who would in a flash.

I think the Mini line was doomed by the second iteration of the SE.

I know multiple people who held onto their original SE because of the form factor, but bought the second SE when it came time to upgrade because that seemed to be as small as the iPhone would go anymore.

Presumably the cost of replacing these based on the higher than average defect rate is already baked into the price.

Or Apple could say that they were holding it wrong to save that cost.

I feel this is worse than Nintendo’s “solution” to Switch joycon drift - giving us in the USA (for now) free refurb/fixes which must be cheaper than admitting there’s an issue, but still a cost/brand trust problem.

The subreddit is filled with posts of people's devices breaking even on the first day of purchase. It's hard to know what the actual breakage rate is but it's certainly suggestive of problems. It would be crazy if Apple with all their typical polish managed to miss some major flaw.

Typical polish: "You're holding it wrong."

More typical polish: iPhone 6 that bends easily.

It's what happens when you rush a product. The indications that Apple has lost the plot are getting ever harder to ignore.

JerryRigEverything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5laDGy4INB0

That actually took quite a bit of effort to break and didn’t break completely.

I find it kind of funny they replace these defective units with another defective unit, but I guess that’s all Apple can do, for now.

Has anyone caught wind of any hardware revisions?

> When I stopped in an Apple Store yesterday and checked one of these out at the display table, I noted that the Apple Store employee who was showing the phone to people in a sort-of ad-hoc demo session told people that to close it, they had to press on the bottom-center bit of the hinge that's in-line with the bottom of the frame. Saw someone else online suggest that this could be because people pressed down on the middle of the screen to initiate closing it, and that that exposed some part of the screen to some moving parts in the hinge that were never meant to interact.

Comment from the article. Uh-oh, are we headed for another "You're (h)folding it wrong"?

> Saw someone else online suggest that this could be because people pressed down on the middle of the screen to initiate closing it,

One expects that a multibillion corporation affords itself a test departament. /s