kirklennon

You ignore that it’s physically impossible to put a flagship performance in an under 5 inch format.

Not even slightly.

The battery alone scales with size. The camera is a physically space occupying bunch of glass and sensors, that even the ultra size phones have to put them in awkward bulges outside the phone main body to deliver the kind of qualety demanded by users.

The obvious solution is to make the body of the phone very slightly thicker. Thinness is more important in a bigger phone to shave off some of the overall bulk and make it easier to hold but when the area of the phone is smaller, you can easily make it thicker, with the added advantage of making the camera bulge less ridiculous. I’m reluctant to even call it a tradeoff because you’re not really giving anything up. This would have been a legitimately comparable phone, but they never made it so there’s no direct sales comparison in the market. There is no hard data, only inferences.

The smaller phones were not comparable models. They were a lower-tier product with fewer features. This contrasts with the regular and Plus/Max versions where it's very much positioned as the same phone in two sizes.

That’s not true. Apple sold a mini version for several generations and consistently the mini was always the worst performing version sales wise.

The "mini" lineup was never truly comparable to the flagship product. The specific deficiencies varied with the year but they were all missing an entire camera, and cameras are one of the single most important features of an iPhone.

The mini phones were significantly and arbitrarily gimped to mark them as a distinctly (and quite visibly) lower tier phone.

No, that's precisely my point: they don't because no major phone manufacturer has simultaneously sold both a large and compact flagship. And when there are legitimately comparable models in different sizes, the smaller size fairly reliably sells better.

No one big releases a small phone because no one buys them.

Except we don't have any good data to say why. Do people buy a bigger flagship over a smaller model that has older technology? Yes, but the only thing we can say with confidence from that is that people want the latest technology. The closest comparison we can make is Apple's Max/Plus and non-Max/Plus versions, which offer essentially the same model in two sizes. The smaller size consistently sells better. It's also cheaper. Does it sell better because it's smaller or because it's cheaper? Probably both, actually. But as long as nobody offers a small flagship (since Apple stopped making them entirely and switched to larger flagships), nobody can say for sure how well they'd sell.

It should also be noted that Apple admitted at one point to purposefully slowing down older iPhones too, which very clearly was done to get people to upgrade. If that’s not planned obsolescence I don’t know what is.

It is the literal exact opposite of planned obsolescence. Apple introduced a new feature, still present in all of their phones, to extend the useful life of old phones. Batteries degrade with time and use and, after a certain extent, are not able to maintain the sufficient and stable current levels for a phone to operate, particularly during moments of peak power draw. If this happens (and this applies to every Android phone as well), the phone will just shut itself down. Specifically it will shut down right in the middle of you trying to actually do something, since that’s what’s going to cause a spike in power demand. Apple added additional power management to iOS to dynamically throttle power use only when and to the extent needed. On a phone with a perfectly healthy battery, it’s not in use at all. On a phone that’s had years of hard use, it might still only barely be noticeable with some high-demand tasks running slightly slower or the screen slightly dimming. The worse health the battery is in, the lower its current charge level, and the greater the temporary spike in usage, the greater the throttling. Recharge it or resume less intense use and the throttling stops.

So after release (unplanned), they gave new life to what were otherwise obsolete batteries so you could wait longer to upgrade.

There's no "too." This is the (US) price to have Apple themselves replace your battery for you with a new OEM battery, inclusive of the battery and labor. It basically represents the highest available cost.

they try to create a sense of urgency to sell people what they don’t need.

Do they? Yes, they certainly advertise what's new but they're not primarily targeting customers with last year's phone. I recall seeing previously that the average time to keep an iPhone is three years. On Apple's iPhone 15 product page, I found two spots where it called out direct comparisons to previous iPhones: "A17 Pro GPU is up to 70% faster than the GPU in iPhone 12 Pro" and "iPhone 15 Pro has up to 6 more hours video playback than iPhone 12 Pro." They're targeting upgrades to the newest flagship at people with the flagship from three years ago. Of course due to the long support for iPhones, that three year iPhone will inevitably end up in the hands of another user, where it will continue to live on, so there's nothing at all wasteful about upgrading. It's not even wasteful to upgrade every single year because those year-old phones are still used. It's only when the phone is irreparably broken or hopelessly, legitimately obsolete (due to still rapidly-improving technology) that it's then recycled (and Apple has developed special robots to make extracting the rare earth metals viable at large scale).

I wonder what the latest iPhone would look like if Apple were on a once every two years release schedule instead of annual.

I think it would look exactly the same as it does today except that it would include two years' of innovations and changes rather than one, but would also mean that if you needed a new phone before its release, your only option would be an increasingly dated model. Customer: Hi, I'd like the latest flagship. Store: Here's the best technology that was available 20 months ago.

I also think it's worth noting that Apple pretty much single-handedly slowed the release schedule for phones. Prior to the iPhone, Nokia was releasing roughly a dozen barely-differentiated models per year, spread throughout the year.

A battery replacement from Apple itself for an iPhone 8 is $69. You can get third-party replacements for less. They actually offer battery replacements going back to the 5s (released in 2013) and screen repairs going back to the iPhone 6.

A decade of first-party hardware support for the most likely to fail components in a phone is pretty hard to square with allegations of "planned obsolescence."

The phone has advantages in that it’s more secure (because you’re not giving the merchant your real card number so when they inevitably have a hack, you don’t need to get your card replaced), and that you can carry multiple cards without taking up any extra space. Also, most people are playing on their phones while they wait to check out so it’s already in their hand.

Yahoo Inc. owns TechCrunch, Autoblog, and Engadget, plus some other stuff, along with their own Yahoo-branded stuff (excluding Yahoo Japan, which is a totally separate company). It's a ton of eyeballs, and they sell the ads on their sites.