It was cannibalized by iphone 12 mini and also se and older iphones still being sold by carriers. All that going on and it still sold millions of units. If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers. In fact if it was apple 10 or 15 years ago they'd also probably be happy with those numbers.
You also have to understand the psychological profile of us "utilitarian" iphone users. We only get one when our hands are forced either hardware failure or forced software obsolescence. The iphone mini came to market and was discontinued all in the time I was still using my SE.
"If it was any other phone manufacturer but apple they'd be happy with those numbers"
That's what sucks about these huge dominant companies. They suppress interesting products because they don't reach the huge sales they need to make a difference to a trillion dollar company. And smaller companies can't compete against these behemoths.
So I've never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why there aren't interesting niche phones that don't sell a ton (anymore: android used to be full of them, that was half the point), but are enough for a small company to make consistent (but small) profits. People who want niche phones are a tiny fraction of the market....but the smartphone market is enormous. A tiny fraction seems like it should be able to sustain a few small companies.
My best guess is that the kind of person who would found a company capable of making such a phone won't do it because they know it doesn't have potential to make them fabulously wealthy (just regular old wealthy) because it's inherently limited in scale. And the big companies don't do it because, while such a line could be profitable, in the absence of competition, it's more profitable to force their consumers to buy the "main" line and not make another product line.
My guess is they are only able to make the phones cheap if it’s sold at huge scale. If you make some niche small phone, the price goes way up and doesn’t look attractive.
Then you have to deal with the fact that the people with obscure requirements have a million other requirements. The person asking for a small phone then complains it doesn’t have a headphone jack, and AV1 decoding, and 16gb memory, and an unlocked bootloader, and whatever else.
Pokemon is one of the worst games for min maxing into a broken game. You go on the subreddits and everyone runs the same perfectly optimal team with the same perfectly optimal movesets. Playing like that probably is remarkably boring, but also once you learn of these patterns and playstyles it becomes hard not to consider using them. Like games that give you free money cheats, the seems great for a second then the drive to actually play the game as it was meant to be played is lost.
I've tried to keep my pokemon knowledge free and clear from this influence. I don't look up anything. I don't really understand the meta beyond basic type matchups. I fumble through the games inefficiently and slowly same as I did in the 90s.
I was just thinking too when there are new IPs, they are completely indistinct today. Take a character from any of the past 15 years of animated movies and they are interchangeable with each other. Everyone is afraid to establish a design language beyond looking kinda-sorta like a pixar character.
90s were so different with creative freedom with the media we were exposed to. All those shows had their own art style. Characters were distinct and unmistakable. Brands were cemented as a result.
Marketing executives have lost the hat. They are like those people from the Neutral Planet in Futurama. Somehow they reigned in everything that made them successful in the 80s and 90s.
I'm unfamiliar with anime, and I disagree. (Not that I'll be able to provide examples.) There's a generic anime look, but there are a lot of things that don't look like the generic anime look.
Just looked up some names I've heard people mention: The My Hero Academia character art is very visually distinct from OG Pokémon, which is very different to the Sun & Moon version of Ash Ketchum.
Lightning cable unfortunately has a shelf life. My current SE2 barely seats the cable appropriately in the connector and if you look at it wrong it stops charging.
You pick up the ipad off the coffee table, then what? This is the issue with the ipad since it has been released. What is the value proposition? Bigger iphone? Clumsier macbook? I guess it sells somehow or else tim cook would have shitcanned it already.
I use my 13” iPad Pro M4 almost as much as my MacBook Pro. I’m typing this on it right now. It is by far more comfortable for consuming any kind of media than a laptop.
If I’m researching something and I need to read any significant amount of text I’m going to grab my iPad and find a comfortable spot instead of sitting at my desk. Even though I have 2 big monitors.
I also have a Magic Keyboard that I can simply pop on if I need to write any significant amount, like this, and pop it off again for pure consumption.
It’s an amazing device for watching video (the tandem OLED looks incredible) and I often use the pencil to sketch out ideas.
Hiring seems to be way down in my world as a result of LLM. It isn't so much people staring blankly that I worry about, but companies thinking hey maybe we can get away with not replacing headcount for a while longer, or maybe this tool will help bootstrap the offshore team to be at parity with the expensive onshore team.
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