I remember when the first Android phones with 4-inch screens hit the market, I saw someone comment online that if a 4-inch screen was better Apple would have figured that out during R&D for the iPhone and made the original iPhone 4 inches.
I still think the original iPhone was the best size. I use the iPhone mini today, and I wouldn't mind it being a bit smaller still.
It really lends itself to the phone being a tool, rather than a device for endless entertainment. It also suggests it is an accessory, with the desktop/laptop being the home base, rather than the phone being a primary device.
It really bothers me that the phone is now at the center of the ecosystem. It seems like the hub should be something that isn't as vulnerable (to theft, loss, or drops) as a phone.
There's a pretty common use case that's basically this: get in the car, plug in the phone, and drop it in a cup holder with the charging port pointing up and all the antennas that would point skyward during handheld use are now pointing at the ground.
They were and are good at this. But the decision to ship this in this state before their typical quality bar was Tim Apple’s. He reportedly overrode the design team and demanded it ship now to enter the market and iterate in public. Even though he’s otherwise hands off with the product itself. This was all widely reported but has been missing from recent reporting now that it’s out.
The thing is, when one has a user base the size of Apple's what "feels" right actually covers a very large range of possibilities. Even when Apple "excels" and covers most of that range, there's still a ton of people left out. Which leads to every Apple thread on HN filled with users bemoaning Apple's poor choices.
There is a fundamntal tradeoff between FOV and image quality at any given pixel density (and there are other tradeoffs between pixel density and cost and compute power needed).
