Manton Reese - No Perfect iPhone Size

The lesson from all these switches couldn’t be more clear: there’s no longer one perfect iPhone for everyone.

I hate to disagree with Manton, because I think he’s really smart, but there has never been one perfect iPhone size for everyone. For the longest time there was only one iPhone size to pick, so we all had the same size out of necessity. Some of us rationalized this by saying that “Apple knows what the best size is, so I defer to them.”

To say that there is “no longer one size right for everyone” implies that there used to be a perfect size, and that’s simply not true. I actually switched away from the iPhone for 6 months when I realized that I was missing out on phones that I would enjoy more that had bigger screens. The iPhone screen sizes were always wrong for me, but I put up with them because I loved iOS software. Even now that I have more choice, none of the iPhones out there are perfect for me. I would love for there to be a 5 inch iPhone I could buy, but there isn’t one. As it stands I have to decide between a phone that’s a little smaller than I would like or one that is bigger.

This is all part of what you sign up for when you buy into the Apple ecosystem. You will not have as much “choice” as you might with other ecosystems, and you’re trusting Apple to make decisions that make sense for you. iOS offers a lot of good, so we put up with one size of iPhone for years. 2014 was the first time that we really had any choice at all in what size we got, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the quarter the new iPhones came out was Apple’s biggest quarter ever.