Besides the economic / niche issues - I love my iPhone mini, I loved my Xperia compact, apparently people on HN also love their minis, SEs, and compacts, but no

Besides the economic / niche issues - I love my iPhone mini, I loved my Xperia compact, apparently people on HN also love their minis, SEs, and compacts, but nobody else does - there are real technical problems with making small phones. We seem to have reached a local minima with phone mainboard/CPU size. Generation over generation, the last 2-3 years worth of phones share similarly sized logic boards. So, as more and more internal footprint is dedicated to camera hardware, less and less is available for battery. As phone chipsets appear to have also bottomed out on TDP and idle power, this means that either battery life gets worse, cameras get cut even more, or phones get bigger. Unless or until Apple make a small-phone _specific_ processor and introduce a new process with a stripped-down CPU (which will make the same HN readers mad, eye-roll), we're back to giant phones for now.