Thirty years ago, if you asked a member of the public about the future of technology, there’s a fair chance you’d hear the word “miniaturization.” That’s the way things seemed to be headed in the 90s, and you could hardly move for observational comedians doing tight fives about funny little camcorders and funny little music players and funny slightly less massive mobile phones. By 2024, we all assumed, a household’s entire collection of tech products would fit into a matchbox.
In any event, it didn’t quite work out that way, which is often the case when you assume current trends will carry on endlessly in the same direction. An iPod nano is an appreciably more portable and convenient product than an iPod mini, but that doesn’t mean we’d get the same benefits from an iPod pico the size of a kidney bean or an iPod femto the size of a grain of rice. There’s a point where getting smaller stops being helpful.
The iPhone is a case in point. Our 90s friend would be baffled to discover that the iPhone 16 is taller, wider, and more than an ounce heavier than the original iPhone that came out 17 years earlier—but this is more than compensated for by the much larger screen and battery, and the arsenal of vastly upgraded tech components. Apple’s smartphones have got slimmer, but in other respects, it makes functional sense for them to stay the same size or grow. A 6.1-inch screen is just demonstrably more useful than a 3.5-inch one.
Of course, it hasn’t been a simple march upward in size, and Apple has experimented with smaller handsets from time to time. For a couple of generations, the iPhone SE was popular among folk who didn’t especially want or need a phablet. (Now there’s an ugly neologism you don’t hear anymore, mainly because big smartphones are no longer a novelty.) But was it really the small size that was the attraction, or was it the low price and the Home button? The evidence suggests the latter, because the small but mighty iPhone 12 mini and 13 mini, as popular as they were with reviewers, were so commercially unsuccessful that Apple killed off the line in favor of something bigger.
I loved (and mourned) the iPhone 12 mini because it seemed miraculous that something so small could contain such a formidable set of specs and features. I loved how unobtrusively it slipped into a pocket, and the lack of compromises its petite form factor appeared to entail. But the problem comes when a user goes from a 5.4-inch screen to a 6.1-inch one, or vice versa. I switched from the iPhone 14 Pro to the 15 Plus last fall and can confirm from personal experience that once you try a bigger screen, it’s very difficult to go back.
Perhaps this explains the situation of the iPad mini, which once seemed like the future of the line (following that same 90s logic, I suppose) but quickly became its pariah instead. Apple eventually updated the iPad mini last month, but this came after an astonishing three years in the wilderness and involved precious few worthwhile upgrades: one imagines that Apple spent a lot of that time giving serious thought to mercy-killing the iPad mini like the iPhone mini before it. The device is apparently popular in some professional applications, but I’m not sure there are enough doctors and airline pilots in the world to make it commercially viable when everyone else wants to watch movies on a screen at least the size of the 10th-gen iPad.
Does shrinking tech products ever make sense? Of course. Apple’s own Mac mini, now smaller than ever, is the most recent poster child for the mini concept and has proven a great and enduring success. Mainly, I suspect, because the Mac being mini doesn’t require the display to follow suit. It’s one of the few products in Apple’s ecosystem where the screen is unbundled from the rest of the device… and it helps that it’s plugged in rather than battery-powered, so being smaller doesn’t necessitate a reduction in functional life. The two big downsides of smallness don’t affect the Mac mini. (Another such example is the HomePod mini.)
What, then, would it look like if Apple tried to mini-fy one of its other products? What would a MacBook mini, for example, look like? Well, we don’t really have to guess because Apple actually used to sell a smaller MacBook Air with an 11-inch display… and the fact that it doesn’t anymore suggests this isn’t the optimal laptop form factor. Even in 2015, we concluded that the screen was too small, although in fairness this was more a function of the extremely thick bezels than the limitations of the chassis.
A 2025 MacBook mini would fix that issue, at any rate. And if we’re committing to the miniature concept then we can assume that the chassis would shrink inwards to meet the screen, rather than the screen expanding to meet the edge of the chassis. That would give us an unprecedentedly slim and portable laptop that would fit in Steve Jobs’ manilla envelope with room to spare for a packed lunch, which isn’t an unappealing thought. Chuck in an M3 processor and support for Apple Intelligence, and the MacBook mini would deliver high-class performance in an ultraportable package.
Unfortunately, some problems are fundamental to a device’s size. No matter how much we slim down those bezels, the screen can’t get any bigger than the chassis allows. More importantly, neither can the keyboard, which is bad news for people with human-sized hands and a desire to type. And if you’re one of the few people willing to stomach a laptop with a small screen and a small keyboard, there’s already the option to buy an 11-inch iPad Air with a Magic Keyboard and get two products in one. But I’d recommend you steer clear of the iPad mini.
Foundry
Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.
Trending: Top stories
How Apple learned to stop worrying and laugh at the Microsoft Zune.
Complaints about the Magic Mouse are missing the point, because there’s a logic to Apple’s laziness.
How Apple Intelligence can take over the world (or just the Apple ecosystem).
I’m skipping the Apple Watch Series 10 this year, says Mahmoud Itani, and so should you.
How small is the M4 Mac mini really? This small.
Podcast of the week
The internet didn’t become a widely accessible resource for years after the Mac was born, So where did people go to get Mac support? In this episode of the Macworld Podcast, we explore the history of Mac User Groups and their influence on the Mac community.
You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.
Reviews corner
- M4 iMac review: This might be the best iMac ever.
- M4 Pro Mac mini review: Remarkably small and incredibly powerful.
- 14-inch MacBook Pro (M4) review: From ‘meh’ to marvelous.
- 16-inch MacBook Pro (M4 Pro) review: Locked in and loaded.
- iPad mini (A17 Pro) review: A little faster, a little ‘smarter’.
The rumor mill
The M4 Ultra will reportedly get a massive core upgrade for Apple’s highest-end Macs.
Major changes are coming to the MacBook Pro–but not until 2026.
Left-field report claims Apple is working on a 90Hz display for iPad Air, iMac.
And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.
