The "Unloved" iPhone SE...

Around two and a half years ago, Apple attempted to meet a perceived market demand for a "smaller" iPhone at a lower price, and engineered not the iPhone 5C, but instead a blend of iPhone 6 and 6s features within an iPhone 5s casing and screen.

This, of course, was the $399-starting-price iPhone SE, which combined NFC from iPhone 6 and the then-amply-powerful Apple A9 SoC from the iPhone 6s, along with the same 12MP, 4K video capture camera system from the 6s.

At the keynote, Greg Joswiak made the argument that the smaller iPhone still had an important place in Apple's lineup, citing the following statistics:

1) 30M "4-inch iPhones" (iPhone 5C and 5S units) sold in a trailing 12-month period (whether he meant FY15 or CY15 was unclear);

2) something on the order of 40% of such customers worldwide being new to Apple; and

3) more than 60% of "smaller iPhone" customers in China being new to iPhone.

When considering those numbers alongside the then-considerable base of iPhone users that had not upgraded to an iPhone 6 or better, there was definitely a business case in 2016 (and a fairly low-capital-cost one at that) to address this market with a familiar, yet definitely capable, smaller-screened iPhone.

There was just one problem. The iPhone SE never saw a single update in its nearly 30 months on the market (only a $50 price drop), and was unceremoniously discontinued,

• strongly indicative of a lack of demand

• to justify any further development of a smaller-screened iPhone form factor

• that was, from the moment of iPhone SE's introduction, a relatively small, well-under-20-percent slice of iPhone unit sales (around 230M units in FY 2015).

...Still Leaves a Theoretical Form Factor Gap in Apple's iPhone Lineup

Nonetheless, there's also no doubting that Apple's current iPhone lineup seems gigantic by comparison. Screen sizes start at 5.8 inches with the iPhone Xs, with a 6.1-inch display on the mainstream-flagship iPhone XR, ending with a massive 6.5-inch display on the iPhone Xs Max.

True, the steel-frame iPhone Xs is dimensionally similar to the iPhone 8 form factor (3.6mm wider, 5.2mm taller, 29 grams heavier), but in today's tech parlance, iPhone Xs and the X before it are undeniable "phablets", meaning every single one of Apple's new iPhones are in this "heavyweight" (and fast-growing!) smartphone screen class.

Of course, Apple still has what consumers consider "normal-size" smartphones, namely the aluminum-based iPhone 7 and 8 (Regular), each weighing a more reasonable 138 and 148 grams respectively. However, the iPhone XR represents the design writing on the wall, meaning that even iPhone 8 may only have until around September 2020 before all Traditional iPhones make their final bow from the major-markets stage, as Apple charges towards a "zero-bezel" smartphone ideal.

But if that leaves "nothing but phablets" in Apple's lineup...

...doesn't it only make sense that Apple engineer an iPhone that isn't a phablet to serve the various hundreds of millions of smartphone owners, iPhone owners or otherwise, that don't want phablets?

Well...yes and no.

Imagining the "iPhone XR 2 mini" (and that the Product Name is Actually Super-Elegant)

Using Apple's publicly-available iPhone XR media, available from Apple Newsroom's press release (and I am on Apple News, after all), I present to you the fictional, concept design, seven-syllable "iPhone XR 2 mini", not shown to scale, but shown in approximate relative scale to the iPhone XR.

XR? 2? Mini? What? I'll explain.

Your mileage may vary, but I'm going to play Product Design Lead and set down some core assumptions as to why the semi-tongue-twisting iPhone XR 2 mini pictured above (at right) is both

• the only smaller iPhone that makes sense,

• and the only smaller iPhone that could make good sense (at least, in those presumably intense Apple product planning/justification meetings).

At approximately 6.1 inches on the...err...diagonal? (curse you, uncertainty of rounded screen corners), iPhone XR features a folded-type LCD panel with a resolution of 1792x828 at 326 ppi, and a screen ratio of around 2.15:1.

Any mini version of the iPhone XR (we're trying to keep costs somewhat lower than the iPhone Xs, remember), must keep 1792x828 resolution as a baseline. And it must feature the exact same Apple-famous, repeatedly-imitated-yet-never-quite-duplicated, NotchPhone design.

The Wrong Way to mini

1334x750, the screen resolution of iPhone 6 through 8, is the past, and while a resolution like 1612x750 would be in keeping with the current aspect ratio, that's just another, legacy-ridden resolution for developers to have to contend with. And at the same 326 ppi, you'd only have an iPhone that's around 90% the size of the "unapologetically phablet" XR (not considering product thickness).

So, yes, you now have an iPhone that's dimensionally similar to the iPhone 8, but the "XR 2 not-so-mini" ends up with only around 20% more pixels, and around a quarter million pixels less than the XR. Honestly, that doesn't sound very iPhone X-family level at all, regardless of any other features.

And since the blah-screened, iPhone XR 2 not-so-mini is also about the same size as iPhone Xs...that just makes the lineup look all the worse by comparison.

The Right Way (or at least, superior way) to mini

Therefore, I think the only logical choice for Apple would be to look to its now-midrange, higher-resolution LCD panels. Namely, the 401 ppi panels as seen in iPhone 6 through 8 Plus.

1792x828 @ 401 ppi (thanks, Sven Neuhaus' PPI Calculator!) yields a "screen diagonal" of just about 4.93 inches, which is mostly useful for purposes of sizing up the dimensions of this mythical XR 2 mini unicorn. Quick and simple division yields the dimensional ratio: Around 81% scale relative to the iPhone XR.

What's that mean in terms of actual dimensions? Accepting that 81% might not be completely accurate on account of the current folded-LCD bezel/backlighting limitations, you get an iPhone that's about 61.3 mm in width and 122.2 mm in length.

That's less than 3 mm wider, and 1.6 mm shorter, than the iPhone SE (58.6 mm width x 123.8 mm length).

What you have now is a product that's almost exactly the same size as the iPhone 5, 5C, 5S, and SE, carrying Apple's newest screen-maximizing design language and every last pixel of the iPhone XR phablet in an extremely portable form factor relative to today's phablet-dominated world. Sounds...pretty darn impressive, doesn't it?

Well, it'd kind of have to be, because packing iPhone X(R)-level technology into an iPhone SE space would be no trivial matter. True, Apple could probably adjust the thickness of this product as needed...to iPhone 5C levels, if need be...and its intended market would be more than forgiving, given the additional space that would allocate for battery.

As far as how to market it? Well, this concept of product has been sold once before, in the form of the iPad mini 2. It was the only device Apple ever shipped that was, except for screen size, identical in nearly every way to its larger sibling (iPad Air 1), right on down to pixel count.

It was also $100 cheaper than iPad Air, but a little marketing magic, perhaps some additional color choices, and a clear product vision (along with the utter lack of flagship-level smartphones in this smartphone size class) could convince the target market that paying somewhere around $749, perhaps more (?!) to get an iPhone XR in an SE package is well worth it.

Unfortunately, here is where the potential positives end.

A Question of Priorities, And Echoes of "Dead-End" Smaller-Sized Apple Devices

The current problem with scaling down the iPhone XR is that you'd also have to scale down Apple's premier biometric authentication (and Memoji) platform, the Face ID sensor array (TrueDepth camera system). If you don't, a smaller X-class iPhone won't have much of a notch at all.

Meaning Apple would have to spend precious development time on miniaturizing an "if it ain't broke, don't make it even smaller" front camera/sensor system so it can fit an iPhone size it just discontinued in 2018.

Sure, "everyone knows" Apple is looking to minimize the size of the Face ID sensor array over time - maybe even completely hide it behind active pixels someday. And it would be relatively less costly in terms of business risk and people-hours of engineering if creating a more compact Face ID system by Fall 2019 was the plan all along. But when you consider that Apple didn't fundamentally alter the face of iPhone 6 for three years (four, if you count iPhone 8), it might be asking too much to expect Apple to shrink such a critical and proven biometric system in the space of only two years.

Not to mention the engineering challenges of folding a higher-resolution LCD panel within an overall-smaller iPhone casing, compared to the relatively plentiful interior volume of the iPhone XR.

Which leads us to the second major problem. While Apple was able to cram much of an iPhone 6s into an iPhone 5s case, and engineer an iPad mini 2 that was functionally identical to iPad Air 1 except in top-end speed, the fact remains...both iPhone SE and iPad mini were ultimately dead-end Apple products.

And so were iPod shuffle, nano, and mini before them. The smaller iPads and iPods were wildly successful in their heyday, but at day's end, simply had no future.

In other words, a compelling case can be made that by "returning" to the iPhone SE-sized smartphone realm, Apple is likewise skating to where the puck has already been - the exact thing Wayne Gretzky would never do. The wearables business (and incidentally, the screen size of Apple Watch) is expanding, and while iPhone is still the core of the company, Apple is undoubtedly hard at work in its clandestine R&D labs, researching product categories known and unknown that may someday supplant the smartphone (to the extent the smartwatch is not already an incipient threat).

There's a final potential deterrent to any sort of "iPhone XR mini", which I alluded to earlier in this article. That would be the sharp market trend away from smaller-screened smartphones. Why? My best guess: Today's phablet-class devices, while a bit ungainly, carry superior connected computing power to many PC laptops in active use - plus a host of other built-in must-have features at a weight class no laptop or even tablet could ever hope to match.

According to IDC, phablets - a niche oddity earlier in the decade - are now projected to be the majority of smartphone shipments worldwide by 2019. While that still leaves an IDC-estimated 40% of the market using non-phablet devices (under 5.5 inch-diagonal screens) in 2021 (around 700 million smartphones in total), the realities of the Android market (and Apple's own iPhone demographics) mean that the premium flagship market (where all of the innovation is) is precisely where Apple has been skating to all this time - high-end phablets.

While market trends could miraculously reverse, the safest bet for consumers? A training regimen of wrist curls and two-handed typing practice, along with minimizing phablet usage while walking down the street (or while half-asleep).

For the halcyon days of one-handed-operation smartphones may have permanently passed us by.