The iPhone 13 series might not come with the four devices that you saw in the iPhone 12 series. Apple might cut down on the cheapest variant namely the ‘mini’ device for the iPhone 13 series. There is a strong reason behind this. Apple almost always gets its strategies right, but with the iPhone 12 series, the company didn’t think the right way.
iPhone 13 mini Would Be a Wrong Move
Apple recently halted the iPhone 12 mini production. There’s no hiding the fact that the iPhone 12 mini was underperforming quite heavily in terms of sales. People were opting for the regular iPhone 12 instead of the iPhone 12 mini. Looking at this, it only makes sense that Apple comes out with three iPhone 13 models - a) iPhone 13, b) iPhone 13 Pro, and c) iPhone 13 Pro Max. There’s one thing that Apple didn’t get right with the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini. The Cupertino tech giant only focused on making the iPhone 12 mini smaller and didn’t differentiate it from the iPhone 12 in anything else. Further, the close pricing of the two smartphones pushed people into investing a little more and get the bigger screen iPhone. This is an era where people want large screen (at least 6-inches on average) smartphones and thus if Apple really wanted the iPhone 12 mini to be an attractive offering, it should have priced it even lower with certain differences in the performance. Look, from close pricing, I don’t mean the difference of Rs 10,000 is less. Psychologically, if this was a Rs 30,000 device and a user could get its slightly smaller version for Rs 20,000, that would have been a huge difference. But for a user, who is spending Rs 70,000 on an iPhone 12 mini, he/she wouldn’t think a lot about spending Rs 10,000 more as a big difference. No one would want to spend that much money on a small smartphone when its bigger variant is Rs 10,000 away. Thus, Apple might make a huge mistake if it comes out with the iPhone 13 mini the same way it did with the iPhone 12 mini. However, Apple can do a few things to ensure that its future ‘mini’ devices are successful if it plans on coming out with such devices.
iPhone 13 mini, What Should Apple Do to Make it Successful?
iPhone 13 mini can be priced at least with a gap of Rs 20,000 from the regular iPhone 13. Further, Apple should carefully reduce the features and the specs of the iPhone 13 mini. The iPhone 13 mini could feature the older generation chipset but still retain all the new features. The camera performance of the devices could be the same. There should be enough differentiation between the devices and the price should also be quite far away. Looking at the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12, it feels like Apple might have tried the ‘Decoy Effect’. Maybe Apple wanted the iPhone 12 mini to fail in the first place and launched it to only act as a catalyst to boost the iPhone 12 sales. Note that this is just an assumption and Apple might or might not have strategised the way I have interpreted things.
