Fewer people buy them. But maximizing for only the bestest thing is not how capitalism is supposed to work. Even the goddamn sugar-water companies know they can crank out eleven different kinds of citrus-flavored diabetes, because they want to cover all their bases.

Some industries just hate niches. Your TV channel’s doing well because it shows stuff nobody else does? Cool, bet it’d make all the money if it showed the same stuff as everyone else. Your website got big thanks to weird shit that’s not welcome elsewhere? Wow, let’s scrape that off and it might be the next Facebook.

Smartphone choice has suffered immensely from this confusion. ‘People tend to buy thinner phones’ gets warped into ‘no phone will ever sell unless it can slice cheese!’ In these very comments - people are scoffing their hardest at the idea of putting all the guts of a modern millimeter-thick 5G postcard into anything more compact. Like it’s gotta be that big because the antenna’s six inches long.

Guys: the iPhone 14 only weighs one ounce more than the original iPhone. It does not need to be 50% larger.