I consider cases an unfortunately necessary evil.

I prefer to go raw most of the time.

On a nice technical level, heat and space. On a sales level, upselling. Larger phones dissipate more heat. Heat is bad for computers/phones. A 45w quick charge (which is dumb to use, fyi. Fast charging degrades batteries faster) has a larger amount of circuitry in the phone that takes up space to regulate and monitor the charge.

Beyond that, there’s a nice little formula used for how fast you can safely charge a lithium battery, and that formula directly ties into battery size. Essentially, for every 1000 mah worth of battery, the battery pack can handle about a 1 amp per hour charge (roughly). So the bigger the battery, the higher the wattage and amperage you can somewhat safely go. This is the main reason the s24 won’t have 45w fast charging. It has a 4,000mah battery. It’s too small a battery to even use the 45w fast charge without degrading the battery too fast. The s24plus has a 4,900 mah battery. That’s big enough to handle a 45w charge (though again, if you want your battery to last as long as possible, you want to disable it in settings.).

Now aside from just up selling, smaller phone= smaller parts needed. Your thermometer needs the hardware inside to support it and that has to go on the main board. Your smaller phone has less open space to fit it on there.

Then things like video boost while may be just an upsell, could also be because recording very high quality video is an intensive task on your phone so it causes more heat and drains your already smaller battery faster, which generates heat as well, and your smaller phones can’t get rid of that heat as quickly.

Next, I had seen you mention 1440 screens. That means across the whole screen there would be something like 2,960 pixels/dots of light in one direction and 1440 in the other. The more dots, the more resources (processor use etc) you need to power them, so your battery drains faster and phone heats up more. But the smaller the entire screen is, the less dots you need to make it look the same to you from the one or two feet away from your face you hold your phone. Smaller screens don’t really need a 2960 x 1440 screen. You can’t tell much of a difference on a screen that size and it would just make the batt drain faster for almost no reason. I have a large screened Note 20 Ultra that has a 1440 screen and I don’t even use it. I turned it down to 1080 because even on my larger phone the viewing quality wasn’t enough of an improvement to trade off from how long my battery would last on a charge.

Ram is mostly a money grab, but each ram chip does also use more battery as well.

In summary, for some things it’s a money grab, for others, there’s good reason it’s that way. But it’s also become a niche market for people who want the high end stuff in a smaller phone. You’re a minority. Cramming all the things in a smaller space is harder and therefor more expensive. There just aren’t enough people who are willing to pay a premium price to get the highest end phones that want a small phone, so no one makes them. There isn’t enough money in it. I believe you said in here you wanted to buy a phone for around $750, while top end phones are double that price, so not even you are willing to pay $1500 to get a 6" phone with all the best stuff packed inside.

Hope this helps. Cheers

Exactly, artificially limit the phone touch you to bigger phones.

Mind you, once you have many phones sharing the same hardware(for example the same 6.7inch screen), it becomes a question of adding or removing features (fast charging, AI, etc).

It makes commercial for companies to standardise on as many parts as possible.

That’s a hill I will die on. Bring back rugged android phones under 6".

Yeah the mini is a great phone just didn’t sell well. I thought maybe they would roll the X back out as a mini or a SE since it’s screen size was about halfway between the mini and regular 12&13. I never thought phones would just keep getting bigger. I remember switching from a HTC One to an LG G3 with its massive 5.5” screen and it was just perfect lol.

Apple has different design tradeoffs, they use smaller camera modules than Samsung, at least compared to the last few Samsung models, for example. They also tend to use smaller batteries, and charge them slower, requiring less cooling components. They also design more of their components in-house than other manufacturers, allowing them more efficient use of space. Their RF also tends to be inferior to Samsung, trading antenna design for space. Apple also uses inferior cooling solutions, relying on software thermal throttling to cut down on the physical size of the device. The whole trade-off of what can be fit in that smaller space is something each manufacturer has to make per model.

Optical zoom will always be superior to digital from the perspective of getting focused light onto a sensor, it’s just science. Digital methods will indeed continue to improve, I’ll leave most of that philosophical debate to those more passionate about camera tech, however. They’re definitely leveraging the new coprocessor to enable better image processing, in the same way Google leveraged their ML coprocessor to improve pictures out of Pixels a few generations back. Companies think software processing of images can “work around” image quality that requires physical hardware. (Look at Samsung Moongate.) It results in images that may end up being visually pleasing, but as for image quality, that’s debatable. (Zoom in on a Samsung zoomed picture of a pine tree for example, the way it tries to contrast/filter/process the branches makes them look like some 1990s Photoshop unsharp mask filter job meant for newsprint.)

Good conversation.

You know, I should buy a spare. Thanks for the idea

I waited for the Pixel Fold specifically for this reason, Galaxy Folds are way too narrow and makes you want to use it unfolded which I think goes against the spirit of a foldable, to be a phone when you need a phone and a tablet when you need a tablet

It’s actually exactly what I wanted in terms of form factor and purpose, but the battery life is bad for it being so thick, and it comes with a version of android that did not let me sideload the correct version of Google messages on. This caused problems with my Google fi messages for web sync function which basically made the entire phone pointless since I do 99% of my texting and calling on my pc while my phone is off. It’s a long story but in the end I was not able to get it working fully. I went back to my pixel 7.

But if you’re looking for a flip phone with enough smart capabilities to get by in the modern world, this is it. It’s also really really cheap, great for a backup phone in case you ever lose or destroy yours.