For... well, most people. Half of people are women, so I don't know how they do it. I'm a man, with man hands, and modern phones are not one hand operable. You need two hands. Even if you can do a particular operation with one hand, the phone is unsteady and it's awkward.
I think people with large hands are definitely the minority. So, we're not optimizing for hand size. We're optimizing for engagement, I think.
It was observed a long time ago on HN that women, with their tiny hands, loved huge phones - since they were using small phones two-handed anyway - and it was the men who complained that small, one-handed phones stopped being sold.
You don’t speak for most people. You can only speak for yourself. The feelings of “Most people” are clear as demonstrated by the market; they not only find large phones fine, they find them preferable.
> modern phones are not one hand operable
So? I mean for me they are so it’s irrelevant, but what should it matter if they are not? The market obviously does not share your interest in devices to be operated in such a manner as a priority or something of particular importance.
That being said, it’s of course unfortunate that if that is your preference, that nothing in the market caters for it. Your preferences and wants are obviously entirely valid and it’s a shame there is no interest even from a boutique vendor in meeting them.
I have plenty of preferences for products that are not catered too, as I am sure is true for us all and of course I don’t love it, but I must live in the reality that the larger market doesn’t always want what I do.
> We’re optimizing for engagement
The market is optimizing for what consumers asked for, which was larger devices. You say I am in a minority, I claim equally that you are in a minority as well.
We are in agreement - you appear to be replying to my comment piece by piece without reading all of it.
I'm speaking about the one-hand operability, which I then conclude must not be very important and obviously the market prefers something else.
I will only address this part:
> The market is optimizing for what consumers asked for
This is hopelessly naive. This is true in the same sense that butane rings in cigarettes is optimizing for "what consumers asked for" - more pleasant to smoke cigarettes. Consumers don't know what they want, they're fed whatever is going to make the most money by advertisers. And they will like it, because there is no other choice.
The market is not some perfectly rational machine. It is, often, a self-eating beast, concerned with it's own self-preservation to such a degree that it destroys itself. Had the Tobacco industry chilled, they wouldn't have been eviscerated by legislation. But no - they had to target children, they had to make the death sticks as addictive as possible. As if to put a bright flashing sign on themselves that says "look at me! Regulate me!"
> Consumers don't know what they want, they're fed whatever is going to make the most money by advertisers. And they will like it, because there is no other choice.
Except we know this is not the reality in this case as the worlds most successful mobile device marketer has made multiple attempts to create and market smaller devices which time and time again the majority of consumers have rejected.
The majority having a preference not matching your own doesn't need to be a conspiracy of consumer stupidity. Apple held out for a long time on making larger devices and ultimately caved to consumer sentiment, they didn’t grow that sentiment, they reacted to it.
Yes, again, similar to how a Tobacco consumer would reject older styles of Cigarettes. They were objectively worse - less nicotine, less impact on the brain, slower burning, and uneven burning. I used to smoke, ask me how I know.
> conspiracy of consumer stupidity
You misunderstand. Consumers aren't stupid, they're human. Human are remarkably easy to exploit. Exploiting the human mind is orders of magnitude easier than exploiting a computer.
I mean, you put a shiny machine in front of a human and tell them there's little to no chance they'll win money and they'll destroy themselves in front of it. Drain their bank accounts, ruin their marriage. You don't even have to lie - you can tell them gambling is bad, you can tell them they won't win, but that doesn't actually affect the exploit. Monkey brain see bright light, dopamine hits.
It's really quiet simple, and you're a market-minded man so you should be able to deduce this: it's all about incentives. You can continue to believe that the devices best for advertisers also happen to be what consumers want most. I think it's painfully naive, almost child-like.
I mean, look at smart TVs. Why do we have those? Do consumers prefer them? Sure. Is it to everyone's benefit that consumers prefer it? Certainly. So then we must ask - how did consumers come to prefer them? Was it, maybe, forced? Were they, maybe, exploited?
Just consider this. If I want to enter the Tobacco market, anywhere in the world, should I enter with a nicotine-free cigarette, or even a low-nicotine cigarette? Would those be successful? No, I think, the company would sink remarkably fast. We'd have no sales, consumers wouldn't buy it.
At 193 cm in height, I have large hands too. I currently use a Zenfone 10 and a Galaxy S10e before that, and I can grip them both just fine in one hand, but I can't also control them with that same hand without awkward contortions and a reliance on gravity.
The only phones I've had that I could comfortably use one-handed were my old BlackBerry Q10 (2013) and BlackBerry Classic (2014). The Q10 because it's short enough to hold between my thumb and ring finger such that I could use my index and middle fingers on the touch screen (slightly unorthodox but it worked really well), and the larger Classic because it has an optical thumbpad and excellent software support for it (it was so good I rarely used the touch screen at all). And both had physical keyboards.
I don't have especially small hands and I can't stand my Nokia XR20 (which isn't even close to the biggest phone out there). If I can't reach every corner of the screen with my thumb while holding the phone, it's uncomfortable and unpleasant to use. Sadly that is most phones these days.
