Action at a Distance

The other reason the rumoured small iPhone makes no sense

Last week, the Wall Street Journal set off yet another round of “iPhone nano” rumours with an allegedly confirmed report that Apple are working on a “half size iPhone”.

So far, most of the debunking arguments have focused on either a conflicting report from the New York Times or focussing on backwards compatibility issues for existing apps. The compatibility argument holds a lot of water; basically, even if a small iPhone used the same native resolution on the screen most apps would still be unusable because their buttons would be half the size they used to be.

But there’s another good reason I haven’t seen discussed anywhere. Take a look at the iFixit iPhone 4 teardown. Specifically, look at the volume the battery takes up – it’s most of the device. If you subtract half the volume without jettisoning a number of features, you still have to fit most of the same parts in: the mic jack, the vibration motor assembly, the antenna, the SIM card slot1, the CPU and GPU and baseband processors, the flash memory. None of these parts can be made significantly smaller. So what do you have to jettison to make a smaller iPhone? The battery. You’d have to lose more than half the physical size of the battery. And as battery technology hasn’t had any significant breakthroughs in the last year, that also means losing more than half of the battery capacity.

So even if this mythical iPhone nano also used much lower power components – which would mean a much weaker CPU and GPU, less RAM, less flash – and allowing for less power used to light a smaller screen, you’d be seeing a big drop in battery life too. This simply doesn’t seem credible to me.

While we’re on the subject of iPhone components, the WSJ also somehow makes the leap that a smaller iPhone would be inherently cheaper too. I can’t follow the logic. Making electronics smaller usually makes them more expensive, not cheaper. Apple might reduce raw material costs on the screen assembly, battery and housing but they only make up a small part of the overall cost of an iPhone.

Unless, of course, it starts to get a bit more radical and perhaps discard a lot of hardware compared to the iPhone 4. Maybe it loses almost all the flash memory, for example, in favour of cloud based media streaming. Maybe Apple even give up the App Store altogether – then the screen can be any size it wants to make it, and the CPU and GPU requirements can be minimised. If you want to look at what happens when Apple take this sort of radical approach, compare the current generation iPod Nano with the iPod Touch. Superficially, they are quite similar – they both have touchscreen UIs with some common design points and similar iconography – but underneath, the Nano is totally different. It runs a hermetically sealed mini OS that can’t run third party apps and offers little user customisation.

The App Store is the possibly the greatest piece of platform lock-in since .DOC files and there is no way Apple will jeopardise its ability to keep users on its platform. Any feasible reduced size iPhone cannot offer meaningful App Store capability, and hence I suggest will not happen.

1. I am aware of the rumours that Apple had a plan to move to so-called “emebdded SIM cards” that was blocked by the carriers; this was, as far as I can tell, a load of rubbish. In fact, embedded SIM cards is a subject of ongoing market and technical research by a large number of cellular technology vendors sponsored by the GSM Alliance. ↩