Sony tried to compete with the best camera, best DAC and I don't think those phones sold. Manufacturers build products the market wants. Wired headphones are not what the market wants. If you are a true purist you buy stuff from fiio and carry more then one device.
This is the same thing as with small phones. A vocal minority cried far and wide that they wanted them. Apple made them.. and they did, not, sell.
I don't know if you meant it but you seem to imply that that vocal minority only cried but didn't buy the small phones?
You know a minority is a _minority_, even if everyone in that minority bought a iPhone Mini, the sales number is still not going to be high.
(Edit: just checked, in 2022, 3% of iPhones sold were 13 Minis. not high but surely someone out there can run a sustainable business out of that 3% of mobile phones)
> Sony tried to compete with the bet camera, best DAC and I don't think those phones sold.
They were also priced like it -- and worse, many of them weren't available through US carriers, which is prohibitive to a market that often won't spend Kaz Hirai money all at once on a phone.
You're otherwise restating my point, though. Many of the niche hardware features don't have to be built into the device if you just offer more baseline extensibility.
I don't know of a single person who has switched to a smaller phone after having a bigger one (though also don't know anyone who bought a phablet, so maybe that's too big). As people moved most of their computer use to phones, bigger phones where you can see more of the web on your page, while still fitting in your pocket or purse, have won decidedly.
By and large, the only people who want small phones are those that still do most of their computing and media consumption on a PC or laptop. And that's becoming much, much rarer (and gaming doesn't really count here - lots of gamers have a separate stream or something on their phones while playing).
>I don't know of a single person who has switched to a smaller phone
It's difficult to do that when the available phones are just getting bigger. Ten years ago you could still find sub 6" phones easily. These days, not so much.
> I don't know of a single person who has switched to a smaller phone after having a bigger one
Consider how small the overlap is between devices in a product lineup in the first place and an audience that can buy them -- whether that's through carrier availability to put them on plans if in the US, or the resources to spend on them up-front.
That trend also is based on touch as the primary method of interaction -- but given the tethered AR devices we're starting to see trickle out, and Android's desktop mode finally hitting prime time, that assumption might not hold long-term. I'm not saying this will be the timeline we live on, but considering some of the experiments with dedicated, external devices for powering them, it's not hard to envision the pendulum swinging back toward smaller phones that focus more on things like the compute and sensors and less around a screen you look at all day.
Think of the (modern) Moto Razr. You could, hypothetically, have a compute device that more so resembles the folded-down version of this -- aimed more toward external displays, and less toward being regularly looked at.
This is the same thing as with small phones. A vocal minority cried far and wide that they wanted them. Apple made them.. and they did, not, sell.