On paper, there’s not much to recommend the iPhone 12 this year. Sure, slightly faster new processor. Sure, 5G if you have a carrier that actually has it anywhere nearby. Sure, half a dozen tweaks to the camera or the battery or what have you, and nothing that would make you turn in last year’s phone to get this one. The days of wild radical change are over.
Except.
I made a list over a year and a half ago of the things I would want from a notional “iPhone X-Minus” in those innocent days where a bigger phone was “Plus” and not “Pro Max”. A surprising number of them were picked up by the new iPhone SE when it dropped in spring (and when I promptly bought it). But the rest went by the board for a long time, because the new SE itself – in the hair-too-big body of the iPhones 6 through 8 – was smaller than the smallest X-series 5.8” phone.
Except now we have all but confirmed that there is a 5.4” iPhone 12 mini, so-called, and it does have an AMOLED display that goes edge-to-edge and will have all the assorted features of the new phones like night mode, Animoji, or a battery over 2000 mAh and puts all these features into a package somewhere between the two SEs in size – making it just about the size of the original Moto X, the only Android phone to ever sufficiently tempt me into buying it. I said for years that what I wanted, as Apple’s handsets got ever larger, was a Moto X capable of running iOS. And the iPhone 12 mini might just be it.
That’s why I’m still tempted. If the smallest iPhone 12 were still 5.8”, I would be no more desirous of owning it than I was of owning the iPhone 7 once I bought the original SE. My iPhone X from work has sat untouched in my backpack ever since iOS 14 dropped for the new SE, bar some experimentation last night for the first time in a month because reasons. I don’t need the newest iPhone at all. It’s just the temptation of a bigger screen in a smaller package, something I’ve been coveting the notion of for three years at a minimum and in some ways longer, ever since the Moto X put the same size display as the iPhone 6 in a smaller device with a bigger battery.
I guess we’ll see if it’s worth it.