Apple switched to a larger screen size not because they thought it was better but their phones were losing out in showrooms to the larger Galaxy phones.
Well, when you can't go thinner and lighter without ruining structural integrity and battery life, you go bigger with the screen. Gotta keep people on the upgrade treadmill so they can visually see who is up-to-date, just like the notch.
Except that could easily be achieved by making the phone slightly thicker, instead. When phones are so thin and fragile that a rigid case is practically mandatory, I don't know why "thin" is a selling point.
We could solve two problems at once: get rid of a camera bump and make the battery bigger at the same time by using the extra space of the camera bump to house a bigger battery.
Not sure why it hasn't happened yet or if it has I don't know if it.
My guess is the same reason glossy screens won out over matte screens for laptops: because they look slightly better on the showroom floor, despite the worse real-world performance.
Why does the battery size matter? Do we compare car fuel tank sizes? We typically care about how it affects our use of the product. How long can the iPhone SE last on a charge? How does it compare to other iPhones?
Yes. I can't tell you why they thought it was important, but in my childhood I've heard multiple adults talk about "My car goes <x> miles before a fill-up". Never made sense to me, gas stations are everywhere and filling up is quick.
> Never made sense to me, gas stations are everywhere and filling up is quick.
Gas stations are not everywhere, and can be few and far between on certain routes, and more to the point filling up being quick may be the normal conditions, but if you are old enough (or have lived in the right–or maybe wrong would be more accurate–places even without being that old), you have experience of times when filling up has not been quick, or even, on any given day for any given car, necessarily permitted.
I think it's because more and more people are opting to use phones to consume their media instead of traditional avenues like TV.
Lying in bed, on the bus, in the classroom, etc - less time to sit down in the living room and watch youtube/movies on the TV - especially with the TikTok(/vine?) generation latching onto vertical video formats too.
I think it's just a generational thing - I remember being amazed at how people are consuming vertical video now like it's anything else when 5-10 years ago people would give the cameraman grief for filming this "crazy moment!" in vertical format :P
Why are screens getting so big? So they can shove more ads?