[float4]

> The book 'Invisible women' by Caroline Criado Perez has a section about this, I highly recommend it.

I asked for this book for my birthday and read it. However, I couldn't help but notice that when the author wrote about my field (computers, broadly speaking) the research was often... lacking?

She wrote a solid 3-4 pages on large phones and it was just surreal to read. Paraphrased:

> Phones are very large. This is bad for women; they have smaller hands. Nobody knows why tech companies make large phones. It is very silly, because women actually use their phones more than men. I asked multiple tech journalists for an explanation, they had no idea either. Here I present some theories that can tie this issue to sexism: companies simply design phones with men in mind, companies expect women to carry a handbag all the time so a large phone is no bother, and so on. And sure, women could buy an iPhone SE but that model hasn't been updated in two years.

Nothing about better battery life, nothing about better media consumption. It was so confusing, as every tech journalist, literally every tech journalist, knows that bigger phones have better battery life.

Sadly it made it a bit difficult for me to fully trust the rest of the book.

[Larrikin]

From what I remember from phone history, the original iPhone was the size it was due to extensive research to ensure a Japanese woman's hand could reach all parts of the screen and there was a planned big push into Japan, which mostly succeeded at the time.

But Korean women actually lead the push for bigger phones, since they could keep larger devices like the Samsung Note in their purses and using more than one hand turned out to not be a big deal to most people if it meant being able to see more content/detail on the screen and better battery life.

[plorkyeran]

That's also just sort of blatantly incorrect. The early growth in phablet sales that eventually lead to them becoming the normal size for phones was disproportionally in _women_.

[klipt]

That's just standard MO for these think pieces. Anger sells.

Corporations: sell things women actually buy.

Journalist: why are these corporations so sexist against women? This makes me angry!

[ecshafer]

Anecdata but I, a man, prefer small phones that easily fits in my pocket and I can easily use with one hand. But otherwise most women I know have very large phones and when I've asked them, they prefer them. I think one component may be purses, but another is how likely one is to treat their phone as their primary computer.

[placatedmayhem]

Same. I have moderately large hands (XL motorcycle gloves), and I prefer the iPhone Mini form factor for the exact same reason. Sadly, it looks like it's gone to the graveyard. I haven't seen a flagship Android phone in a similar size recently either.

To get the battery life, I'd rather have a thicker phone without increasing the screen size.

[dhruval]

I can relate to your last sentence regarding trust. Happens alarmingly often when I read popular takes on things I know a fair bit about.

Which makes me wonder about the extent to which I can trust popular takes in things outside my wheelhouse.

[adolph]

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

― Michael Crichton

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

[fleddr]

With a book title like that it's unsurprising that this is her theory. So an entire round of "tech journalists" produces no answer, at all.

Pretty suspicious as the answer is obvious: phones are large because people want large phones. The reason that the iPhone SE is never updated is because nobody buys them, women included. Small phone fans are just a tiny vocal minority.

To add, when the Android ecosystem pioneered larger phones, there was intense pressure on Apple to follow. Because, again, people want large phones.

[nopenopenopeno]

Women are far more likely to have big phones because they are more likely to carry it in a purse.

Based on the title alone, I couldn’t take that book seriously.

[anyoneworks]

Idk. Her point that now that phones are maxed out to being comfortable for men and have stopped growing really nails it. They even having folding ones now, because forcing men to have a phone laughably large for their hands just isn't an option, whereas it is for women.

[taeric]

Have phones maxed out? Seems the evidence is inline with it basically growing to cannibalize all of the other utilities that it is able to replace.

[phphphphp]

A bigger phone may have a better battery life, but that does not mean that better battery life is why phones are large. iPhones have gotten bigger while battery size has shrunk. There is literally a void inside of the iPhone 14 Pro Max. Apple obviously make a very deliberate choice about the size of their phones, and so unless you have a plausible suggestion for the why of their sizing choices, your opposition to the idea that it's based on the average man's hand size doesn't hold up.

[davidktr]

Apple cut the production of the iPhone SE because of low demand. If it would be true that women would like to use small phones but cannot buy any, this is very hard to explain.

[Xylakant]

The small SE never was upgraded to anything resembling recent hardware. It‘s pretty much iPhone 6 level tech - no surprise demand was falling.

[stefanvdw1]

A new SE was released just this year with an A15 chip so that’s not it

[Xylakant]

The new SE (2nd and 3rd gen) have the form factor of the iPhone 8 and no longer the small form factor of the iPhone 5. They’re bigger than the iPhone 13 mini.

[dtech]

Was that before or after it wasn't updated for years?

[kgwgk]

Has the average man’s hand size doubled in the last fifteen years?

[creaturemachine]

The "void" only exists in models destined for one country.

[ithkuil]

> However, I couldn't help but notice that when the author wrote about my field (computers, broadly speaking) the research was often... lacking?

The words "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" popped in my brain. Luckily it didn't affect you