Big phones work for everyone, except you
When the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 came out in 2014, I refused to believe smaller size phones were truly dead. I didn't want to believe they'd done it, but the signs were clear. Other iPhone owners told me there would be an adjustment period. I would have an easier time using and holding onto a live fish, the way it flops around in my hand. The time I spend using my phone hasn't changed, but now my hands go numb and wrist and fingers ache holding it.
In bounding after large screens, phone makers seemed to ignore the usability issues that accompany them. Small studies have shown before that 4.3 inches is about as big as a phone can get before people start struggling to use it. The time to operate the phone slows down significantly because one-hand use is awkward-and that's for average men's hands. Assuming a normal distribution, a phone bigger than 4.3 inches is too big. People were especially annoyed about their inability to use the phone safely with one hand. Women's clothes also haven't caught up to the big-phone trend. It's weird, isn't it, how bad of a design choice this seems to be, from a company whose driving force is good design?
That brings us to the economic explanation, and my own personal conspiracy theory: There are powerful interests that want us to drop our phones so they can fix them and sell us new ones. If you took the earlier versions of the iPhone in, it wasn't uncommon to get a free replacement phone for one with a cracked screen. Fast forward a few years, and Apple now charges $99 to replace the screen on an iPhone 6S, even if the owner bought the AppleCare warranty.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-big-phone-works-for-everyone-but-you
In bounding after large screens, phone makers seemed to ignore the usability issues that accompany them. Small studies have shown before that 4.3 inches is about as big as a phone can get before people start struggling to use it. The time to operate the phone slows down significantly because one-hand use is awkward-and that's for average men's hands. Assuming a normal distribution, a phone bigger than 4.3 inches is too big. People were especially annoyed about their inability to use the phone safely with one hand. Women's clothes also haven't caught up to the big-phone trend. It's weird, isn't it, how bad of a design choice this seems to be, from a company whose driving force is good design?
That brings us to the economic explanation, and my own personal conspiracy theory: There are powerful interests that want us to drop our phones so they can fix them and sell us new ones. If you took the earlier versions of the iPhone in, it wasn't uncommon to get a free replacement phone for one with a cracked screen. Fast forward a few years, and Apple now charges $99 to replace the screen on an iPhone 6S, even if the owner bought the AppleCare warranty.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-big-phone-works-for-everyone-but-you
1. Nowadays, the main use of phones is as multimedia devices (gaming, movies, facebook...). You need as large screen for this as possible. Everybody will agree that selfies look soooo much better on a larger screen :-)
The average user will cope with some usability issues to gain advantages of a larger screen. Simple as that. Note that I am talking about the average user here.
2. You are writing the article implying that Apple is the driver of the large screen devices. This is not true...
Before iPhone 6 there were several large-screen android devices (by Samsung for example) which were very successful. iPhone sales were going down and people wanted larger screens. Apple just followed the trend despite Steve Jobs' claim that "You can't get your hand around it, no one's going to buy that."
3. The only way manufacturers can force a larger screen on you is if they don't sell smaller screens. However, last time I was at a phone shop there were lots of models running Android with smaller screens... not sure about iPhones.