We tested just how mini the iPhone 12 Mini really is

Hear ye, hear ye: The tyranny of overwhelmingly large iPhones over women with perfectly normal sized hands is over. Sort of.

Apple unveiled the new iPhone 12 mini during its virtual product debut event Tuesday. It has all the same cool new specs as the “normal” iPhone 12, notably 5G connectivity and a stronger “ceramic shield” screen. It’s just smol!

When iPhones began to expand in the late 2010s, some pointed out that iPhones were becoming too big for many women to hold – an insensitive if not outright sexist flaw. 

Of course, people of any gender can have a variety of hand sizes. But for people with smaller hands (many of whom might just be women), the fact that, over the past five years, Apple’s phone sizes have just gone up, up, and away, has been frustrating.

I upgraded from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone 11 last year. If I wanted a new Apple phone, I had no choice but to go big or go home. There’s not much I can do without the use of both hands. So this year, the mini is a long overdue but nonetheless welcome change.

With the new iPhone 12 mini, a new smaller phone sounds great! However, it’s not like I want to become Derek Zoolander, with his Polly Pocket flip phone — and Apple is calling it “mini” after all. So I decided to do a scientific experiment to figure out just how teensy the mini actually is. 

It turns out that the mini is actually standard smartphone size, by 2015 standards. At 5.18 inches tall and 2.53 inches wide, with a screen at 5.4 inches diagonally, it’s just fractions of an inch smaller than the 2014 iPhone 6 and 2015 iPhone 6s, which some *cough Mashable reporters* have called the Platonic ideal of iPhone that Apple retired too soon.

That similarity explains why holding the highly accurate iPhone 12 mini facsimile created by Mashable scientists felt just so… right. 

This was a surprise! The way Apple showcased it, the mini looked like a phone for ants. They somehow found an actor with the largest possible hands they could to show off their new creation.

But actually, especially for someone like me, the iPhone 12 mini is a phone with a size that’s reasonable. Here’s a comparison between a man holding the cardboard mini, and the mini in my hands.

It did look smaller in the man’s hands. And ok, you win, I *do* have smaller hands than a lot of humans — but they work perfectly well, thank you very much!

Even in the man’s hands, though the mini does not look freaking microscopic like it does in the Apple model’s. And in my hands, it fits just right. I won’t miss the bigger screen — I’m confident the smaller screen would fit my texting, Instagramming, and FaceTiming needs just fine, and I might be able to finally operate it with just my thumb again for some things.

So thank you, Apple. It may have been a long time coming, but the small-handed humans who rely upon you thank you for this gift. I hope that my thumb shan’t ever need to overstretch itself again!