Despite all the critical misgivings, the original iPhone SE was a hit with the audience to which it was marketed. While Apple had moved on to handsets with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch displays before the spring of 2016, there were millions of customers who thought they were too large. A four-inch display was quite enough, particularly for those with small purses or pockets.

We can argue the value of larger displays, maybe, but the public mostly made its decision. After Apple executives, including marketing VP Philip Schiller, denigrated the large Samsungs and other handsets as being too inconvenient for one-handed use, it was clear that the public just didn’t care. Soon as the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus arrived in 2014, sales soared. A pent-up demand that Apple wasn’t admitting to was filled.

All right we know that when Schiller was saying no to any iPhone larger than the iPhone 5s, Apple was already designing handsets with larger displays. Typical of Apple, it was all marketspeak. First attack the competitor’s product, then release the “superior” alternative.

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As much as some people complain that Apple is spending too much time resting on its laurels — particularly with the iPhone and certainly the Mac — change has been a constant for the company over the years. In article in AppleInsider about how the Apple II saved Apple, Steve Jobs is quoted as saying that “all computer architectures have about a ten-year life,” but that was largely about boosting the sale of NeXT gear.

Now the ten-year lifecycle comment has in sone respects been true for Apple. So while the Apple II was quite a successful computer in the 1970s, the Mac ultimately supplanted it although it took a while.

Ten years after the Mac debuted in 1984, Apple made a huge change in the processor architecture with the arrival of the PowerPC. Looking back, it wasn’t such an impressive upgrade at first. It took quite a while for apps to be upgraded to the new architecture, so they ran in emulation, and thus much slower than regular Macs of that era.

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The best way for me to put this in perspective is to turn back the hands of time to my early days as the owner of a personal computer, in the mid-1980s. In those days, I was in a position to upgrade frequently, even though it was fair to say that I could put off some of those purchases for a while without my workflow suffering.

Really, the main improvement for me was the upgrade from a 14-inch Apple color display to a 19-inch something-or-other. As an historical aside, that original 14-inch display soon became a 13-inch display because of a revision in the way display size was calculated.

In any case, I took advantage of my status as a tech journalist to upgrade Macs every year or so. In large part, the performance improvement was worth it more or less; that is, until the Power Macs arrived in 1994. With the promise of a high-performance RISC processor from IBM and Motorola, Macs held the promise of achieving amazing performance, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

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For several years after a tremendous growth curve, iPhone sales began to hit a wall due to size; the physical size of the device that is. Although Samsung and other companies delivered handsets with displays of five inches or more, compared to the iPhone with four inches, Apple had an argument against that approach.

The argument, that those devices were too large for easy one-handed use — well except for basketball players I suppose — was perfectly logical. But customers don’t generally make purchase decisions mainly or even partly on logic. There’s a lot of emotion involved, and the attraction of a larger display was also perfectly logical.

The iPhone 5s, for example, was in many respects superior to its Android competition, but the limitations of its relatively tiny four-inch display loomed in bold relief. Even though I became accustomed to the original 3.5-inch iPhones, writing any email of more than a few works proved a chore. I compensated by looking real close. But this approach wouldn’t work so well even with reading glasses when my contacts were on. My regular glasses, with progressive lenses, also didn’t fare so well, so I usually removed them whenever that move was convenient — or safe.

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