I have a friend who still uses an iPhone 13 mini held together by a case and pure spite, and every single time a new iPhone launches, she asks me the same question. Is it small yet. It never is. Apple has spent years telling us, implicitly, that small phones do not sell, that the market has spoken, that everyone wants a bigger canvas for videos and games and doomscrolling. Fine, sure, the sales numbers backed that up in 2023. But sales numbers do not mean the desire disappeared, they mean the alternative was not good enough to fight for.
Which brings me to the iPhone Ultra, Apple’s rumored first foldable, expected to close into a short, squat, almost passport-shaped little brick before you unfold it into something the size of an iPad mini. That folded shape is the closest thing to mini energy Apple has shown in years, and it is buried inside a two thousand dollar folding phone nobody asked to be the delivery method. My friend does not want an iPad mini that folds. She wants her 13 mini, but new. Apple already built the shape. It just built it around the wrong phone.
Designer: Apple
The Air existed to answer a question almost nobody was asking at checkout, namely how thin can a phone get before the internals start filing complaints. It was a genuine engineering flex, the kind of thing that looks incredible in a teardown video and slightly pointless in daily use. I understood what it was trying to prove. I just never needed it proven to me personally, and I doubt I was alone in that.
The Ultra is rumored to repeat that exact flex, except this time the thinness gets folded in half, closing down to somewhere between 9 and 9.5mm shut and reportedly as thin as 4.5mm open, according to recent leaks. That is a genuinely wild number for a phone with a hinge in it. Apple is once again proving it can do the hard, borderline unnecessary engineering thing. The difference is that this time, buried inside that flex, is an actual shape people have been begging for since 2023. Apple just does not seem to have noticed it yet.
Go back and look at what the 13 mini actually was for a second, because I think people forget how unremarkable the compromise really was. It measured 131.5mm tall, 64.2mm wide, weighed 141 grams, and ran the exact same A15 chip as the standard 13. You gave up battery life and screen real estate. You did not give up the flagship experience shrunk down to fit an actual hand. Compare that to where the standard iPhone lineup sits today, regularly north of 6.1 inches before you even get to Pro Max territory, and the gap the mini used to fill has only gotten wider and lonelier.
Now put the Ultra’s folded footprint next to that. Reports point to a 5.5 inch cover display when shut, in a short, wide, passport style shell that is about as close to mini adjacent proportions as Apple has shipped since the mini died. The catch is that this compact shell only exists as a doorway into a 7.8 inch, 4:3 inner screen and a starting price rumored to land somewhere between 1,999 and 2,499 dollars. Nobody buying that phone is buying it to have something small in their pocket. They are buying an iPad mini that happens to fold shut, which is a completely different pitch than the one my friend has been asking me about for three years running.
There has been some loose speculation, mostly a 9to5Mac piece from last year, that Apple’s new staggered launch schedule could theoretically clear a runway for a smaller phone somewhere down the line. Even that piece called the odds slim to none, and nothing currently on Apple’s roadmap for the 18, 18e, 18 Pro, or Ultra includes a mini in any form. Samsung, for what it is worth, has stuck with its Z Flip clamshell as its own answer to compact, so the appetite for small has not vanished industry wide, it has just gone unanswered on Apple’s side of the fence for a while now.
So here is the pitch, and it is not a complicated one. Apple has now proven twice, once with the Air and once with the Ultra’s folded shell, that it can engineer real compactness without breaking anything important. Skip the fold. Skip the tablet trapped inside a phone shaped envelope. Take that exact short, wide, passport sized footprint and wrap a single, non folding screen around it, call it a mini, and ship it. Apple does not need a new idea here. It already built one. It just keeps hiding it inside features nobody was asking it to attach to.
