GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
It’s not the Mini, it’s me.
Nearly five years after it launched, the 13 Mini is still the best phone ever made. That hasn’t changed; it’s just that I changed. And as painful as it is to admit this, after using it again for a couple of weeks, I think it’s time to put my iPhone 13 Mini to rest.
The Mini is an underdog. An outlier. It’s a weird little phone that Apple tried to sell twice, couldn’t, and promptly gave up on. If you pick it up after using any modern phone it’s laughably small. A tiny baby phone in a world of Maxes and Ultras.
But small phones are so nice. I can use the Mini one-handed without fumbling around trying to reach my thumb across the screen. I can carry it in my coat pocket and actually forget it’s there. It fits the front pocket of my jeans, or an evening clutch, with room to spare. They quite literally don’t make ’em like that anymore; the Samsung Galaxy S26 is the smallest mainstream Android phone you can find these days, and it’s a full 18mm taller than the Mini.
Look how small it is next to the regular iPhone 13! And the 13 isn’t even that big! Photo: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
The 13 Mini was already over a year out of date when I bought it in 2023. When Apple introduced the iPhone 14 lineup in fall 2022 without a successor to the Mini, I figured it was my last chance to buy a new small phone before they vanished off the face of the Earth. This turned out to be true, unfortunately.
Even being the small phone that it is, the Mini is a surprisingly complete package. My 13 Mini has MagSafe — something that the much more recent 16E lacks. There’s also an ultrawide camera, which you won’t find on the brand-new iPhone Air. And my personal favorite feature is a real throwback: a physical SIM tray.
In fact, that has been one of its most valuable assets over the past few years. It acts as a kind of bridge when I’m using an Android phone with a physical SIM and need to switch to an eSIM-only iPhone. The most reliable method I’ve found for this maneuver is putting my physical SIM in the 13 Mini, converting it to an eSIM, and transferring it to whatever new iPhone I’m testing. Is this a weird, niche reason to love a phone? Yeah, but also, the Mini is a weird, niche phone.
I realized a few weeks ago that I hadn’t used my Mini for a significant stretch of time in, I don’t know, months? When I test a phone I go all in, putting my own phone line on it and using it as my only device. I usually get to use my 13 Mini as a treat in between reviews, but it was gathering dust. I’d been busy testing out a lot of other phones, but I was also trying to delay the inevitable — the moment when I’d have to reckon with my Mini’s mortality.
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