secretk
macrumors 65816
As a former Sony user I can tell you that at certain point of time age plays a role 🙁. I had used two Sony compact phones for the last 5 years. In the beginning it worked but the last year I realized that I use my phone less and less. I could not use it for anything smart related. I do have myopia and astigmatism though so for me it is important to see. I had to enlarge the display text size so much that I could not see almost anything. Forget about texting with people. In the end I had to buy something bigger for the sake of my eyes. I still like smaller phones but my eyes do not.Sony made the exact thing that you wanted with their compact line, a smaller phone with flagship internals, but obviously it's not selling enough to sustain themselves. And have you looked at the offerings from Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi? Even their cheapest offerings have at least 6.5" screen or larger. These companies cannot afford to cater to the small phone crowd as the return is not enough to justify the cost of R&D, manufacturing, logistic, etc.
So not only there were less people like me that wanted small phone, but most of us are aging to some extent and now our eyes demand something different in terms of size.