Apple's new phones taking screen time from iPads; iPhone 6+ owners open 65% more articles and videos than those with smaller phones
The Screen-Size Debate: How the iPhone 6 Plus Impacts Where We Read & Watch — Every day, millions of articles, videos and web pages are saved and viewed …
Context & Ripple Effects
Pocket's engagement data lands a month after the iPhone 6 Plus hit shelves, turning an early reviewer hunch into measured behavior: the hands-on that flagged the Plus as large enough to rival the iPad mini now has usage numbers behind it. The finding also fits a pattern — iPhone 5s owners were already driving unprecedented data consumption before big screens arrived, and the Plus took roughly a quarter of US iPhone sales in its first 30 days, so this is a mass-market shift, not a niche one.
First-order effects
- Publishers and content apps like Pocket see materially higher per-user engagement from iPhone 6 Plus owners — 65% more opened articles and videos — shifting where reading and viewing actually happens.
- Apple's own product lines now compete: every hour of video or long-form reading moved to the Plus is screen time the iPad (especially the mini) no longer captures.
Second-order effects
- App developers and media companies face pressure to redesign layouts and video experiences for one-handed-plus-phablet use, since a growing share of consumption happens on 5.5-inch screens rather than tablets.
- If Plus owners keep substituting it for casual tablet use, demand at the small end of the iPad line softens, forcing Apple to differentiate the mini or accept cannibalization within its own portfolio.
Third-order effects
- The phone-tablet boundary keeps eroding toward a single 'big enough' device per person, which would restructure the tablet market around productivity and creation niches rather than general consumption.
- Engagement data of this kind becomes a competitive input: carriers, publishers, and Apple itself increasingly size products and ad inventory around measured screen-time migration, not just unit sales.
The trend: Smartphone screens are absorbing the consumption role once split between phones and tablets, making the phablet the default personal media device.