> Who cares, is nobody bought it?

The N9 was sold out in Scandinavia, and it was outselling Lumia (Windows) in Q4 '11. That's fairly good for something that had no marketing and it had already been labeled as a dead platform. Around 2 million N9 devices were sold. That's on the same order of magnitude as any Google Pixel generation.

What could have happened if the device had been phased out is something we can only hypothesize about, but I don't think it's fair to claim it was a fringe device nobody cared about.

>The N9 was sold out in Scandinavia

If only Scandinavia was as relevant as the US, UK, Asia and rest of the EU for a product to stay in development and in production to remain internationally relevant and competitive to the iPhone.

>Around 2 million N9 devices were sold.

My LLM research says 1-1,5 Million MeeGo powered Nokia N9 devices were sold by 2011, versus 93 Million iPhones and 237 Million Android devices out of which Samsung had 94 million, similar to Apple at the time. The N9's 1,5 Million wasn't even close, it was orders of magnitude less than Apple or Samsung.

So the writing was on the wall by then. How can you even think that they had a chance to be competitive after the numbers of 2011? Based on those numbers they were right to pull the plug back then at the time, the finances spoke for themselves, there was no way for Nokia to turn the ship around in their favor. The line was just going down and even more down.