Eshu Marneedi

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac on a semi-detailed leak from The Information about Apple’s rumored ultra-slim iPhone 17, supposedly coming next year:

A new report from The Information today once again highlights Apple’s work on an ultra-thin “iPhone 17 Air” set to launch next year. According to the report, iPhone 17 Air prototypes are between 5 and 6 millimeters thick, a dramatic reduction compared to the iPhone 16 at 7.8 mm…

The Information cites multiple sources who say that Apple engineers are “finding it hard to fit the battery and thermal materials into the device.” An earlier supply chain report also detailed Apple’s struggles with battery technology for the iPhone 17 Air…

Additionally, the report says that the iPhone 17 Air will only have a single earpiece speaker because of its ultra-thin design. Current iPhone models have a second speaker at the bottom.

My initial presumption months ago was that the device was just being misreported as an ultra-slim iPhone and is instead a vertically folding one, but that has no chance of being right this late into the rumor cycle. So this is an ultra-thin iPhone, and it looks like it’ll take the place of iPhone 16 Plus — which took iPhone 13 mini’s slot a year earlier. Apple seems to be having a hard time selling this mid-tier iPhone: both the iPhone mini and iPhone Plus are sales flops because most people buy the base-model iPhone or step up to an iPhone Pro or Pro Max. The only catch is the price: If rumors are to be believed, this will be the new most expensive iPhone model next year, which means it wouldn’t be the spiritual successor to the iPhone mini and iPhone Plus but a new class of iPhone entirely. That makes the proposition a lot more confusing.

The whole saga reminds me of an ill-fated Apple product: the 2015 MacBook, lovingly referred to as the MacBook Adorable. It cost more than the MacBook Air at the time yet was a considerably worse product: it only had an Intel M-series processor, one port for both data and charging, and it shipped with terrible battery life. The MacBook Adorable was a fundamentally flawed product, thermal throttling for even the most basic computing tasks, and it was discontinued years later. The MacBook Adorable was a proof of concept — a Jony Ive-ism — and not an actual computer, and I’m afraid Apple is going for Round 2 with this iPhone 17 Slim, or whatever it’s called. It’s more expensive than the base-model iPhone but is rumored to ship with no millimeter-wave 5G, one speaker, an inferior Apple-made modem, a lower-end processor, and only one camera. Even the base-model iPhone ships with two cameras: an ultra-wide and a main sensor.

Granted, if the iPhone Slim costs $900, we’d have a marginally different story. It still wouldn’t be good to sell a worse phone for more money, but it’d make sense. The iPhone Slim would be an offering within the low-end iPhone class, separate from the Pro models, almost like the Apple Watch Ultra, which is updated less frequently than the regular Apple Watch models and thus is worse in some aspects, yet nevertheless is more expensive. But pricing it above the Pro Max while offering significantly fewer features just doesn’t jibe well with the rest of the iPhone lineup, which currently, I think, is no less than perfect. Think about it: Right now, customers can choose between two price points and two screen sizes. It’s a perfect, Steve Jobs-esque 2-by-2 grid: cheap little, cheap big, expensive little, and expensive big. Throw in the iPhone SE and some older models at discounted prices, and the iPhone lineup is the simplest and best it can be.

But throw the iPhone Slim into the mix, and suddenly, it gets more convoluted. If it’s priced at $900 — what iPhone 16 Plus costs now — then it’d make more sense to save $100 and get a better device. In other words, it slots into the current lineup imperfectly, and nobody will buy it. Conversely, if it’s situated above the Pro phones, say at $1,200, it becomes an entirely new class of its own, separate from the base-model iPhones — a class nobody wants because it’s inferior to every other iPhone model. The only selling point of this iPhone Slim is how thin it is — and really, 5 to 6 millimeters is thin. But is being thin seriously a selling point? If being small and being cheap and large weren’t selling points for the mid-range iPhone, I don’t see how being thin yet more expensive is one, either. The whole proposition of the phone makes no sense to me, especially after seeing the hard fall of the MacBook Adorable. Part of my brain still wants to think this is some sort of foldable iPhone — either that or it’s some permutation of the iPhone SE.¹

Also peculiar from this report, Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu:

Apple’s other iPhone models will also undergo significant design changes next year. For instance, they’ll all switch to aluminum frames from stainless steel and titanium, one of the people said.

The back of the Pro and Pro Max models will feature a new part-aluminum, part-glass design. The top of the back will comprise a larger rectangular camera bump made of aluminum rather than traditional 3D glass. The bottom half will remain glass to accommodate wireless charging, two people said.

The Information is a reliable source with a proven track record; when AppleTrack was a website, it had The Information at a whopping 100 percent rumor accuracy. Yet I find this rumor incredibly hard to believe. Apple has shipped premium materials — either stainless steel or titanium — on the expensive models since the iPhone X to separate them from the base-model iPhones. The basic design of the iPhone — to the chagrin of some people — has remained unchanged since the iPhone X: an all-glass back with premium metallic sides. Now, the two reporters say next year’s iPhone will be “part aluminum, part glass,” using a description that’s weirdly reminiscent of the Pixel 9 Pro. Why would Apple make a hard cut from aluminum to glass? And why would it even be aluminum in the first place when one of Apple’s main Pro iPhone selling points is its “pro design?” It doesn’t even make a modicum of sense to me how this design would look. A split metal-glass back is uncanny and nothing like what Apple would make. For now, I’m chalking this up to a weird prototype that’s never meant to see the light of day.