iPhone 17 season is heating up with two especially interesting design variants: iPhone 17 Air and iPhone 17 Pro. Yes, there will be a plain iPhone 17, but it doesn’t sound like Apple will be very bold with its design this year.
So what about the iPhone 17 Air and iPhone 17 Pro designs that some are calling radical? There seems to be two camps: those who believe the designs are real, and those who think Apple will never release something like what we’re seeing in leaks and rumors.
Redesigns can be fun, even when they’re not new
One thing we can all agree on is that iPhone design changes are fun. If the iPhone X didn’t look like an iPhone from the future in 2017, the internet would have been utterly bored by the iPhone 8 that looked like the iPhone 7 that looked like the iPhone 6S that looked like the iPhone 6.
We’re kind of getting back to that with the iPhone 12, iPhone 13, iPhone 14, iPhone 15, and iPhone 16. I would argue that the cameras, colors, buttons, materials, and shrinking notch turned Dynamic Island all help the current iPhone designs feel fresh. The candy bar design remains, but the phones have gotten thinner, lighter, and more comfortable to hold without going back to curved edges.
Perhaps the best example of a “new” design bringing excitement to an otherwise unremarkable product is the fourth-generation iPhone SE (or first generation iPhone 16E, if that’s a naming scheme Apple indeed adopts). By all accounts, the iPhone SE 4 will look like the iPhone 14. That’s being billed as a radical redesign all on its own because the iPhone SE 2 and iPhone SE 3 look like the iPhone 8 with thick bezels and Touch ID instead of Face ID. The original iPhone SE brought back the smaller iPhone 5/5S design when the iPhone 6s still felt big.
Why is Apple making an iPhone 17 Air?
Recent iPhone lineups have had five options: iPhone SE, iPhone #, iPhone # Plus or iPhone # mini (one or the other depending on the year), iPhone # Pro, and iPhone # Pro Max.
This year we expect the lineup to add a new model without deleting an existing option: iPhone # Air.
While the iPhone X showed us the direction of future iPhones, the iPhone Air seems different.
Some customers will continue to want the best cameras and battery life more than thinner and lighter phones. Other customers will continue to want the newest phone that doesn’t start at $999.
Current technology doesn’t allow Apple to go thinner and lighter without sacrificing camera sensors and battery capacity. Current technology does allow Apple to make smartphones thinner (and therefore lighter) than ever before. For Samsung, that’s the teased-but-not-released Galaxy S25 Edge; for Apple, we expect the iPhone 17 Air.
I don’t know if a thinner iPhone is compelling enough to compete with a less expensive iPhone or a more capable iPhone. I do think it’s important for Apple to compete with Samsung in this narrow space though — even if the customer base is thin.
But are the leaks accurate?
That brings us to the iPhone 17 Air and iPhone 17 Pro design leaks.
The iPhone 17 Air is expected to have a so-called camera bar that runs across the back of the iPhone. Recent iPhones have an Apple Watch-sized camera plateau, although the iPhone 16 switched to a more compact camera pill.
The camera bar design is expected to show up on both the Air and Pro. This would indeed be a notable design change for the Pro line. Since the iPhone 11 Pro, Apple has used a three-camera layout that sits atop of round-rectangle bump.
The benefit of dropping Mount Camera in favor of Bender from Futurama is that iPhone 17 Air and iPhone 17 Pro will share the same look that is intended to signal premium. If accurate, this trick will help upsell the single-lens camera on the iPhone 17 Air while the iPhone 17 actually has an additional rear camera.
Personally, I put a lot of stock into the iPhone 17 Air design. That’s not because I’ve seen something or know anything, but it feels on pace with leaks from past years in terms of volume and timing.
I also say that because iPhone design leaks tend to be accurate. Not since the “teardrop iPhone 5” has an iPhone design leak been plain wrong.
Some design rumors do fall flat when reality arrives. The rear facing Touch ID sensor and the iPhone “smart connector” fall into the category of fiction when it comes to what actually shipped.
Regardless of who has leaked what, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the iPhone 17 Pro still looked like the iPhone 16 Pro. I can imagine a scenario where Apple is working on bringing the iPhone Air camera design to the iPhone Pro, those design plans leaking, and the iPhone 17 Air being the only “camera bar” iPhone this year.
I wouldn’t be willing to bet that the iPhone 17 Pro will look like the iPhone 16 Pro, but there just doesn’t seem to be the same consensus around the Pro design this year yet. I’m open to having my mind changed though.
Still, my general approach with iPhone design leaks is this: the weirder they seem, the more likely they are to be real.
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