A render of what the iPhone 17 Air could look like
The iPhone 17 Air will herald the start of a new iPhone engineering ethos at Apple, with Apple said to have pulled off a herculean effort to come up with its design.
The 2025 iPhone lineup is expected to include quite a few changes. Alongside a radical iPhone 17 Pro camera bump alteration, speculation is that Apple will be bringing out hardware referred to as the iPhone 17 Air or iPhone 17 Slim.
In Sunday’s newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman writes about the model’s details, including how it won’t look that different from a standard model when viewed from the front. It will have a 6.6-inch display with slim borders and ProMotion, as well as the Dynamic Island at the top.
The 6.6-inch claim is about the same as others about the screen, with the size ranging from 6.55 inches to 6.7 inches, depending on the rumor source.
The side will even have things like the Camera Control button, but there won’t be that much space for it. The depth reduction is said to be about 2 millimeters, making it about a fifth thinner than the current-gen iPhone 16 range.
Making a smaller smartphone required Apple to go back to the drawing board to avoid making too many compromises. That resulted in engineering changes to the display, battery, and even silicon elements, to make it fit.
Not full-bore
While it tried to avoid them, Apple still had to make some choices that marginally reduced the iPhone 17 Air’s capabilities. This includes switching to a single 48-megapixel camera on the back, similar to the iPhone 16e.
Though the iPhone range hasn’t had a physical SIM card slot for a while in the United States, the new design will also lose the component in other markets. This was previously reportedon, but reaffirmed by Gurman in his report.
Though the drawbacks of the redesign are a problem for the slimmest on-the-way model, it also brings with it some benefits. For example, Gurman believes that the model will use the C1 modem, Apple’s in-house design that will save power, but loses out on mmWave 5G support.
The new model will also apparently represent a sea change for Apple, and some technologies made for the Air will apparently be incorporated into future releases, like the long-rumored iPhone Fold.
