It has A19 Pro. A19 Pro has matmul acceleration in its GPU, the equivalent of Nvidia's Tensor cores. This would make future Macs extremely viable for local LLMs. Currently, Macs have high memory bandwidth and high VRAM capacity but low prompt processing speeds. Give it a large context and it'll take forever before the first token is generated.
If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us.
That's the most exciting thing from this Apple's event in my opinion.
PS. I also like the idea of the ultra thin iPhone Air, the 2x better noise cancellation and live translation of Airpods 3, high blood pressure detection of the new Watch, and the bold sexy orange color of the iPhone 17 Pro. Overall, this is as good as it gets for incremental updates in Apple's ecosystem in a while.
It is almost strange, since iPhones were only available in ugly drab colors for several generations. And the Pro models in particular were previously never available in a decent color.
If this was true wouldn't there be a market for a ruggedized version that has the toughness of a case, from the factory as shipped? Its a little silly for Apply to shave every possible half-millimeter from the design and then have 99% of people add back the thickness plus a lot of extra by adding a case. Why not have a factory-ruggedized version which isn't as thick as adding that case but is just as rugged?
Considering the price and re-sale value of iphones I would add a case even if they ruggedized it.
My current (Android) phone is from 2020 and I have bought three cases for it because the previous ones got wear and tear. The phone inside still looks brand new.
But yeah, the trend of ultra-thin phones is silly.
That open a new business for them to sell $60 cases that are worth $2 of materials and have a great panel to match people’s taste which is even more appealing to buy
Ask workers of cell phone stores and you’ll find that figure is way off. Not everyone wants a case. Having a case significantly changes the feeling of the device in hand.
The 15s and 16s both had titanium bodies which (as I recall at least) don't take on colour as well when they're anodized, so that could be the cause of drab colour ways.
edit: It was only the Pros and up which had titanium bodies. The 17s are all aluminum.
Anodizing titanium creates an oxide layer, the thickness of which varies with the voltage used. The thickness of that oxide layer determines which wavelengths of light it refracts [0]. In practical terms, your choices for color are pretty limited[1].
I'm not a chemist, but I looked into this years back when I was wondering why everything titanium is offered in the same couple of colors. Personally, I like the plain gray.
I don't get why Apple doesn't do consistent colors. I loved the blue of my iPhone 12 Pro, but I can't even get that anymore... I would have upgraded a few generatiosn back if they had kept consistent colors.
> I don't get why Apple doesn't do consistent colors
The materials used is a factor: the last few iPhones were built with aluminum (iPhone 16), titanium (iPhone 16 Pro) and stainless steel (iPhone 13 Pro).
Not all colors work with all materials; my understanding is titanium is particularly bad for bright colors. The colors for the iPhone Pro models have been pretty drab--not this year.
And i have no idea what color my phone was when i got it. It has been inside an otterbox case since the hour i first had it. For me, the color of a cellphone is about as relevent as the color of a motherboard. It will look cool for, at most, a few minutes before it is forever locked inside a case.
Which is a very powerful feature for anyone who likes security or finding bugs in their code. Or other people's code. Even if you didn't really want to find them.
It certainly took them a while to introduce MTE! Pixel 8 came out in 2023. I wonder how it compares against hardened_malloc with 48-bit address space and 33-bit ASLR in Graphene. Apple's security team has reported that MIE could break all "known" exploit chains, but so does hardened_malloc. Hard to tell right now which one is best (most def MIE) but everything else included in Graphene is probably making the point moot anyway.
In the past few weeks the oxymeter feature was enabled by a firmware update on series 10. Measurements are done on the watch, results are only reported on a phone.
As of September 9, 2025, hypertension notifications are currently under FDA review and expected to be cleared this month, with availability on Apple Watch Series 9 and later and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. The feature is not intended for use by people under 22 years old, those who have been previously diagnosed with hypertension, or pregnant persons.
I believe this is for the fringe cases where you have been diagnosed with hypertension, but your apple Watch does not tell you that you have hypertension risk, then you may decide to not take your drugs, since your watch told you all clear. This could trigger lawsuits if complications set in when you decide not to take your drugs because of "lack of alarm"
Then you get a new fringe case: you are not yet diagnosed with hypertension, but you are aware that your apple watch has that functionality so you decide you don't need to be diagnosed.
Going to be interesting comparing the series 10 blood pressure sensing against my Hilo (formerly Aktiia) band on the other wrist. Although without calibration against a cuff, I'm not super convinced the Apple Watch will give reliable information.
The color line up reminds me of the au MEDIA SKIN phones (Japanese carrier) circa 2007. Maybe it's because I had one back in the day, but I can't help but think they took some influence.
Wow, thanks for sharing the name, these are really good! I don't know why I was surprised to realize that great designers have made fantastic products even in the past...
If you like these, check out the INFOBAR phones from a few years prior. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/cho... People like the multi-colored one, but I've always been partial to the green. I believe there's been a few newer homages to these over the years.
I've always been a bit confused about when to run models on the GPU vs the neural engine. The best I can tell, GPU is simpler to use as a developer especially when shipping a cross platform app. But an optimized neural engine model can run lower power.
With the addition of NPUs to the GPU, this story gets even more confusing...
In reality you don’t much of a choice. Most of the APIs Apple exposes for running neural nets don’t let you pick. Instead some Apple magic in one of their frameworks decides where it’s going to host your network. At least from what I’ve read, these frameworks will usually distribute your networks over all available matmul compute, starting on the neural net (assuming your specific network is compatible) and spilling onto the GPU as needed.
But there isn’t a trivial way to specifically target the neural engine.
You're right there is no way to specifically target the neural engine. You have to use it via CoreML which abstracts away the execution.
If you use Metal / GPU compute shaders it's going to run exclusively on GPU. Some inference libraries like TensorFlow/LiteRT with backend = .gpu use this.
Competing at high end budget PC laptop will increase market share, but more importantly it’d be an easy recommendation to make when people see a lower priced PC laptop. Rumours were $699.
That seems incredibly prescient for accounts created before even GPT-1. Obviously broad data scraping existed before then, but even amongst this crowd I find it hard to believe that’s the real motivator.
Yes, they do. They're called Neural Engine, aka NPUs. They aren't being used for local LLMs on Macs because they are optimized for power efficiency running much smaller AI models.
Meanwhile, the GPU is powerful enough for LLMs but has been lacking matrix multiplication acceleration. This changes that.
From a compute perspective, GPUs are mostly about fast vector arithmetic, with which you can implement decently fast matrix multiplication. But starting with NVIDIA's Volta architecture at the end of 2017, GPUs have been gaining dedicated hardware units for matrix multiplication. The main purpose of augmenting GPU architectures with matrix multiplication hardware is for machine learning. They aren't directly useful for 3D graphics rendering, but their inclusion in consumer GPUs has been justified by adding ML-based post-processing and upscaling like NVIDIA's various iterations of DLSS.
I wish they would offer the 17 pro in some lighter colors (like the new sage green for the regular 17). Not everyone wants bold, and the color selection for pro is always so limited. They don't even have white with this generation, just silver.
The first SoC including Neural Engine was the A11 Bionic, used in iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X, introduced in 2017. Since then, every Apple A-series SoC has included a Neural Engine.
The Neural Engine is its own block. Neural Engine is not used for local LLMs on Macs. Neural Engine is optimized for power efficiency while running small models. It's not good for LARGE language models.
This change is strictly adding matmul acceleration into each GPU core where it is being used for LLMs.
The NPU is still there. This adds matmul acceleration directly into each GPU core. It takes about ~10% more transistors to add these accelerators into the GPU so it's a significant investment for Apple.
> If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us.
I don't think local LLMs will ever be a thing except for very specific use cases.
Servers will always have way more compute power than edge nodes. As server power increases, people will expect more and more of the LLMs and edge node compute will stay irrelevant since their relative power will stay the same.
LocalLLMs would be useful for low latency local language processing/home control, assuming they ever become fast enough where the 500ms to 1s network latency becomes a dominate factor in having a fluid conversation with a voice assistant. Right now the pauses are unbearable for anything but one way commands (Siri, do something! - 3 seconds later it starts doing the thing...that works but it wouldn't work if Siri needed to ask follow up questions). This is even more important if we consider low latency gaming situations.
Mobile applications are also relevant. An LLM in your car could be used for local intelligence. I'm pretty sure self driving cars use some about of local AI already (although obviously not LLM, and I don't really know how much of their processing is local vs done on a server somewhere).
If models stop advancing at a fast clip, hardware will eventually become fast and cheap enough that running models locally isn't something we think about as being a non-sensical luxury, in the same way that we don't think that rendering graphics locally is a luxury even though remote rendering is possible.
Network latency in most situations is not 500ms. The latency from New York California is under 70ms, and if you add in some transmission time you're still under 200ms. And that's ignoring that an NYC request will probably go only to VA (sub-15ms).
Even over LTE you're looking at under 120ms coast to coast.
> Servers will always have way more compute power than edge nodes
This doesn't seem right to me.
You take all the memory and CPU cycles of all the clients connected to a typical online service, compared to the memory and CPU in the datacenter serving it? The vast majority of compute involved in delivering that experience is on the client. And there's probably vast amounts of untapped compute available on that client - most websites only peg the client CPU by accident because they triggered an infinite loop in an ad bidding war; imagine what they could do if they actually used that compute power on purpose.
But even doing fairly trivial stuff, a typical browser tab is using hundreds of megs of memory and an appreciable percentage of the CPU of the machine it's loaded on, for the duration of the time it's being interacted with. Meanwhile, serving that content out to the browser took milliseconds, and was done at the same time as the server was handling thousands of other requests.
Edge compute scales with the amount of users who are using your service: each of them brings along their own hardware. Server compute has to scale at your expense.
Now, LLMs bring their special needs - large models that need to be loaded into vast fast memory... there are reasons to bring the compute to the model. But it's definitely not trivially the case that there's more compute in servers than clients.
The sum of all edge nodes exceed the power in the datacenter, but the peak power provided to you from the datacenter significantly exceed your edge node capabilities.
A single datacenter machine with state of the art GPUs serving LLM inference can be drawing in the tens of kilowatts, and you borrow a sizable portion for a moment when you run a prompt on the heavier models.
A phone that has to count individual watts, or a laptop that peaks on dual digit sustained draw, isn't remotely comparable, and the gap isn't one or two hardware features.
I adore this machinery, there's a lot of money riding on the idea that interest in AI/ML will result in the value being in owning bunch of big central metal like cloud era has produced, but I'm not so sure.
I'm sure the people placing multibillion dollar bets have done their research, but the trends I see are AI getting more efficient and hardware getting more powerful, so as time goes on, it'll be more and more viable to run AI locally.
Even with token consumption increasing as AI abilities increase, there will be a point where AI output is good enough for most people.
Granted, people are very willing to hand over their data and often money to rent a software licence from the big players, but if they're all charging subscription fees where a local LLM costs nothing, that might cause a few sleepless nights for a few execs.
We could potentially see one-time-purchase model checkpoints, where users pay to get a particular version for offline use, and future development is gated behind paying again- but certainly the issue of “some level of AI is good enough for most users” might hurt the infinite growth dreams of VCs
tts would be an interesting case-study. it hasn't really been in the lime-light, so could serve as a leading indicator for what will happen when attention to text generation inevitably wanes
I use Read Aloud across a few browser platforms cause sometimes I don't care to read an article I have some passing interest in.
The landscape is a mess:
it's not really bandwidth efficient to transmit on one count, local frameworks like Piper perform well in alot of cases, there's paid APIs from the big players, at least one player has incorporated api-powered neural tts and packaged it into their browser presumably ad-supported or something, yet another has incorporated into their OS, already (though it defaults to speak and spell for god knows why). I'm not willing to pay $0.20 per page though, after experimenting, especially when the free/private solution is good enough.
IMO the benefit of a local LLM on a smartphone isn't necessarily compute power/speed - it's reliability without a reliance on connectivity, it can offer privacy guarantees, and assuming the silicon cost is marginal, could mean you can offer permanent LLM capabilities without needing to offer some sort of cloud subscription.
"Servers are more powerful" isn't a super strong point. Why aren't all PC gamers rendering games on servers if raw power was all that mattered? Why do workstation PCs even exist?
Society is already giving pushback to AI being pushed on them everywhere; see the rise of the word "clanker". We're seeing mental health issues pop up. We're all tired of AI slop content and engagement bait. Even the developers like us discussing it at the bleeding edge go round in circles with the same talking points reflexively. I don't see it as a given that there's public demand for even more AI, "if only it were more powerful on a server".
You make a good point, but you're still not refuting the original argument. The demand for high-power AI still exists, the products that Apple sells today do not even come close to meaningfully replacing that demand. If you own an iPhone, you're probably still using ChatGPT.
Speaking to your PC gaming analogy, there are render farms for graphics - they're just used for CGI and non-realtime use cases. What there isn't a huge demand for is consumer-grade hardware at datacenter prices. Apple found this out the hard way shipping Xserve prematurely.
> Speaking to your PC gaming analogy, there are render farms for graphics - they're just used for CGI and non-realtime use cases. What there isn't a huge demand for is consumer-grade hardware at datacenter prices.
Right, and that's despite the datacenter hardware being far more powerful and for most people cheaper to use per hour than the TCO of owning your own gaming rig. People still want to own their computer and want to eliminate network connectivity and latency being a factor even when it's generally a worse value prop. You don't see any potential parallels here with local vs hosted AI?
Local models on consumer grade hardware far inferior to buildings full of GPUs can already competently do tool calling. They can already generate tok/sec far beyond reading speed. The hardware isn't serving 100s of requests in parallel. Again, it just doesn't seem far fetched to think that the public will sway away from paying for more subscription services for something that can basically run on what they already own. Hosted frontier models won't go away, they _are_ better at most things, but can all of these companies sustain themselves as businesses if they can't keep encroaching into new areas to seek rent? For the average ChatGPT user, local Apple Intelligence and Gemma 3n basically already have the skills and smarts required, they just need more VRAM, and access to RAG'd world knowledge and access to the network to keep up.
> The demand for high-power AI still exists, the products that Apple sells today do not even come close to meaningfully replacing that demand.
Correct, though to me it seems that this comes at the price of narrowing the target audience (i.e. devs and very high-demanding analysis + production work).
For almost everything else people just open a bookmarked ChatGPT / Gemini link and let it flow, no matter how erroneous it might be.
The AI area is burning a lot of bridges and has done so for the last 1.5 - 2.0 years; they solidify the public's idea that they only peddle subscription income as hard as they can without providing more value.
Somebody finally had the right idea some months ago: sub-agents. Took them a while, and it was obvious right from the start that just dumping 50 pages on your favorite LLM is never going to produce impressive results. I mean, sometimes it does but people do a really bad job at quickly detecting when it does not, and are slow to correct course and just burn through tokens and their own patience.
Investors are gonna keep investor-ing, they will of course want the paywall and for there to be no open models at all. But happily the market and even general public perception are pushing back.
I am really curious what will come out of all this. One prediction is local LLMs that secretly transmit to the mothership, so the work of the AI startup is partially offloaded to its users. But I am known to be very cynical, so take this with a spoonful of salt.
If the future is AI, then a future where every compute has to pass through one of a handful of multinational corporations with GPU farms...is something to be wary of. Local LLMs is a great idea for smaller tasks.
Sure, that's why local LLMs aren't popular or mass market as of September 2025.
But cloud models will have diminishing returns, local hardware will get drastically faster, and techniques to efficiently inference them will be worked out further. At some point, local LLMs will have its day.
I switch between gpt-oss:20b/qwen3:30b. Good for green fielding projects, setting up bash scripts, simple CRUD apis using express, and the occasional error in a React or Vue app.
That's assuming diminishing returns won't hit hard. If a 10x smaller local model is 95%(Whatever that means) as good as the remote model it makes sense to use local models most of the time. It remains to be seen if that will happen but it's certainly not unthinkable imp.
It's really task-dependent, text summarization and grammar corrections are fine with local models. I posit any tasks that are 'arms race-y' (image generation, creative text generation) are going to be offloaded to servers, as there's no 'good enough' bar above which they can't improve.
Apple literally mentioned local LLMs in the event video where they announced this phone and others.
Apple's privacy stance is to do as much as possible on the user's device and as little as possible in cloud. They have iCloud for storage to make inter-device synch easy, but even that is painful for them. They hate cloud. This is the direction they've had for some years now. It always makes me smile that so many commentators just can't understand it and insist that they're "so far behind" on AI.
All the recent academic literature suggests that LLM capability is beginning to plateau, and we don't have ideas on what to do next (and no, we can't ask the LLMs).
As you get more capable SLMs or LLMs, and the hardware gets better and better (who _really_ wants to be long on nVIDIA or Intel right now? Hmm?), people are going to find that they're "good enough" for a range of tasks, and Apple's customer demographic are going to be happy that's all happening on the device in their hand and not on a server [waves hands] "somewhere", in the cloud.
It's not difficult to find improvements to LLMs still.
Large issues: tokenizers exist, reasoning models are still next-token-prediction instead of having "internal thoughts", RL post-training destroys model calibration
Small issues: they're all trained to write Python instead of a good language, most of the benchmarks are bad, pretraining doesn't use document metadata (ie they have to learn from each document without being told the URL or that they're written by different people)
> don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us.
I don't think local LLMs will ever be a thing except for very specific use cases.
I disagree.
There's a lot of interest in local LLMs in the LLM community. My internet was down for a few days and did I wish I had a local LLM on my laptop!
There's a big push for privacy; people are using LLMs for personal medical issues for example and don't want that going into the cloud.
Is it necessary to talk to a server just to check out a letter I wrote?
Obviously with Apple's release of iOS 26 and macOS 26 and the rest of their operating systems, tens of millions of devices are getting a local LLM with 3rd party apps that can take advantage of them.
I think they will be, but more for hand-off. Local will be great for starting timers, adding things to calendar, moving files around. Basic, local tasks. But it also needs to be intelligent enough to know when to hand off to server-side model.
Android crowd has been able to run LLMs on-device since LlamaCPP first came out. But the magic is in the integration with OS. As usual there will be hype around Apple, idk, inventing the very concept of LLMs or something. But the truth is neither Apple nor Android did this; only the wee team that wrote the attention is all you need paper + the many open source/hobbyist contributors inventing creative solutions like LoRA and creating natural ecosystems for them.
Couldn’t you apply that same thinking to all compute? Servers will always have more, timesharing means lower cost, people will probably only ever own dumb terminals?
Huh? GeForce NOW is a resounding success by many metrics. Anecdotally, I use it weekly to play multiplayer games and it’s an excellent experience. Google giving up on Stadia as a product says almost nothing about cloud gaming’s viability.
Do you mean Stadia? Stadia worked great. The only perceptible latency I initially had ended up coming from my TV and was fixed by switching it to so-called "gaming mode".
Never could figure out what the heck the value proposition was supposed to be though. Pay full price for a game that you can't even pretend you own? I don't think so. And the game conservation implications were also dire, so I'm not sad it went away in the end.
The crux is how big the L is in the local LLMs. Depending on what it's used for, you can actually get really good performance on topically trained models when leveraged for their specific purpose.
I'm running Qwen 30B code on my framework laptop to ask questions about ruby vs. python syntax because I can, and because the internet was flaky.
At some point, more doesn't mean I need it. LLMs will certainly get "good enough" and they'll be lower latency, no subscription, and no internet required.
pretty amazing, as a student I remember downloading offline copies of Wikipedia and Stack Overflow and felt that I have the entire world truly in my laptop and phones. Local LLMs are arguably even more useful than those archives.
local LLM may not be good enough for answering questions (which I think won't be true really soon) or generating images, but it today should be good enough to infer deeplinks and app extension calls or agentic walk-through... and ushers a new era of controlling phone by voice command.
Because of the prompt processing speed, small models like Qwen 3 coder 30b a3b are the sweet spot for mac platform right now. Which means a 32 or 64GB mac is all you need to use Cline or your favorite agent locally.
Yeah you can, so long as you're hosting your local LLM through something with an OpenAI-compatible API (which is a given for almost all local servers at this point, including LM Studio).
That said, running agentic workloads on local LLMs will be a short and losing battle against context size if you don't have hardware specifically bought for this purpose. You can get it running and it will work for several autonomous actions but not nearly as long as a hosted frontier model will work.
Unfortunately, IDE integration like this tends to be very prefill intensive (more math than memory). That puts Apple Silicon at a disadvantage without the feature that we’re talking about. Presumably the upcoming M5 will also have dedicated matmul acceleration in the GPU. This could potentially change everything in favor of local AI, particularly on mobile devices like laptops.
Cline has a new "compact" prompt enabled for their LM Studio integration which greatly alleviates the long system prompt prefill problem, especially for Macs which suffer from low compute (though it disables MCP server usage, presumably the lost part of the prompt is what made that work well).
It seems to work better for me when I tested it and Cline's supposedly adding it to the Ollama integration. I suspect that type of alternate local configuration will proliferate into the adjacent projects like Roo, Kilo, Continue, etc.
Apple adding hardware to speed it up will be even better, the next time I buy a new computer.
I will believe this when I see it. It’s totally possible that those capabilities are locked behind some private API or that there’s some weedsy hardware complication not mentioned that makes them non-viable for what we want to do with them.
They might recommend using CoreML to leverage them, though I imagine it will be available to Metal.
The whole point of CoreML is that your solution uses whatever hardware is available to you, including enlisting a heterogeneous set of units to conquer a large problem. Software written years ago would use the GPU matmul if deployed to a capable machine.
According to Apple's comparison tool, the Air has 27 hrs of video playback, compared to 30 for the 17 and 39 for the Pro.
Based on that, it doesn't sound like it's that much worse. Of course, if you're trying to maximize battery longevity by not exceeding 80% charge, that might make it not very useful for many people.
Yes, and then don’t even make it compatible with other phones. I’m a big fan of their previous (discontinued) MagSafe battery as that supports reverse charging, charge state display on phone and has the perfect size.
This new battery however is only compatible with the Air as other phones have a bigger camera bump.
And how much better would be if it had a physical connector so it's much more efficient. So you would have a bigger total charge and it wouldn't cook both batteries in the process. One can dream though.
The previous MagSafe battery has the size of the MagSafe wallet and thus fits onto all the iPhones that have MagSafe down to the "Mini" variants. It's the perfect emergency power backup. But Apple discontinued this a while ago.
Selling a thin phone with half a battery where you have to buy the other half and keep it attached to get a proper battery runtime (turning it into a normal-sized phone) can't be the solution Apple intended. At least I hope so. And that battery doesn't fit other iPhones as the camera bump of those other phones is in the way.
Well, swappable batteries has the UX advantage of being able to swap in full charges.
I don't really understand all the complaining since it's merely a variant of the iPhone for people who prioritize thinness over battery.
For over a decade, HNers have complained that they don't want thinness to be forced on them and that there should be a separate SKU for it. Yet when it finally happens, HNers complain about the trade-off.
Either way, people have options now. If one doesn't like the compromises of the thin phone, they can buy the thick phone. Seems silly to complain about the thinness if you're not the target demographic.
Magsafe battery has also been a great fix for a 5-year old built-in battery for 1/3 the cost of a battery replacement, and when I finally replace this phone I'll still have the magsafe battery for travel/emergency.
3rd party versions of course, the official one was much more expensive than that.
The camera bump on other models protrudes more towards the centre of the body. And thus the battery wouldn't fit (flush) and the Qi charging wouldn't engage properly.
So running the battery perpendicular to this photo isn't an option?
I'm sorry if I'm not completely familiar with this product: you are to have this battery attached at all times while you're charging, and it just stays in place? (gawd I sound like I'm from a different planet, I apologize -- wireless charging just never has been interesting to me)
What on earth are you talking about? It includes a battery and there is both a cheaper and a more expensive version that has more battery, plus an add on battery pack. And you’re complaining about what exactly?
IMO it's underwhelming considering folding phones have been out for many years now and we still don't have a folding iPhone. What are the PMs doing at Apple.
I think folding phones will remain a small niche unless someone figures out how to make a foldable screen that doesn't get permanently scratched by your fingernails.
Pebble had like a week long battery life. Apple’s pitch wasn’t better battery life, it was just “that thing for nerds? This is the same, but for everyone else.” I.e. it came with seamless integration with your phone, rings to close, a more expensive look, and more polished fitness tracking.
The breakthru that made touchscreen phones works wasn’t an app ecosystem. That came after people were already crazy about iPhones. It was capacitive touch screens. Basically everything before was resistive touch, which is why they usually had styluses. Getting touch, and really multi-touch, working well was the game changer that redefined cell phones.
IMO there's a gap between "charge every day" and "charge once a week" that needs to be crossed.
In other words, if they made the battery last twice as long it'd still be equally as annoying (since your daily routine would be nearly the same, except now you also need to remember if it's a charge day or non-charge day).
To be fair maybe 3/4 days buys you some convenience. But anyways charging once a day is a reasonable place to get to, to get something better would require at minimum a 3x improvement which probably means a ground-up rework instead of continuous refinement.
A battery band might get you there but I suspect it'd be too clunky. At best Apple may redesign their watch to support a battery band and allow 3rd parties to make them for folks that need weeks of battery life.
For me, it comes down to two things. First, I do not want to have to charge every night since I use my watch as a silent vibrating alarm, and I track my sleep. It seems like Apple has basically overcome this hurdle, now that you can charge while you shower and basically get by.
The other issue is that I don't want to have to bring Yet Another Dongle™ every time I go away for a weekend or short business trip. Most of my trips are ≤ 4 days, so if AWs could reliably go that long (including battery degradation over time) then I'd consider getting one.
Right now, only the AWU even approaches this, and only in low-power mode. If it weren't a thousand dollars, I'd consider it. But between the low-power requirement and the pricing, it's just no contest in my book. I'm getting a new Pebble, which offers a month of battery life at 1/3 of the cost.
I watched the announcement yesterday and was very surprised to hear the watch battery life is still so shocking.
Especially considering how useful sleep data is, then I was surprised to see they're only getting sleep scores now.
My dirt cheap Huawei watches have had this for years. It's accurate enough (my own perception based on use). And I get a weeks battery life too (although I don't have the distracting fancy notifications perhaps). It does check blood oxygen levels, heart rate, stress etc.
I truly thought this was a solved problem (looking at headphones battery life, although I might need to check my assumptions here also apply to Airpods).
And that's the fancy screen, gimmick edition garmin watch - the normal MIP display garmin watches (even an old, midrange Forerunner 255) will easily get a couple of weeks of battery life, more for the higher end ones.
OLED is just the wrong screen tech for these devices, never made any sense to me given how little I care about graphics and how little time I spend reading the display.
Yes. My Pebble Steel got over a week of battery in 2015, had physical, tactile buttons that worked even wearing thick winter gloves, and had an always-on-no-matter-what screen that was clearly readable in full sunlight.
Every smartwatch that hasn't met that bar, which is almost all of them ever made, is a joke to me. I'd have ordered a RePebble had I not moved back to analogue dumbwatches instead just before they were announced (and were iOS not actively hostile to competing watch implementations).
And motorcycles get way better gas mileage than cars. But it’s still odd to frame a (totally understandable!) preference for one product category in those terms.
If you are okay with less smart smart watches, and okay with no hackability, Garmin should have a few with black and white display and >1 week battery life (even indefinite with sufficient solar).
depends which camp of apple watch (or smart watch in general) users you are asking.
the camp that sees the smartwatch as an accessory to their smartphone that does fitness tracking and maybe a few other useful things to avoid pulling their phone out constantly - those people want MUCH longer battery life.
the camp that sees the smartwatch as a REPLACEMENT to their smartphone, they are perfectly fine with the current battery life.
I am closer to the first camp than the second, and I don’t understand why I would need longer battery life. The watch charges very quickly, and there is never a day when I don’t have the chance to charge at some point. I usually do it during my morning shower.
1. People use these GPS watches for Ironman triathlons, ultra running & cycling events etc. They can't and won't charge before the battery is done - and remember the battery with a daily charge will degrade significantly. If it's borderline on release, it'll be inadequate after a year.
2. Just for general convenience, having to take another special cable for every late night or overnight trip is maddening. I always have a phone anyway for any actual interactions.
I find it hard to believe many people are writing texts on their watches, it's just a nice to have gimmick feature that everyone I know has stopped using.
> and remember the battery with a daily charge will degrade significantly. If it's borderline on release, it'll be inadequate after a year.
That has not been my experience though - having used both an Apple Watch and a Pixel Watch for years on end every single day. Absolutely outside my area of expertise, but I would imagine that you can design batteries to have a much longer lifetime (no of recharge cycles) when their capacity is smaller.
That’s not how Lion charging works - degradation and lifetime (to a first approximation) depend on full charges. If you charge daily from 80% to 100% or charge every 5 days from 1% to 100%, your battery degradation and lifetime will be the same.
I think a lot of people reach into their pocket and get their phone out if they need "interactivity, ability to respond to notifs, cellular, etc"
But if you want to leave your smartphone at home, but you still want cellular and notifications, I agree the apple watch is the only game in town even if the battery life sucks.
Most of this is because of the always-on screen. If you can live without it and switch back to the motion or button to wake mode, you get 30-50% more usage before the battery runs out, which is not a huge improvement but is a legitimate option.
A side effect is that this makes your watch look less new, and therefore less of a theft target.
And bicycles go much further without needing petrol than cars.
I agree that Apple Watches don't last long enough between charges, but comparing them to a completely different class of device that's technically the same broad category is pointless.
Is this a thing? I've been using a Pixel 9 Pro Fold for one full year now and my inner screen looks pretty flawless. I don't see a single scratch, and I've never used any kind of protector on the inside. This kind of sounds like a "sour grapes" excuse where a really good thing is presumed to suck only because you can't have it. Personally, as someone who isn't really interested in a full tablet, the foldable is really really nice.
I have an OG Pixel Fold and the inner screen is flawless. My iPhone 14 Pro screen is visibly scratched. The Fold replaced tablets and e readers for me.
I don't know what to tell you - I don't want to brag about my eyesight, but it's pretty good - No matter what angle, no matter what phone, the crease is visible. What would I have to gain lying about this? I could say the same thing - Stop trying to copium your purchase?
For those that are not chronically online, a mobile phone from a decade ago has everything they need. If you only have to phone the family, WhatsApp your neighbours, get the map out, use a search engine and do your online banking, then a flagship phone is a bit over the top. If anything, the old phone is preferable since its loss would not be the end of the world.
I have seen a few elderly neighbours rocking Samsung Galaxy S7s with no need to upgrade. Although the S7 isn't quite a decade old, the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come since there is this demographic of active users.
Now, what if we could get these people to upgrade every three years with a feature that the 'elderly neighbour' would want? Eyesight isn't what it used to be in old age, so how about a nice big screen?
You can't deliberately hobble the phone with poor battery life or programme it to go slow in an update because we know that isn't going to win the customer over, but a screen that gets tatty after three years? Sounds good to me.
I'm still want a phone with expandable storage and a headphone jack. Sony had one, but I don't know if they're selling them and I've heard they have their own issues too.
One extra 'thing' to need - at the moment I know that I can play music through anything that has a line-in, with just a cable. However Bluetooth seems to work ok - for devices that support it.
Probably trying to find better screen materials, and addressing reliability issues.
I used Palm devices with resistive touch screens. It was good, but when you go glass, there's no turning back.
I would never buy a phone with folding screens protected by plastic. I want a dependable slab. Not a gimmicky gadget which can die any moment. I got my fix for dying flex cables with Casiopeia PDAs. Never again.
my girlfriend broke her iphone screen twice in two weeks, the second time we didn't bother repairing the screen and now she has a broken screen which looks really ugly. I've dropped my google pixel fold 9 countless time and the screen is still intact and flawless. So not sure what you're talking about.
Sure, but I wouldn't buy one even if it was in the same price range as phones I usually buy. For me, it will be useful rarely and cumbersome to use the rest of the time.
I picked up a folding phone a while back just to test it out, and honestly they're still pretty underwhelming.
The screen isn't really big enough or the right shape to feel like a real upgrade for movies, and a lot of apps just aren't built with foldables in mind. Most of the time it just feels like a weirdly shaped, less powerful, less durable tablet.
On top of that you're dealing with a visible crease across the screen, higher prices for something that's actually more fragile, and bulkier hardware with smaller or split batteries. The tech is cool in theory, but in practice it's a lot of compromises without a clear killer use case.
which phone was that? I bought the pixel folding 9 last year and it has basically replaced my ipad pro. I watch movies, shows, youtube videos, read PDFs on it, it's really good
Things have evolved a ton. I've got an Oppo Find N5. Thinner than iPhone Air when unfolded. Same size as iPhone 16 Pro Max when folded. 16GB Ram, fastest Snapdragon, okay cameras, the screen is magnificent, crease basically invisible in day to day use. Battery larger than any iPhone battery (thanks to Silicon Carbon)
Free with a plan just means you paid for it in installments without them breaking down how much of your monthly payment is going towards the device vs towards the network use. Had you opted for a cheaper device you could have got the same plan for less money. The phone is never actually free, just cleverly marketed to seem free.
I recently got one of these (Galaxy Z7 Fold) and I can't imagine ever going back to a regular phone. The big screen is what makes the phone finally begin to resemble actual productivity tool.
It was a prepaid plan that was the same price whether I got the phone or not. I guess you could say everyone who didn’t get the phone was subsidizing those who did, but there’s no way to opt for lower pricing if you BYOD. So no, in this case that’s not really true. If it were Verizon where you can pay less if you BYOD then sure but that’s not what I did.
> It’s not a big enough slice for them to want to chase.
Typical strat for them is not to be first with an innovation, but to wait and work out the kinks enough that they can convince people that the tradeoffs are well worth making. Apple wouldn't be chasing that existing slice, they'd be trying to entice a larger share of their customers to upgrade faster.
Yes, in some way everybody is in the 1.5% of something. Apple users will therefore never be 100% happy. Apple is a compromise. But they're also opinionated and very good at telling their users what they should like.
Folding phones are extremely popular in China, where nobody cares about Apple anymore. They are now seen as a status symbol because they are significantly more expensive.
I think they'd rather sell you an iPhone and an iPad Mini rather than one device that does both, just like they'd rather sell you an iPad Air/Pro and a MacBook with basically the same internals, rather than a convertible macOS tablet.
Aside from the obvious mechanical issues, the screen quality compromises, et cetera, folding phones are just dorky. Apple wants their products to be anything but dorky.
Apple watch is like the definition of dorky looking - so much for that theory.
Also flip phones aren't dorky and have a 2000s vibe - but they don't fit Apple "you can have any color as long as it's black" approach to design.
In some ways I can't even fault them - fragmenting your device shapes/experiences to chase a niche look is not good business. But this is exactly what's pushing me out of Apple ecosystem - it's so locked down that if you don't want to fit into their narrow product lines you have no other options. There are no third party watch makers using apple watch hardware and software. No other phone makers with access to iPhone internals and iOS. Nobody can hack a PC OS onto an iPad or build a 2in1 MacOS device.
I feel like this is the last gen of Apple tech I'm in on - I just find there are so many devices that are compelling to me personally but don't fit into the walled garden. Plus Google seems light-year ahead on delivering a smart assistant.
I was going to write that the only nerdier thing I can think of is wearing a calculator watch - but even that's like nerd fashion and having a rectangular screen strapped to your wrist is just all about utility.
If you mistake any of these for an apple watch at less than 100m you need glasses.
There's nothing wrong with rectangular watches - a fat bezel less screen rectangle around your wrist is not the same thing. The pro comes closest to a proper watch look but even that's "inspector gadget" teritory, not fashion accessory.
Don't know why you're downvoted. My boyfriend wears the Apple Watch Ultra in public and looks like a complete dork. He's got a pretty big wrist, too!
I left the ecosystem after Catalina, and my experience with macOS at work has horrified me enough to stay well away. Nowadays I'm happily using NixOS on the desktop, laptop and homeserver. My biggest gripe is that I didn't switch sooner, probably could have saved a decent amount of cash eschewing the Apple tax, SaaS fees and macOS migration hamster-wheel.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with the Apple Watch being labeled "dorky". I think they look pretty nice - and I don't own one. I wear a Timex Ironman.
It’s hard to find a source of how many iPhone owners specifically also own a smartwatch, but in the US it seems like 35% might be a decent estimate of smartwatch ownership, so it’d be more in the realm of ~28% of iPhone owners also having an Apple Watch.
True, it did seem a bit unbelievable. Either way, if you look around, Apple Watch is worn by all walks of life and just doesn't have the dorky vibe HNers might insist it has.
They're in the right. Folding phones are great, and I've used one for years, but the technology hasn't reached Apple levels. Get rid of the crease, make the screen less scratchable, and make them waterproof, and then it could go in an iPhone.
Im never going back to non-foldable. The ability to have a full sized phone take up half as much space in my pocket is amazing. Consistently more comfortable moving around.
I have a google fold 9 for a year and I've never noticed it unless I look at the phone from the side. It's interesting that this is the criticism that comes up the most here where it's already been a solved issue
If you hold it up to light to get a reflection, you are telling me there's zero perceptual warping of that reflection around the crease? None? It's as flat and perfect as a single sheet of glass?
iPads are better for watching shows on a stationary bike, since they fit on the bike
iPads are better for reading manga, since you can hold them vertically
and iPads are clearly better for drawing--you can't draw on a laptop.
There are some hybrid laptops that do these things, but they're bad at them. Especially drawing, I've used enough HP convertibles with "stylus support" over the years to know that.
> there’s essentially (literally?) no difference between an iPad and MacBook hardware
Form factor. Touch screen. GPS. Cellular. Circular polarization. These are all literal hardware differences between the iPad and MacBook, and every single one of them makes the iPad suitable for my use case (ForeFlight running on an iPad mounted to the yoke) where a MacBook would not be.
Also, can you give an example of a laptop (or non-Apple tablet) with a circularly polarized LCD? I've never been able to find one, but it's not a spec that's often published…
Are you serious? For anything that needs more screen estate - reading, browsing, photo/video watching/organizing, or simply if your sight is not as good anymore, it's so much better than phone. And with the pricetag around $350 that is amazing value.
Someone else commented that the reason the iPhone Air is so thin is the result of Apple building a folding phone (they have to be thin). I agree. The iPhone Air basically looked like a low hanging fruit while they're still at it. Apple is known to take its time so that makes sense
I've had the past three generations of Samsung folding phone (4,5,6).
My use-case is for travel, where I want to read books, and the very occasional time when I want to do some design work outside the office -- draw a diagram that sort of thing. A third rare use case is where a web site is buggy or limited in functionality for mobile browsers. In all these cases the unfolded screen allows me to do the thing I need to do without carrying a second device (tablet, eReader). Another marginal use-case is to show another person a photograph. The fold out screen is much easier to see and I think has better color rendition too.
For these use-cases I find the folding phone very worthwhile.
But...the benefit that trumps all that is that the phone itself is smaller (narrower) than the typical flagship phones these days. It fits in my pocket and my hand reaches across it. I'd never go back to a non-folding phone for this reason alone, even if I never unfolded it. In fact I almost never do unfold it, except when traveling.
fwiw it wasn't until the Fold6 that the "cover screen" typing experience was ok. I understand that the Fold7 is a bit wider and so probably better, but I can't justify the expense to upgrade so will sit out until the Fold8.
they do work well but are fragile. I broke one by gently closing it on a hot day (about 100F). Saw another break from the kind of short fall that used to break phones before they all got gorilla glass.
I guess if you're the sort that is not clumsy and you're in a mild climate you might get your money's worth
The vertical fold ones might be better. I had the newest Samsung Flip (horizontal folding) and the screen died twice. Both times from a small rupture on the seam. The tech at the phone place said it happens constantly, and it costs hundreds of dollars to replace out of warranty.
I dunno, I always felt folding phones added unnecessary complexity and moving parts. The slab phone seems closer to a platonic ideal and from a user/engineering perspective, has less compromises
> IMO it's underwhelming considering folding phones have been out for many years now and we still don't have a folding iPhone. What are the PMs doing at Apple.
They're buying another year of very-high margin phones I guess...
I would never have bought one before but nowadays it could actually be useful. You could have Codex or Claude Code in your pocket, and every ~15min check the work and write a new prompt. Tablets are too big (for me) to constantly carry around for this, and phones annoyingly small for that use.
Can someone that is actually interested in this explain the appeal? Thin on its own I get but thin with a giant bump 100% defeats the whole point for me. Seems clear at this point there is little hope of them engineering their way into thin cameras.
Doubt most people want it as thin as possible. This is just the phone industry running out of ideas and trying to tell people what they actually need.
There's not much left to "fix" on mobile phones, and no real important features to add. Lacking that, they need something to sell the phones with, so they're going for these strange "improvements". It needs to be something that has some wow factor so they can lead with. This seems to somehow work on normal people so they'll keep doing these "improvements".
I expect in the future they'll pull this trick again, moving bits of the phone upwards towards camera, and create a second notch from half way down, where the phone will get even thinner, and they'll sell that.
I can think of quite a few things to fix just they are extraordinarily difficult engineering problems versus 10-20% improvements on existing features or random tweaks:
- novel approach to camera optics that can completely flatten them into the phone
- front camera hidden behind the screen removing the island or inset
- dramatically better battery tech density leading to like week long usage
- way more ram (100gb+) and processing power for powerful local llm and other ai
- significant reduction in thickness and weight. like this air with no bump but also under 100 grams
- maybe some stuff with projectors
This. I don't want a very thin phone — I want one that fits in my pocket smoothly, and the bump ruins that. Give me a thicker phone, with a bigger battery and rounded edges like the original iPhone.
You know, I forgot my razor and was on vacation in a very touristy place which only had expensive, "luxury" brands of everything just to pump up the price. So I got stuck buying one of those Mach 4's. I have to say, it was actually a very nice shave. I'm usually a total skeptic and this is obviously Mad did a great job with this commercial, but there is something to be said for that product. I haven't bothered paying the higher price for it in general, but I do kinda miss it.
Interesting! I hadn’t seen that Mad TV ad before. It’s quite reminiscent of this one from The Late Show on Australian TV in 1992. I can totally see people having a similar idea from the same blade escalation process.
No one would buy it (by Apple standards) because no one is asking for an over half pound phone. I bet a 17 Pro with a flat back that was all battery would approach a pound.
This is not true. None of the Apple cases (or third party cases) give a flush finish to the entire phone. They just add a new, bigger, larger bump below the camera bump which lets the phone basically lie flat. It does not make it easier to smoothly fit into a pocket or anything like that, and the phone is still wobbly while placed face-up on a surface.
Note that hidden front cameras have been available for a while - for example, the Samsung Z Fold 3 (2021). There are some engineering tradeoffs involved with light transmission and image quality that maybe Apple doesn't find favorable.
Interestingly Chinese manufacturers seem to be the main adopters of this tech. For example, the article below has Samsung, Xiaomi, ZTE, Oppo, Vivo (actually, this may just be due to there being many more large Chinese phone manufacturers in general.)
https://www.smartprix.com/bytes/under-display-camera-phones/
Basically nobody cares about front camera performance since its never stellar and always over-ironed digital meh, especially compared to look of display that's constantly in-your-face. The photos taken with it are never taken for highest picture quality, rather just catching a person being somewhere.
The motivations of Apple to keep things as they are for so long, despite strong criticism from all over is one of business mysteries. A little middle finger to its user one may say, not big enough to stir things too much, just a bit.
At some point you run into physics limitations with the camera though. Cameras are a weird bit of tech. In almost all other areas of tech, as we get more advanced, things get smaller - the opposite is true of camera sensors, they get better the larger they are. More light, less noise, better/more pleasing bokeh, etc. Same is true for lenses as well, and as the sensors get bigger, the lenses also must get bigger.
I love the idea behind the pro phone and going all out on cameras, but practically I want the air more. I wish it had an ultrawide, but it is what it is - I have and frequently carry around an actual camera with me most places I go where I'd want to take photos.
We had flush cameras the last time in the iPhone SE 2016. That camera was good enough for my modest needs. It's just that Apple has a different opinion.
People who routinely take photos in social situations. Camera phones don't have features that appeal to professionals, they do things that appeal to casual photographers.
Pro photographers aren't professionals because they have expensive cameras, it's because they get paid to deliver professional results. A phone camera can be the most usable camera for a result because it's smaller and fits in more places.
Though the camera isn't even the most important equipment, that's lenses/lighting (plus stabilizers, studio backdrops, etc.)
They say the best camera is the one you have with you, and your phone is usually with you. In any case, some professional photographers actually prefer shooting on their phone even for planned, high-profile shoots—perhaps they like its convenience, or that its unassuming nature puts subjects at ease. Or perhaps they find it creatively freeing to be burdened down by only minimal gear.
Yeah, idk. That seems like an awful idea to me. I’m not sure why she would shoot with an iPhone for such a job unless she got paid by Apple. Some practical reasons:
- Such an important moment is something you often wanna blow up in a large/hi-res print.
- An ultrawide lens is suboptimal for portraits and usually makes the face look puffy from the perspective.
- Unless you know the exact color & aesthetic for the cover you want to preserve the raw capture for changes in post to match the vibe.
While I can certainly appreciate the casual and intimate vibe she’s going for, as a pro she could have brought any decent camera with a portrait lens and keeping the shoots equally short without compromising quality and adding risk for the poor layout person who has to work with it later.
I consider myself a hobby photographer, and I love having a phone camera. I can then have the tele glass on for entire hike/session, and do landscapes on the phone. Currently, 2 weeks in, I didn't even touch the landscape glass in it's case.
> novel approach to camera optics that can completely flatten them into the phone - front camera hidden behind the screen removing the island or inset - dramatically better battery tech density leading to like week long usage
The thing you are looking for is meta lenses, not the company. They could cover the entire back-face of the phone and provide some pretty incredible capabilities. We are not there yet, but I'd expect to see them in the next 20 years.
I was going to come in with a set of reasons why these wouldn't sell, but... I think they could! Air quality fits neatly into Apple's health push, though I could see them making that a Watch feature rather than a phone feature (since your phone lives in your pocket, and quality sensors need time for the readings to stabilize). 3D imaging and synthetic refocusing both have a wow factor that would be easy to get people excited about. The only one I'm unsure of is multi-spectrum imaging; while I suspect pretty much anyone on this forum would jump at that, I don't have a good idea of whether the general population would get excited about temperature data. At the very least, it'd be handy for some kitchen tasks where you need a surface temperature.
> Novel radios that enable true Starlink connection in your pocket for gigabit internet globally
Satellite comms gets very close to face melting tech quite quickly, so I would prefer not to have that in a mobile device....
I would like a light field camera. I've seen some research about using and array of 1mm2 cameras (basically the smallest omnivision module) and one decent module to make a synthetic high res camera. Takes a huge amount of GPU power to get not very interesting results though.
Man, the Oneplus 8 I believe had an 'xray' camera that was super cool, until people realized you could use it to 'see through clothes', and so it was disabled. I have to imagine cool camera tech is being held back to some degree by that still today.
Why do you need a gigabit connectivity on the phone? Aside question: can you tell the difference between 4K and 8K video on the phone without actually checking?
I want a phone that fits in my hand. Will have to leave the iPhone world in a few years when the 13 mini dies, but from what I can tell android is just as bad.
Took the plunge from an SE 2020 to a 16, and it is noticeable how it is hard to hold in one hand. I could see a world were a foldable iphone would mean a narrower device.
I got a 16 (mostly because of the USB-C) and returned it before the 30day return period was over. It was a noticeable downgrade compared to my SE 2022.
Currently trying to get a solid postmarketOS setup so I can switch back to Linux before the SE goes out of support. Apple really doesn't offer an upgrade path from this device.
My hope is that when the mini is end of auooort that I’ll just stop carrying a phone and will end up not wasting so much time on the internet. It could be a good thing!
I am thinking of trying one of the vertically folding phones with a keyboard case. It reminds me of a BlackBerry. The keyboard means the small square outer screen is a lot more usable by itself.
iPhones have had iMessage over satellite since I think the 15? I've used it when camping. It's pretty neat!
Features I want: ask siri for the things I look up and it works. "When did the baby fall asleep" instead of opening Nanit. "How many more intervals in this workout" instead of opening TrainerRoad. "What is my next meeting" instead of opening Outlook. This was the promise of the new Siri and it just has yet to really come true.
What needs to be better about screens outdoor? iPhones have had nicely readable screens in bright sunlight for a long time now, including compatibility with sunglasses. Though it would be nice to see this in all other phones too.
Other than that I agree. Especially camera bumps are annoying to me, I would prefer a phone thick enough to make the bump disappear, that would then automatically solve the battery life issue as well.
> Batteries that charge fast. Batteries that can support 2-3 days of use. Lighter batteries.
Battery chemistry isn't there yet. Frankly, we are lucky enough phones don't set themselves ablaze every day - it only takes minuscule errors and you get a Galaxy Note.
> Thinner camera.
Hard to beat physics and if you ask me, "AI" slop is already being overused on cameras to hide the fact that good picture quality requires sensor area and distance for the optics.
> Satellite connectivity.
We're already beginning to see that with Starlink LTE.
You can see the logical conclusion to this phenomenon with vacuum cleaners. Pointless little buttons and switches that don't do much, labels and fancy names for things that any vacuum can do, and aesthetics that prioritize a futuristic form over function.
> There's not much left to "fix" on mobile phones, and no real important features to add.
I'm happy with my iPhone, but it still has a week or so shorter battery life than even a relatively cheap Nokia phone and with all that available space I know something it could be used for.
3d holographic displays, IR keyboards, powerful local llm (so more powerful), Silent-Speech Interface (SSI), more powerful cameras (better than mirrorless cameras, 3d, multi focal length in one image etc).
3d UIs don't work, every attempt has failed to reach mass adoption
IR keyboards lack haptic feedback
Aside from enhancedprivacy, a desire to drain your battery, a lack of recurring revenue for local phone LLMs, and functioning when network is inaccessible, what would a local LLM do that a network-enabled feature couldn't?
I don't have the impression people care about the weight of phones. Premium phones have metal and glass cases, and in the non-premium market the thing that matters is price.
What matters to me is how comfortable it is to hold and use with one hand. Large and thin phones tend to be bad in that aspect.
Niche, but (true) satellite communication. If i understand correctly what we have in the pixel 9/10 is not nearly as useful as having a garmin, never mind the fact that it works basically in europe and US only
the thin phone is supposedly first step toward the iPhold foldable. they will probably slam 2 iphone air sandwiched together for the fold so this is the first step i guess
Here's my hot take: A small metal loop for tying a wrist strap to.
All other cameras have wrist straps as a safety feature. From flimsy ribbons on the smallest (smartphone-sized) to padded leather on the largest. They were common on feature phones too.
But smartphone makers want people to drop their phones, so people would have to buy new ones, I suppose.
You could get a case with a wrist loop, you say? Not on any of Apple's cases, anyway.
There is ample room to extend, but it costs money or the designers are in a bubble or they are afraid to innovate. The worst is that they now copied Pixel's ugly island :DDDDD. Oh dear god. At least it doesn’t look like some brutalist artist’s fever dream, just like we've seen it on the Pixel phones.
I agree with you, you're still going to put it in a fat case to protect the camera.
Personally, I think thin is just "omg look at my engineering". blah blah.
I found the (expensive!) bullstrap case to be helpful - thin and slippery enough to slide out of a pocket easily, well engineered to protect the camera.
But really, I think the iphone 13 mini was the most useful/practical application of apple's engineering.
I think a mini-sized 3-camera bulge phone would be great.
Never once used a case in 12+ yrs of iphone ownership and only cracked a screen once. Think there are a lot of people out there like me. Many people are way too anal about an every day utilitarian device.
Yeah I'll never understand how anyone can use an iPhone without it being in a case, it's just not practical or comfortable to hold without a case adding grip.
Surely its obvious - grip and protection. Fairly well established that they're slippy, and dropping them means gouges being taken out of the frame, or if you're really unlucky, cracked glass.
Pixel 9 is so extremely slippery that one can't help but think they designed it to need a case. I never bought a case prior to Pixel 9 but the thing is like a wet bar of soap.
Yeah when my last phone case broke I tried carrying it nude and that was what immediately struck me. So I bought some adhesive rubber knurl stickers for the edges but they wouldn't stay on because my Pixel 7 has a curved edge - would probably work well on a phone with a flat edge.
I stuck on a MagSafe metal sticker thing on the back and that little bit of greebling makes me feel a bit better holding it.
I'd say approximately once a year. I have been using a case with my current one (a 15 Pro), but didn't with any of my previous ones, back to the iPhone 3G. I've broken one screen.
> that is wild. are you just very clumsy? i drop mine maybe once a year.
"Wild" seems like a stretch. I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to believe that some people drop their phones occasionally, and it's a reasonable concern when it's likely to be with you everywhere you go.
Hearing someone drops their phone on average 50 times more often than i do i find wild. Good points in the other comments though as I have never used cases on phones before so i'm likely subconsciously more careful with them. Also typically in slim fit jeans pockets which are nearly impossible to accidentally drop out of.
Once I was getting off my jeans to do the Royal Squat and they decided to barf my phone. It fell like from 30 cm high, hit the ground exactly on the corner. Screen cracked edge to edge.
Not sure. I rarely fall when climbing rocks, so I’m not a total butterfingers. I often take out my phone to use as a flashlight, angle mirror etc and leave it balanced precarious places. Never had a phone break in probably hundreds of ground falls (always using a case). Since it’s never broken, I don’t expend effort to prevent it from falling.
Edit: sibling comment is correct, sketchy pockets of athletic shorts are a major offender. Actually it bothers me way more when my car keys fall out of those.
It sounds crazy, but it turns out the finish on the phone makes a huge difference.
I never used a case until I got a Galaxy S9; that phone was like a greased eel. Went from dropping my phone zero times in 8 years to 5 times in one week.
The case is part of the utilitarianism. I need to attach my phone to a bike mount. I use a Peak Design case that has a locking attachment point in the centre to securely fasten the phone onto the handlebars.
I would gladly ditch the case if Apple had a strong mounting system integrated into the phone (MagSafe has nowhere near the resistance to shear forces sufficient to hold a phone over bumps on a bike.)
I suppose I am looking for the phone equivalent of a camera thumbscrew mount. If Apple iterated on MagSafe to include an actual mechanical fixture as part of the attachment, I would buy that phone right away so I can avoid using these crappy pieces of rubber/plastic that degrade so much more quickly in appearance than the phone frame rails.
Same, I get random “raw dogging it” comments from strangers much more often than I drop my phone even since having kids. Ironically via raw dogging it.
I bought a new pixel, bought a case that had slow shipping. Only a week, what could go wrong? I dropped it flat on the screen on a tile floor.
Cases are dirt cheap, if you're paying over $30 for one you're probably overpaying. The expected value of a screen repair, not only the cost but your time makes it a no-brainer.
I think you might be an outlier. My own anecdote is that literally everyone I know who doesn't use a case (albeit a small number of people) has cracked their phone at some point while I've known them.
Survivorship bias /s How do you know it wouldn't have survived without case? I drop my phone on nearly daily basis and since 2007 only cracked one iPhone screen.
Very true, actually, you're right! But given that my screen has cracked once while I was using a case, I can't imagine it would be better without a case.
I did do cosmetic damage to the non-screen parts of some phones while not using a case, though.
I'm convinced that "area" where screen breaks without a case, but doesn't break with a case is very narrow. In my mind, the main reasons to have a case: personalize, rugged cases for appropriate environment (car shops, construction sites), improve grip in certain "phone shape" + hand size combinations.
> I did do cosmetic damage to the non-screen parts of some phones while not using a case, though.
I wonder if some of this is also a generational thing? I'm in my mid-late-40s and grew up in a world where electronics were pretty fragile (and water basically was a death sentence). Heck, even getting DOA hardware wasn't so uncommon as to be surprising when it happened.
The idea of letting my phone drop unprotected (or getting it wet like I see some people do) is horrible.
You did forget one big use case for cases: money laundering. There's no way all the physical stores and kiosks that only sell cases are actually making money...
Well, I'm in my mid-30s, if it helps. I remember my first 5 phones would split into multiple pieces with sim always being ejected when dropped. They still would work after put back together, tho.
It's really more "I got extended warranty, and I'm not afraid to use". I live in LA, so I'm never too far from the nearest store I can replace mine. All data important backed up. Dropping a phone for me will result at most in a minor-to-medium annoyance.
I only fear of getting the phone too wet because battery disconnect is practically impossible today.
Because if the case gets damaged you can easily replace it.
People would still put a case on a bulky phone to protect resale or trade in value.
A super thin phone doesn't require a super bulky case, it requires just as much case as a person would normally use, resulting in a smaller overall profile.
I'd probably still go pro because I care more about the camera than the size.
I don’t get the idea of putting glass on the back of this phone. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just have metal there so there are less things to crack?
I think the reality is that your phone will always encounter something that can damage it (unless it's made out of diamond), and a case lets you easily replace the damaged part.
Just subjectively, I remember having a super scratched iPod and it just felt kind of ratty every time you looked at it. Meanwhile, a phone in a leather case gets kind of a patina that improves with age. It is kind of sad though, I got a really pretty blue iPhone and you wouldn't even know it because it's completely covered by a case.
I'd rather see phones that aren't perfectly flat but instead have proper built-in mounting things. Give me some screw holes to attach a set of 4 bumpers to the corners, and a camera mount thread hole in the bottom.
Honestly, it sounds really compelling to me. I do a lot of stuff outside - search and rescue, climbing, etc, and I need a rugged case for that, but having a thin, light phone when I'm at home or doing something with less chance to damage the phone is pretty nice, so thin phone + case is the best of both worlds.
> I agree with you, you're still going to put it in a fat case to protect the camera.
The Apple cases aren't flat on the back. They have a rim around the camera bump (and they create a rim around the front of the phone, too). The rear rim is slightly taller than the lens bezels (not sure if I used the right word there), so they don't touch the surface the phone rests on. I place my phone+case on the desk face-down because the camera bump and the wobble it creates when resting the phone back down triggers some minor irritation for me. The slight rim around the front of the phone keeps the screen from touching the surface. All of this would be nicer if the phone were flat across the back.
The metal case and toughened glass mean I don't really need the case most the time. I once dropped an older model onto a concrete floor such that it landed on a corner, shattering the screen, so I'm more risk averse with them now.
I've only broken the iPhone camera once in more than a decade of using iPhones. And that's when I was in IKEA and a box of unassembled furniture fell onto it.
If you really want protection, the screen is still more fragile than the camera.
I’d go with the 5S - the 5 with the first 64-bit phone CPU and some other improvements (especially TouchID). In black, of course. (I think I still have one somewhere.)
I'm going to preorder one because I want a light phone and a large screen. This will be the lightest iPhone in years while also having a bigger screen than most. I dropped from the Pro Max to the Pro last year because I was tired of how much it hurt when I dropped my phone on my face.
I don't have much call for most of the camera system, and my battery life on my Pro is just fine. I have plenty of chargers typically, and for emergencies or times I know I'm going to be out I could potentially get the battery pack.
I basically never use cases on my iPhone, and at most will maybe use an ultra-thin one or some sort of structure adhered to the plateau just to make it flat across so as to not rock on a table.
> I dropped from the Pro Max to the Pro last year because I was tired of how much it hurt when I dropped my phone on my face.
Now this, good people, is a real use case. If it seems like an edge case to you, I guarantee Apple’s design and product people know of — and optimize for — use cases much more rare.
I'd rather optimize my $20 running shorts around my $1000 phone than the other way around tbh. No phone is comfortable in the pocket when running though, I used to use an arm strap and more recently just take the watch.
I carry two phones on me and if I run with just my SE it is comfortable enough to run with
But its not about optimisation it's about freedom. I don't enjoy having to baby around a lumbering 6 inch phone. I want my phone to optimise around me being able to not worrying about a brick sagging in my shorts.
The horizontal rear waistband zipper pocket on Patagonia Strider Pro running shorts genuinely makes my phone not noticeable at all during runs, unlike any other shorts I’ve tried. My experience is limited to smaller phones (6S, 12 Mini) without any cases, though.
It also hurts when I drop the iPad mini on my face. In fact, I was considering getting a Pro Max to replace both a iPhone Pro and iPad mini combo but figured it might too big of a compromise.
I wonder if anyone has successfully gone down this path.
>> I dropped from the Pro Max to the Pro last year because I was tired of how much it hurt when I dropped my phone on my face.
I never had this issue with my phone but it was a big reason for moving from an iPad to a Kindle for reading in bed... Dropping an iPad on my face (or even chest) == ouch.
Laying in bed/couch with the phone over your face and arms outstretched. Eventually your arms get tired or a muscle twitches and you drop the phone on your face.
I read or do a crossword in bed as part of my go to sleep ritual. Sometimes it slips out my hand though usually it just hits my chin or chest. I can easily see how it falls on someone's face though.
Samsung galaxy s2 was a super small super thin phone, 15 years ago almost, which still had user replaceable battery, microsd, 3.5mm, gps, and everything most people would expect smartphone to have.
We then spent a decade making phones 0.2" bigger each generation as if that's an advancement - I.e. As if we couldn't have made them big in the first place (all the while removing physical features).
Then we started making them thin again, as if we couldn't have made them thin before.
It makes me think of cars - VW golf used to be a small car, then it kept growing... So they released Polo... Which kept growing so they made lupo... But each year my entire life they have ads like "6 inches bigger than before" or "10cm more legroom than competition", as if there haven't been small and large cars before.
Grumble Grumble, seen it all before, kids get off my lawn :-)
I agree to an extent. Most phones back then had no water protection. They also didn't last long so most people carried extra batteries which sucks. Honestly, I'd welcome the whole non replaceable battery if I could completely submerge my phone in water. Maybe when they get rid of the charging port.
You can submerge recent iPhones completely in water for few years now. Every year I make some quite fun and surprisingly looking underwater pictures with mine, that's just fine afterwards given I'm still able to write this comment on it.
Pseudo-scientifically, it always seemed that worked to dissipate impact kinetic energy - I dropped my s2 and s5 a million times and picked up the parts with no damage. The more modern phones don't fall apart, they just crack :-(
It's about the size and even more importantly the weight. I like small, light phones (I currently have the iphone 13 mini). I want something small that I can slip into my pocket and it's not this brick bouncing around as take a walk.
Although, I'm not a big phone user though, mainly use it when I'm outside of the house. In the house, I'll just use my laptop.
Apple offering is underwhelming to say the least and way too expensive for my use case.
I want to go Android anyway, I'm too disillusioned with Apple currently, I'm tired of dealing with their predatory behavior.
But there aren't a lot of decent options there as well but at least you can get it much cheaper, so that's something, I guess.
Previously Apple was the provider of hardware which made the right compromise to allow specific/focused use case, they called it "taste" in a sea of nonsense with bullshit "features".
But now it feels like Apple has joined in on the nonsense and is actually leading the pack; which is why the price feels bad.
If you are going to make the same crap as everyone else with the same set of bad compromises, I'm not going to overpay for it.
I think this is why Apple "AI" got so much backlash. If they didn't make it or at least market it as heavily as they, did it would have been fine, but it was just the same crap as everyone else, just worse and more expensive.
They could have released the exact same phone, just shaving a 100 dollar and have been acclaimed and made more money that way I believe.
Even more annoyingly, the bump is non-uniform with lens extruding even further from the entire bump. I have been annoyed by this design ever since they started with it. The last phone the design of which brought joy for me was my OnePlus 3T - thin and light. It also had the camera bump though which I would gladly sacrifice even if it meant a lower quality camera. On the other hand, I suppose they could just insert a thicker battery and make the whole phone a bit thicker but remove the bump.
> Can someone that is actually interested in this explain the appeal?
It’s light and the thinness is just fun. I’m not putting a case on it. And I really don’t understand why a phone needs to sit flat on a table—if anything, the angle is a plus.
It’s only 12 grams lighter than my iPhone XS. And it’s 20 grams heavier than my Pixel 4a. For a product called “air”, It doesn’t even succeed at being light-weight.
Of course, the iPhone 5 weighed significantly less than either of those! The iPhone Air has a larger screen than all three of those. I don't see what your comparison has to do with anything. The Air is a light phone relative to its screen size. It is also an incredibly thin phone.
I'm probably not getting one, but I don't see the point of comparing it to physically smaller phones.
> Sony Xperia Z2 - 2014 - 172mm x 266mm x 6.4 mm - 439g
Again, not nearly the same screen size, so weight is irrelevant. But also, 439g? Wow! If that number wasn’t completely wrong, that would be impressive.
Did an LLM hallucinate those specs that you quoted? I honestly don’t know how the thickness and weight you quoted could be that far off if you did the research yourself.
But, even if you were right, which you don’t seem to be, it’s all moot. No one is cross-shopping a 2014 phone to a 2025 phone. But even if they were, the real numbers speak for themselves.
At least for me something so thin feels better with a bit of heft. And if you read the article the idea was to use any space saved for the battery. Seems pretty slick
Flat doesn't seem best to you?
Next best for me would be a symmetrical bump.
But the asymmetrical bump (I think) all iPhones have seems the worst of all alternatives. This results in that bad restaurant table wobble feeling.
Right. I am sure flatness would have Revolutionary™ had Apple decided to make it rather flat (of course with the "First Time Again In An iPhone™" tag).
I currently have a 14 pro. I use a MagSafe wallet with it (holds three cards). This allows me a not crazy, but fairly uniform, thick single object I have to grab when I leave the…anywhere. While this might not work for everyone, it works great for me.
I’m potentially considering the air because wasted z-axis space the camera bump creates, I’d use with a MagSafe wallet again, so it wouldn’t be wasted for me. I like that the built in battery is likely sufficient for a day of my use, but can be easily extended with the MagSafe battery on days where I know I’ll be using more juice, e.g. when traveling. None of these things are unique to the air; instead the overall thickness which results from my usage is the differentiator, from which I think I might derive value.
I'm not an apple user, not into their design choices... but if i had a choice, i'd much prefer a phone as thick as the camera with a 3x the battery capacity.
I'd even go with a millimeter or two thicker to have the backplate attached by screws and the battery easily user replacable after a few years.
Several brands have released an ultra thin version of their phone, followed by a foldable version of their phone. One phone depth is good for just about everyone, but you can't double that up, you'd get a phone that's too bulky for modern tastes.
It stands to reason the iFold/iPaper/iSheet/whatever Apple will call it is drawing closer now that Samsung and several Chinese brands have pretty much solved the design for Apple.
I bought a 14 Pro when it came out and returned it for a 13 mini because it was too heavy.
They switched the frame from stainless steel to titanium the next year which made the Pro phones noticeably lighter. And now this year the Pros are aluminum like the non-Pros have been for years, which is also pretty light.
The 3 big camera sensors certainly don't help with the weight either, but the good news is they did seem to recognize they were getting to heavy with the 14 Pro.
The idea of an iPhone still as a status symbol in 2025 seems strange to me. I understood it in 2008. They are so commonplace and also not really that expensive where it is a financial flex like some watch that cost 10k+ or something.
“Sixty-three percent of adults said they would cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense exclusively using cash or its equivalent, unchanged from 2022 and 2023 but down from a high of 68 percent in 2021.”
Hardly anyone in the US pays full price for the iPhone up front. They either use 0% carrier financing - usually with offsetting credits - or through Apple.
I don’t understand what that survey question is supposed to be indicating. I have lots of disposable income, and by default I spend using a credit card.
US net worth at the 25th percentile is >$20k, it’s not the case that 32% of people literally don’t have the wealth to afford a $400 expense.
Suppose that you have an emergency expense that costs $400. Based on your current financial situation, how would you pay for this expense?
If you would use more than one method to cover this expense, please select all that apply.
a. Put it on my credit card and pay it off in full at the next statement
b. Put it on my credit card and pay it off over time
c. With the money currently in my checking/savings account or with cash
d. Using money from a bank loan or line of credit
e. By borrowing from a friend or family member
f. Using a payday loan, deposit advance, or overdraft
g. By selling something
h. I wouldn’t be able to pay for the expense right now
There sure are a lot of comments in this thread pulling out all sorts of random and arbitrary statistics that have no connection with what is actually being discussed here. I’m finding that very strange, frankly.
The people monthly payment plans target are not able to afford the thing because they bought 30 other things on monthly payment plans in the past year and can't keep track of all the monthly payments they're owing until it's too late. That's the intent and why they're so popular now. It's why DoorDash is getting in on the action, so people will buy a Taco Bell delivery with a tempting price tag of only $4 at the time of purchase, multiple times a week for months until you owe hundreds of dollars.
Regardless of who they target, I'm taking free financing any day of the week. It's like credit cards which I've received huge value from, and I've never carried a balance in over 30 years of use.
> They are so commonplace and also not really that expensive where it is a financial flex like some watch that cost 10k+ or something.
I definitely agree about them being just about the most banal stupid toy you could spend the money on, but it's still a lot of money to a lot of people despite the cost of basic necessities making it not the huge amount that it used to be. I cringe at paying over $450, considering that every new model of phone since like 2015 hasn't really done anything worth significantly more money.
It's just a proxy for people to complain about the price. People will complain about a few hundred dollars in a phone price differences, even though it will be the one product they use more than anything else they own. And then not blink spending a couple extra grand on some car features/performance they use rarely or spend a thousand dollars a year on lattes.
I think it's -mostly- an age thing, and you simply matured out of it. For the most part.
I say that because I feel similarly, but my out of college coworkers rib me for not having an iPhone. One even commented he'd probably never text me in real life, to which I of course replied that I'd never want him to text me in real life.
They are between 1000 to 1500 USD over here in EU. Pretty much only very well off people are buying current gen iPhones. Many people have older models. We also don't have any Apple lock-in culture, so there is much less incentive to go out of your way to get iPhone specifically.
Genuine question - maybe I'm too in my own bubble but it seems like iPhone just completely dominates the market and is viewed as the "default" phone, which to me implies status quo, not luxury.
The Pro is still seen by some as a "flex" by some, visibly having all three lenses. The Air is likely just a more visible flex, thus it will probably sell well.
I'm an Australian in my 40's almost everyone in my immediate circle (family, friends, work-peers) has an Android, at least in my world iPhone is a minority.
I grew up with Nokia phones all I want out of my phone is something cheap and rugged with a decent battery life.
> I'm an Australian in my 40's almost everyone in my immediate circle (family, friends, work-peers) has an Android, at least in my world iPhone is a minority.
It's very particular to your group I think as I am in the same country, similar age, and yet it's the complete opposite for me.
But none of us care because it's not the US and nobody is using some phone exclusive messaging service enough to care about what phone anyone else is using.
There are many things that are expensive that are nevertheless not particularly seen as “status symbols”, in the sense of commonly used to publicly display one’s status/wealth/whatever.
I replaced my old iPhone XR with a brand new 16 this year, not because anything was wrong with it (even the battery was OK), but I wanted to see what the changes brought.
I was quite surprised that other than the much better battery, USB-C, and much better camera, and sometimes faster speed, the old one was holding up quite well.
You can get an old iPhone XR for 100 EURish, in decent condition. I really have no idea what model year iPhone's others have.
Americans don't earn the minimum wage. You're talking about less than 1/2 of 1% of the working population. It's a nearly worthless metric (other than as a political reference to how long it has been since the minimum wage has been increased and how far behind the median it is).
it’s just another of the many many comments in this thread where people throw out statistics to make a point, but those statistics are typically detached from reality or not even focused on the main topic of the conversation.
I mean literally half the people I know under the age of 25 have iPhones in my country. How can it be a status symbol when it’s the default phone for most people?
In the end it's the same thing, but in many countries where iPhones are popular, it's more of the "anti status symbol" effect happening. An iPhone is not a status symbol anymore per se, however NOT having one is the thing that gives you a "lower" status.
I bought a new iPhone 13 for $200 a few months ago and I love it. It does everything I need by far. Newer iPhones take better pictures, yes, but the 13 is still no slouch in that regard.
I have my iPhone 13 Pro Max for 4 years now and the only problem I really have is storage and the battery.
I'm debating if I just replace the battery and let this run another year... since the iPhone X I haven't seen any major upgrades still that feel like they'll matter in my day-to-day life.
I'm still rocking a four year-old Note 20 Ultra. I bought it new the week after they announced the Note 21 Ultra when it was clear they were dropping expandable storage. So it's five year-old tech and I can't see any compelling reason to upgrade. It still looks practically new despite never using a case and dropping it dozens of times. It runs all the apps I use quite fast and there's nothing slow about it.
I keep looking at new flagship launches and I keep not seeing any new capability, feature or performance that would make a noticeable difference to me. I replaced the battery myself last year and generally keep the OS clean, not letting app cruft accrue. I'm not a luddite nor am I price sensitive. I remain ready and willing to buy a high-end flagship phone the moment it does anything new I actually care about. It still gets regular security updates even though a couple years ago Samsung stopped updating it to their latest customized version of Android. And despite looking, I still haven't seen any new Android OS or Samsung One UI feature that would matter to me. Bottom line: I don't think it's you or me, I think it's that phones are mature tech and unless you have a specific use case or it breaks, there's just not much reason to upgrade.
I haven't felt compelled to give up my S23 Ultra. The 10X lens is just too useful, and I enjoy the way they did the S-Pen. My previous S21 Ultra is still in use and still going strong.
Can't see the specs for the iPhone Air but it looks much larger than my SE 2022. I wish they would bring that form factor back. Obviously not as powerful as bigger iPhones so not useful for posing purposes.
So I don't get this. Yes, my N=1 experience, but: I don't put my phone in a case, and only use a screen protector. I have a Pixel 8 (arguably one of the more notoriously ridiculous camera bumps), but have of course had other phones with camera bumps before this. I am generally careful with my phone, but of course I've dropped it, knocked it off a table onto the floor, etc. But I've never ever scratched the camera. Have I just been lucky, or are they harder to scratch than one would expect?
It doesn’t always have to be status. Apple is very good at withholding features from low end models to ensure everyone has that one thing they want that makes them go for the pro variant.
Umm most people buy them for the hardware. On paper my 16e sounds really good but is crap compared to the 17 pros cameras plus photonic engine. Apple gimps software in non pros. I don't take alot of pics so I don't really care for the pro. Id rather get an old DSLR.
If you just want a camera get a mirrorless. They're smaller than DSLRs and easier to adapt lenses to. If you don't care about lenses Fujifilm cameras are probably the most fun to use.
(But if you use it rarely it's better to just rent one, and then you can get a really nice one.)
Taking a peek at the research: “While flat-optics cameras have transitioned from theoretical concepts to high-fidelity laboratory prototypes, significant interdisciplinary R&D—spanning nanofabrication, materials science, computational imaging, and systems integration—is required to realize commercial flat camera modules for next-generation smartphones.
Recent breakthroughs have produced multilayer metalenses only ~0.5 mm thick that can focus unpolarized broadband light across several discrete wavelengths.
Dual-Pixel Coded Aperture (CADS): End-to-end learned amplitude masks on dual-pixel sensors have shown >1.5 dB PSNR gains in all-in-focus images and 5–6% depth accuracy improvements in DSLR, endoscope, and dermoscope prototypes.
Color-Coded Aperture Imaging: Single-lens, single-frame depth sensing via color-coded apertures has been demonstrated on DSLR and preliminary smartphone modules with depth map extraction sufficient for basic AR and portrait modes.”
There's nowhere to go with phones than thinner if you aren't doing folding. Thinness has practical value but past a certain point, probably not very much.
Marketing will create hype and desire and the feeling of exclusiveness. Those will lead to sales.
Not every big change is an actual innovation. A lot if just engineering sales via these methods, which aren't very different than fashion, jewelry, or luxury cars.
I might get one because I'm always a bit forced to follow the curve and can't afford to look 'backwards' or 'old fashioned' to stakeholders in the workplace, people in my life, etc who's good side I need to stay on who believe in the above dynamic.
I'm told that was the reason, which is a shame because I would continue to buy the "mini" version if they kept making them. Sadly the only dimension Apple seems interested in reducing is the thickness.
Ben Thompson (Stratechery) has been documenting for almost a decade that the biggest driver of new phone sales in China is a new form factor.
I’m sure that might be the same in other markets where an iPhone is a status symbol. It’s definitely not one in the US where 60% of phone buyers have iPhones.
> I’m sure that might be the same in other markets where an iPhone is a status symbol. It’s definitely not one in the US where 60% of phone buyers have iPhones.
It can still be a status symbol to have the newest phone. That’s imo the only reason for changing camera alignments between generations. So people (who know & care) can see that you have the newest model.
Apple basically forced US carriers to get their act together when they shipped the iPhone 14 series as eSIM-only domestically. Sounds like the rest of the world is about to get kicked into gear.
The major carriers perhaps, but support among the MVNOs isn't universal. Number sharing support for smart watch usage is almost non-existent among the MVNOs in Australia.
Eg. ALDI (yes, the German supermarket chain run a MVNO in Australia), have been saying esim support in the future since 2021.
China Unicom was also the launch carrier for iPhone when it came out in 2007-8. It was the only carrier to support GMS channels similar to the ones in the west (China Mobile didn't, these days Apple supports chinese cell phone channels on both carriers with the same chip).
That's a great piece of marketing straight out of Apple's Big Number Book of Important Numbers, but _who the fuck cares_ ?
Aside from a tiny amount of nerds needing post hoc rationalisation as to why they blew $1500 on a gimmick, absolutely nobody will go looking for a phone and consider grams/mm² as an important measure.
The thinness makes it easier to grip around the phone laterally. Think of it like having a slightly smaller basketball, which more people would be able to palm. Easier for holding, easier for one-handed typing.
I feel like I must be one of these people because even a regular iPhone from the past 5 years is way too thin to comfortably hold. When something is much wider than it is thick, not aligning it perfectly in your hand puts pressure on it diagonally and sends it spiraling to the ground.
I noticed in one of their videos, where the subject is picking up the Air off a table, it looks like it could be hard for a wide-fingered person to pick up.
The good thing about the bump is that it should make it easier to pick up the phone from a desk.
The size and weight of the phone does look tempting, but its battery life is a deal breaker for me. I'm pretty sure there's no way its built-in speakers could possibly match those in the Pro models, which is also very important to me.
>"Thin on its own I get but thin with a giant bump 100% defeats the whole point for me. Seems clear at this point there is little hope of them engineering their way into thin cameras."
I have this recurring vision of what could have been if we never lost Steve before the industry went whole hog in on the camera bump fad. It goes something like this:
SCENE: Steve Jobs' office on the eve of the iPhone 7 release
"Hey Steve here's the new prototype for iPhone 7, we think you're going to love it!"
Steve picks up the phone, fumbles it around for a moment, flips it over, and runs his index finger over the camera bump
"You're fired. Now, you" points to another engineer "Get rid of the bump."
And just like that, we were saved from this nightmare. Alas, the world is shit now and no one cares about anything anymore. But I can say without question he would have never allowed it.
A wedge is such a natural solution. It tilts the screen forward slightly when it's flat, it could have sexy curved edges like the very first iPhone, it would match the aesthetics of the Air, and it would stand out compared to Android phones.
The main issue is weight distribution, although current designs are slightly top heavy anyway.
A less obvious issue is that people would tend to hold the screen vertically while taking photos, which would distort the visual plane of the lenses at the back.
I'm sure both of those could be solved, and a wedge would create something original, instead of the nth iteration of the same ugly wart aesthetic.
I think we'd need to see some sales figures for cases. The case I use on my 13 Pro (casetify) adds enough size that the bump is barely an issue -- there is maybe a 1mm edge around the actual camera bump. It's very nearly the ideal. I don't know how common this size case is, though -- common enough that a mainstream case company sells it, I guess.
I'll concede the point on the weight, although I bet it'd be more like 350g.
I doubt Apple would add drop-friendly materials in such an expansion of the phone so most people would be putting a case on top of the iPhone Brick, making it even thicker and heavier.
>I’d rather have the world with nice cameras on my phone than the one where the back is flat for aesthetic design reasons.
The argument is that you shouldn't need to pick one or the other. They got us used to the bump because it is cheaper and simpler for them to build. The same with literally everything now. No more striving for excellence, it's just "what can we normalize and force people to put up with so we don't have to fix the problem".
Right, iPhone engineers are just lazy. That is a much better explanation than them having to juggle tradeoffs between camera performance, weight, and feel in the hand.
The cheaper option for Apple would be to use smaller camera sensors with worse performance because that would reduce the depth needed for the sensor + lens.
The cameras are getting bigger because a decent segment of the customers want better performing cameras on their phone.
Either the whole phone would have to get thicker and heavier to accommodate, or you end up with a camera bump. And yes, some people would want that brick phone, but Apple seems to think it isn't a large market segment and the money they print from iPhone sales seems to point to them being decent at gauging that market.
Would it? Its just a hump. Where's this person's manager? What about the industrial design stage (where are the Ivy's who would massage that hump?)
The idea that you're hiring talented people and just firing them like this is not only obscenely anti-worker, its anti-social and a wonderful example of how we worship the worst people. This is someone with a pedigree, able to land an apple job, pass the interviews, work with a team, has mortgage/family/whatever, etc but he upset a sultan sitting on his silk pillow and now must be thrown out on the streets?
Oh and Apple's entire existance hinges on "HP and IBM were too full of fire-happy, stodgy, powerful men who wouldnt let youngin's with ideas flourish" then now Jobs becomes the HP/IBM he and Woz have decried all their careers? What a great way to send your talent off to competitors, scare your existing staff to never take chances, depressing hiring, build a toxic workplace, and send all these people to a startup where they might eat your lunch.
What's anti-worker here? A works for B while both A and B want it. The moment one of them doesn't want to anymore for any reason whatsoever, they close this agreement. What's the problem with that?
> Pedigree...streets
If that pedigree is such a high horse.. I'm sure they'd have no problem joining the company next door.
>This is someone with a pedigree, able to land an apple job, pass the interviews, work with a team, has mortgage/family/whatever, etc but he upset a sultan sitting on his silk pillow and now must be thrown out on the streets?
Rather, it would be about their values and vision not aligning with those of the company. The job shouldn't have happened to begin with.
Not that I like this kind of company mind you, but I do understand and see the appeal. The comparisons with a cult that are often drawn have a logic to them. But this whole scenario is also an exaggeration. Somewhat.
And yet Jobs set up Apple to become a trillion dollar company and HP is been relegated to the dustbin. Hell, all apples competition just copies apple these days for the most part.
Apple doesn't randomly fire people. In fact it's quite difficult to get fired for low performance from FAANG because they'd rather just lower your pay until you leave.
Lighter == better, thinner == cooler. Phones are essentially identical these days anyways, and choosing one over another is based on ever-minimizing differences. Now that you can't even install third-party apps easily on Android, this is more true than ever.
"Now"? Are you referring to the future developer signing requirements that won't begin until 2027 globally? It's trivially easy to sideload on Android right now:
1. Flip one switch in settings to enable sideloading
2. Download and open an APK
3. Flip one more switch (which you get automatically redirected to and it's highlighted at least on Samsung phones) the first time
installing from whichever app source (Chrome/FDroid/etc).
4. Click install
Other than step 1, the user is led through the process via prompts, and step 3 only has to be done once per source. i.e. the first time you install from FDroid, after that you just click install without any nags or scare screens.
As far as I remember the "enable sideloading" switch in settings has always been a thing, and the per source setting was added at least 5+ years ago.
Well even then it will be better than iOS which makes the user jump through absurd hoops like having to re-sign every 7 days plus another MacOS device (other than in Europe, but even there Apple still requires approval at the individual app level vs a developer account).
Third-party apps were the only thing that kept me in the Android ecosystem. With that going away there's no point anymore, I already own a MBP anyway, so the "choice" is even easier.
I largely agree, but when we hold phones it is generally by the side without the camera. That means that this phone will feel smaller in the hand, which could be a very effective marketing gimmick to upsell people from the base iPhone.
Some people will like the way it looks, have money, and don't care as much about overall performance/utility. Much in the same way a Rolex and Timex both tell time.
They’ve shrunk the phone so much that the bump is the computer + optics, strapped to a screen and battery.
The Air and Pro are essentially the same with a different skin. It’s a big deal imo as the phone itself is practically modular. It’s pretty brilliant as they can make the computer part in China and Taiwan and probably ship that unit to various locales for different form factors.
It's more about physics than hope. There's not much you can do with lenses miniaturization after a certain point (which we already reached). The result is more and more computational stuff, which Apple does somewhat gracefully, but still in a way that sets the iPhone photos apart from a camera, and not in a good way.
It exists because it is likely the first volley in a push to a foldable phone. It's the same thickness as one half of the foldable phones on the market.
I am personally interested because I have found iPhones to be offensively bulky for... 10+ years, and this has the potential to feel differently.
total phone volume is what determines how well the phone fits in your pocket. especially on women's pants with small pockets. a thin phone with a bump will fit better than a thicker phone.
the argument that the bump defeats the purpose of a thin phone is only true if you're trying to squeeze it through a narrow gap in a rigid object.
It should be a trend. I've been wearing a crossbody small bag (I guess you could call it a fanny pack, technically) for a long time now and ever since I've gotten a smartwatch I rarely need to take my phone out, so it lives in the bag instead of a bulge in my pants pocket. I wear the bag in the front so when I do need my phone it's just as quick to pull out of the bag as my pants pocket.
I wouldn't be surprised if discomfort from having a bulky phone in your pocket drives this.
I am also guilty of buying a bag (not this kind) for my phone because it's so much more comfortable (and makes my trousers last longer) to not have my phone in my pocket.
This was my first thought. My iPhone 15 Pro is fine and hopefully has much more life left in it, and I've gotten used to the size in general over the years, but I like to wear pants that are reasonably fitted and the "pocket bulge" outline of the phone still annoys me if I'm trying to deliberately look nice.
I'd believe this is an area where even a few millimeters of thickness makes a real difference in how much the phone in pocket stands out despite the overall footprint being larger? Will be curious to read once people get their hands on the things.
I'm interested in it. I have an iPhone 11 and have been looking to update. I don't use a case. It looks pretty cool, I guess? Do you need more of a reason than that to have anything more than an iPhone 11, heh?
They sacrificed size for battery life, just like with the mini models, just in another dimension. Since the minis were cancelled I expect this model to undergo the same fate. Maybe it's just an experiment? Call it an A-B test.
It weighs a lot less. My pinky hurts and 99% of my photos are selfies, so I’d rather have less mass than more camera; I’ll rent a Leica if I want truly excellent photographs. Also my purse is hella full all the time so every less millimeter of phone makes it easier to get stuff out of the pockets, get phone out of purse, etc. Also it’ll fit with less bulge into my side-thigh pockets and pull less on the waistband, which is handy for my skirts and leggings and undershorts that all that have that.
Perhaps being thinner allows for people to put their phone into an external case, the combined size which is approximately the bulk of the current generation.
No problem, the next iteration is a phone without a camera. And they will tell us that no one wants a camera oh his phone. And then they sell bluetooth cameras as extra.
it is the precipice of stupidity. making an ugly, mis-shaped phone and calling it thinner than ever. its fugly. just make the guts thinner and use the extra space for more battery. thats what everyone wants. but apple wont do it because they arent brave anymore. they arent brave enough to stick out
I literally almost got an injury from using my iPhone 12 Pro Max while laying on the side on the bed for the last few years -- it's too heavy. I had to do various therapies to stop feeling pain. It's almost 230g and I also have an Urban Armor Gear case that adds a little bit.
iPhone Air is at 165g. I'll get ~72% of the weight and be able to comfortably use the device without getting tired.
Honestly with rumors of a folding iPhone coming out in 1-2 years it makes me wonder if the primary drive is to experiment with thinner production hardware so that a folding phone isn’t super thick.
And now I wonder whether that’s genuine or not. I can imagine someone being truly excited about a folding phone (I have a friend like that), but of course I can imagine someone doing that to promote something. A folding phone, maybe.
I have an iPhone 13 mini, just replaced the battery. If you want my money, give me an iPhone 17 mini with small width and height, I don't care about it being thinner like the Air. Also, no AI ruining the image quality of the expensive camera. I saw examples of a consumer-grade digital camera vs an iPhone 16 and the latter introduced "hotdog skin" effect and other effects that made the photos look over-processed.
Also still rocking a 13 mini. There are dozens of us! Dozens!
(Also to those who say not enough people wanted a mini phone to be worth producing: I submit the case of Prego chunky pasta sauce. Not many people want a chunky pasta sauce, but you sell a whole lot more pasta sauce in total if you sell both regular and chunky pasta sauce. Malcolm Gladwell has a TED talk about this.)
My pet theory about why the Minis sold poorly is that the 12 Mini was released just a few months after the SE 2; I suspect a lot of the would-be Mini purchasers had just bought an SE 2 instead (not knowing the Mini was just around the corner), and are also not a demographic interested in upgrading their phone every year.
Didn't the SE models sell notoriously bad as well?
There are always a bunch of us who wants a smaller phone, but the sales number indicates that we are the minority.
To some extend I also think it explains the increasingly thin phones. With the increases in screen size, they need to make the phones thinner, otherwise it would feel like a brick in your pocket.
Wasn't eight of the ten best selling phones iPhones? It was even beaten by the iPhone 14 line up, which was only for sale in four out of the twelve months, while the SE was available for all twelve.
You're right that it was good sales figures for a smartphone, but not great for an iPhone.
Apple is like CBS in that regard - shows with viewers that other networks would kill for get canceled at CBS because they expect more. Apple doesn’t get as much ROI on phones that sell in the low ten millions or low single digit percentage of the market. But I do think they could put those phones on a slow refresh cycle and teach e.g. Mini or Plus users to wait for the next release and stack that market together over a few years to be worthwhile to them.
Agree, and as an ex-mini user, I wish this was the world we lived in.
I presume the problem is that iPhones are a lot more expensive to produce than tomato sauce, and it's a lot more difficult to get rid of the ones that people don't buy.
I'm trying to hang on to my 13 mini until next year, when hopefully Apple will have figured out Apple Intelligence and upgrade the phone hardware to run it. But I'm worried my 13 mini won't make it that long. It's starting to struggle with even basic apps and lags just reading news articles. Battery is still at over 80% though
> It's starting to struggle with even basic apps and lags just reading news articles
Not my experience, but I tend to blame the web rather than my phone when things get laggy. I estimate that my 13 is about in the middle of its life, barring unexpected rapid deceleration events.
My battery is at 80% after 2 years. Mine is still on AppleCare+. I always do express replacement so I get a « new » one. Hopefully my battery reach 79% soon.
Speaking of dozens. I’m on a 12 Mini and will be hard pressed to give it up. I also replaced the battery recently and am still quite pleased with its performance!
I kept seeing people mention the 13 mini but I always thought the 12 mini was the last mini. Just looked it up and I see why now, seems like the 13 mini is barely different from the 12 mini.
I had the 13 mini and now the 12 mini and the 13 mini was noticeably better - battery life, camera, screen brightness (big difference when using phone on a bike for navigation)
Unfortunately both the 12 Mini and the 13 Mini did terrible numbers sales-wise. People say they want small phones but not enough of them actually buy them when they are available. :(
we remember that there was a phone released with a name "mini" which was just as large as an iPhone 6: which many people considered to be a large phone; and those who didn't were perfectly serviced by the same sized SE from 2020- which was the size of an iPhone 6...
I genuinely don't think I've seen that sentiment? "I really want a smaller phones, these gigantic bricks are too big" is a common sentiment but I don't think anyone disputes the sales figures of the mini
By expressing disappointment with the absence of a mini on every single new iPhone announcement, you’re basically ignoring the fact that Apple and other phone makers understand that small form factor phones are dead as a mainstream product.
Small phones are dead as a mainstream product, sure.
Screenreaders are also dead as a mainstream product.
Phones with a German language setting are dead as a mainstream product.
However, there are various people with severe disabilities like being blind, being german, and having small hands, so we should produce phones that are appropriate for all of those groups, and yet only the former two are serviced (even though there are more people with small hands than there are germans).
Sent from an iPhone mini, which is already about an inch too big for my hands.
No phone company is releasing a flagship SFF phone because there simply is no mainstream consumer demand for one. In fact, demand has been dead for many years now.
Good for you that you have a iPhone mini, but I would wager you won’t be seeing a new mini model anytime soon. Unless of course mainstream consumer demands shift, at which point HN dreams will become reality once more.
What is for certain is that complaining about this on every phone-related HN thread will not help change anything.
The iPhone SE 2022 was in the top ten smartphones of the year by sales figures. It may not be as astronomical as flagship phones, but it's simply a lie to say it's "dead" as a "mainstream" product.
People don't buy phones every year. People don't want to pay 95% price for 80% of performance / features.
Smaller phones as an idea isn't the problem here. Companies just don't want to make equivalent smaller phones. Making a new phone every single year is a stupid trend that causes min-max effects. A good small phone will eat into profits that's harder to make up in a yearly cycle. People will not buy nerfed smaller phones which is a positive feedback cycle.
True, also mini phones are usually of an incredible value, you can buy them very cheap. Because, surprise, actually not everyone wants them. And they are seen as crippled gimp phones. E.g. a child had this phone, then pressed their parents to buy them a normal phone. That’s how I ended up having my mini, for basically bananas. Was upgrading from SE1, so it was still a bigger phone. Yet, I’m not willing to go back, modern iPhone is still better than an obsolete one. Almost. Some bugs aren’t there in the old one.
Just checked and if I want an unscratched iPhone 13 Mini I'll be paying about $600 in Sweden. (That's for the places that have it, everywhere seems to be sold out that's cheaper).
That's for a used, 4 year old phone...
For a device that's "cheap to pick up", it's holding it's value more than any other iPhone.
I’m not very sure about the unscratched one, but I remember researching this a couple of months back, in Ukraine. And there were tens of good options (nice condition), for below $200 or $300. Which I consider a pretty decent value. I have no idea whether the war affects this, but pre war this situation was the same, more or so. Maybe that’s because the internal market is quite huge (40 M population pre-war, perhaps 30 M now), plus the country is literally the biggest in Europe. As compared to relatively small(er) Sweden, population of 10 M if I’m correct. I guess there might be cultural aspect as well. More wealthy countries and their societies (like Sweden) might actually be much less obsessed with things like newer iPhones. While they are wildly popular in Ukraine (pre-war). They may be even more popular these days, since we had very massive electricity blackouts just a year ago. And for many people their smartphones is the way to stay connected, and to check in with their loved ones. Plus, the ‘what if I’d be killed tomorrow?’ factor, I see people’s attitude is a bit different because of this either. I know at least one local friend, who said just recently he thinks of updating his 15 Pro Max (which he bought after the realease of the 16 models, saying they’re mostly the same) for the Air. He’s just a middle class guy, nothing too impressive. Other folks I know, they’re wealthy, and it looks like they won’t even think twice, and more likely to upgrade. I bet their logic is a mix of YOLO, plus they’re constantly invest into military equipment and drones for the army, so that $1K for themselves look a minute amount compared to that. All that creates pretty good market conditions for the used phones, so the folks like me could get something of a value for cheap, because others upgraded for no real reason. Personally, I see little difference after the 12th models.
After my iPhone 6 stopped getting updates I got the SE3, criteria was smallest feature phone without tonnes of shovelware and spyware pre-installed. It is still top of the list in 2025 though I will probably get another 5 years from this one.
And Instagram (or any other "fake universe" which pushes video-quality as a minimal requirement) algos, favor content made with a newer/better/bigger (thus more expensive) phone.
How come there's close-to-0 improvements about audio quality (both recording and listening) with respect to visual technologies?
Make the audio counterpart of Instagram/Tiktok and I'll chime in right away.
But pop-people (and markets) are mostly interested in visuals at the moment.
And for audio-sensitive people like me, it's almost a blessing.
“Terrible numbers sales-wise” is a bit of a distortion when talking about iPhones - the number that went around in 2022 was the 13 accounted for 3% of iPhone sales in 2021, which indeed sounds terrible - except Apple sold somewhere around a quarter billion iPhones that year, which means ~7.5 million iPhone 13 minis in 2021 alone. Those are numbers that anyone else would kill for. That’s just about the entire population of New York City buying an iPhone. There’s 35 states with fewer people than that. Ford sold fewer F-150s in the last decade than Apple sold iPhone 13 Minis in 2021 alone.
3% of sales means a sub-par experience for those users. Every app developer will say “oh yeah let’s test on the pro and normal sizes. Mini might break but that’s ok.”
UX cannot possibly be why Apple axed the mini since they have scalable layout APIs that did work on it. Even video-heavy social media and games worked in it just fine. It’s really just business—they make more sales out of bigger phones, so bigger phones it is.
This is false. The mini logical screen resolution still exists as the Display Zoom resolution of the Pro Max and the Pro. Developers would still need to test for those resolutions even if the mini never existed.
The problem is simply that the small form factor doesn't allow a big battery. So the iPhone 12/13 mini simply have a bad battery life compared to the bigger iPhones.
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for bigger smart phones.
I was extremely interested in a small phone back when the 12 Mini came out, but I didn't dare to buy it without seeing how it feels. This was during the height of the COVID lockdowns, so I couldn't go to a store and feel it in person. Ended up buying the regular iPhone 12, since that seemed like the safer choice to buy blind.
When it was time for another phone upgrade in the iPhone 15 era (because phones really don't change enough anymore to warrant more frequent upgrades than that), there was no mini option anymore. I wonder if others were like me. The Mini came out at a time where people were hesitant to try a new form factor because they couldn't try it in stores.
I think what happened here is that the target audience are people that do not feel pressure to upgrade to the latest mini every year. They do not look to have the lastest-shiniest-ohlookAI-snapdraxxon22pro phone. Just a phone that is a bit cheaper but gets the job done.
Why would you go from 12 mini to 13 mini, or to the concurrently released SEs if your phone still works?
I am also still holding on to my 13 mini. I would not have upgraded to the 14, 15 or 16mini even if they existed. I will upgrade at some point, and that point is when it either dies, or important apps stop working on the last iOS version supported by the hardware.
I do wonder if more people would buy a smaller phone if it had the same cameras and features as the pro? Time will tell if thinner sells better than shorter and less girthy.
I for one hate how even the 17 pro is creeping up in size compared to the 15 pro.
I was one of those people who bought an iphone 13 mini. When someone sees it, their first question is, "what phone is that?", unless they too own an iPhone 13 mini or owned a small iPhone before that.
People do think that being able to use the phone with just one hand is cool, but most people, even small-handed people, like to have a big screen to watch stuff on.
This meme needs to die. Normal-sized iPhones account for tens of millions of sales per year.
The fact that Apple was absolutely schizophrenic about its non-phablet market, introducing the iPhone mini 13 and iPhone SE 2022 at the same time, is utterly irrelevant to that point.
we will never really know for sute because the minis were gimped compared to the max options that had an extra telephoto lens and better ram/storage options
That's the tradeoff with a smaller phone. You can't fit as many features. And despite cutting out so much, there still wasn't enough space for an acceptable amount of battery.
I know that the iPhone Mini users are few but vocal. Instead of a yearly refresh of the mini, they should do a run every 5 years or so. Make a bunch, sell out of inventory by year 3, make a new one year 5 with updates matching the spec/price de jour.
It's like a LTR (Long term release) iPhone.
I know there are Apple Engineers lurking here, start the whisper campaign!
I’m not sure this makes sense on a purely hardware sales sense but with Apple moving toward increasing software profits by ecosystem users, it would seem to make sense to do a long release cycle phone to expand the ecosystem. The iPhone Mini might not justify manufacture on its own, but 30-40 million extra Apple One purchasers might.
I love my iPhone 12 mini, the screen has great pixel density better than the 16 or 17 even. It is compact and light, easy to put in and out of the pocket.
The battery is not great and the peak luminosity could be better, but it still runs so well in 2025.
I've been contemplating buying a new one since the back glass is shattered and the front is scratched, the battery is also getting worse. I don't think it's viable now to get it fixed.
I just wish Unihertz wasn't so questionable! Can't a decent company make a small phone? (And actually update the software on it? And comply with the GPL?)
I own a 12 mini, and I'm planning to upgrade my phone this year, it's time. If there were an iPhone 17 mini, I'd buy it, but because there isn't one, I'll probably go for the Pro to get a bigger battery. Apple knows that many folks like me would buy a cheaper mini if there were one, and not spend as much on Pro.
Apple still has 12 mini batteries in stock, and will for a while.
Might be worth trying to get the battery replaced at Apple.
Extra bonus: while it does cost money in theory, every time I've gotten Apple to replace the battery they end up breaking the screen, so I get a battery and phone replacement for free. 12 mini battery replacements _might_ be de facto free.
Just had my 12 mini battery replaced around 1 month ago, the screen survived but it was still definitely worth the money. It had degraded to around 70% capacity which was just barely preventing me from only charging overnight.
Reading this and replying on the 13 Mini. Love it so much but wouldn’t mind if it were a little lighter. If it stays the same forever, I think I’d still buy it. Great phone. P.S. I work at home, so battery life is not my biggest concern.
I've got a 12 mini and honestly it's the perfect size. Every year I hope they bring back a proper compact flagship, but instead we get thinner, not smaller
This is funny, when you think about that our demographic (people with multiple tech devices, in need of a smaller phone, able to pay more for it, etc.) should match perfectly with everyone who works internally at apple on the phones. They must have frequent discussions on this, that get agressively silenced - to keep the focus on the bigger phones :o)
The problem is simply that the small form factor doesn't allow a big battery. So the iPhone 12/13 mini simply have a bad battery life compared to the bigger iPhones.
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for bigger smart phones.
I recently found my 4S, and that thing is tiny, but I like that I can easily reach the full screen. On even the 2023SE I use my other hand when there is a button I need to hit on the top of the left side
This! small form factor yet powerful. Any OS works. What has been happening is upping the specs mean larger size, less easy to carry and hard to use with one hand.
I loved the mini and bought both the 12 and 13 mini. Also bought it for my siblings. Unfortunately after its sales Apple is very unlikely to ever make a small phone again.
Strange complaint. The guy he's chosen to use for comparisons is making a totally different face in the two photos.
And his main issue with skin undertones is because he picked a photographic style he doesn't like. The camera app both asks you to pick one the first time you use it, and lets you edit it on photos after you've taken them.
I think the color on the Sony camera is a little too cold and makes them all look unrealistically unhealthy.
I had the 12 mini. Perfect size, but awful battery life due to how thin they decided to make it. Give me a mini with more than half-day battery life and I'll queue on release day.
I want an extra thick model instead, let’s call it iPhone Travel (or Ultra?). Just thick enough so the cameras are no longer sticking out. Give me an all-week battery instead of an all-day one. Slim down the power usage and give a power saver mode that actually does make a difference. Let me go on a weekend trip in nature or festival without having to carry extra hardware or having to look for public charging stations.
Personally, I really like being able to use lightweight MagSafe batteries instead of having a thicker iPhone. I used to agree with you, but the tech has gotten ridiculously good the last couple of years.
With something like https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HRY02LL/A/anker-maggo-pow..., you get a magsafe battery that doubles the life of an iPhone and can be independently recharged, and is so slim that I can put it in my pocket attached to my iPhone and not notice.
The downside with these is that in scenarios where you need the extra juice, like say a guided tour all day where you'll be taking a lot of photos and putting it in your pocket, they tend to run hot and drain faster. Then you're carrying an dead extra battery. You get more mileage with a power bank + cord.
The wireless battery just slows the drain unless my phone is totally idle while charging. I really don't think wireless charging is very effective, at least it hasn't been with my 3yo phone and magnetic battery (even when both were new).
But that’s not like it’s an extra battery, it’s a gizmo that charges your original battery all the time, isn’t it? So technically it doesn’t make your battery bigger, but akin to keeping your phone on charge all the time. I expect it would just help you destroy that original battery, that is difficult and expensive to replace. Add some extra marketing, let them believe it’s some magical device, and kindly push them into buying a new phone when their battery dead.
I want a think iPhone with week-long battery life and the battery being easily serviceable, replaceable and ideally some unified standard one that I can buy from any decent vendor. That would be great to have. I hope we’ll come there eventually, since today phones could serve till they physically dead. If you make batteries easily serviceable, plus no software cripple with planned obsolescence.
fewer steps, actually. as a user, you reach into your backpack pull out the battery pack, and put it on phone, check that it's charging, and then move on with your life. Replaceable battery, there's the extra steps of powering it off, opening up the case, taking out the old battery, putting in the new battery, closing the case, powering it on, waiting for it to boot up. So many extra steps!
Yes because inductive charging has a lot of losses, they are ~75% efficient, that means that you waste 1/4 of your battery capacity, and that is power that you also pay for in your electricity bill (for how it's small).
While a phone with removable battery, like it was normal back in the days, you just buy whatever number of batteries you want, when the battery is dead you replace it, and you instantly have a 100% charged phone in a matter of 10 seconds. It's surely better than a MagSafe, than a powerbank, etc.
Oh, I remember these days. For one of my early days smartphones — Motorola MPx — I had like three or four pieces. That was great, also I charged them with a universal battery. Remember similar times with Galaxy S3 and S4.
Between having 2x battery built into the phone and 2x battery that detaches, I’d like the built in option.
I don’t want to deal with losing it. I don’t want to deal with carrying around 2 chargers/cables or charging both at the same time. I want the efficiencies of everything built together and not transmitted through casings
...then buy the non-Air version if you want a thicker phone? That's not being discontinued, you know.
I genuinely don't know what you're complaining about.
You're not going to lose it. It's attached. You don't need 2 chargers or 2 cables. It reverse charges wirelessly via the phone when it's plugged in.
It's an option. People usually want options, but you're complaining you only want things the way you want them, and not let other people have different options...?
I read the original comment like ‘we’d love to have another phone, a thinker one, that has this huge camera system, and also similarly huge battery, so there’s no bump.’
They run hot, and don’t stick to the phone as well as I’d like. No, MagSafe batteries aren’t the solution for me, and I too would buy a thicker phone with more battery life.
This! This right here. It bothers me how someone can be bothered at the prospect of having to keep paying Apple more and more and more. Must an anti-extreme-innovation person. I am just waiting for the day when Apple makes a travelling generator to charge that MagSafe battery and of course those special plugs (don't forget the wire™) and stands that will be proprietary and mandatory with that (if you don't want to void the warranty or risk getting sued by Apple for publicly endangering tech made by them).
magsafe is not even close, wireless charging has terrible efficiency. Honestly the whole idea "wireless powerbank" is ridiculous. You are in need of energy; would you like to waste extra energy as heat?
The way it is currently yes. But hardware is way more efficient now. Why not sacrifice performance and optimize a bit more in that direction? It is plenty fast already for everyday life. I don’t like that we only focus on performance and we don’t see longer battery life that we could have based on advances in battery technology + more efficient processors.
Yes. Give me the iPhone 17 Pro Ultra. It's the Pro Max, but even more battery. Heavier duty case. Like I'm put the thing in a case that makes it big and bulky already, if you give me a heavy duty enough setup that I feel safe letting it go naked, people might actually see the status symbol... instead of the dbrand sticker.
I’ve had a bunch of Moto G phones, I love them. This round I decided to try their upper midrange Edge line.
I found a deal on a Moto Edge 2024 and it’s fantastic. It’s so light and compact vs the Moto G Power, and still can go two full days no problem. The camera is excellent as well, which was my only real gripe with the G phones.
It can plug into my USB-C monitor and act like a Chromebook (more or less). I play Minecraft with my kids this way.
But do you get to hear First Time in A Moto G™ when they announce something? See! That is what you are missing. That is what you pay for. That's revolutionary. Take my money Apple!
A battery case would work too. Was just hoping for a model that is trimmed and optimized for longer trips outside the city/with absence of reliable power sources. Cut some of the performance, only efficiency cores, bigger antenna and optimize hardware aggressively for low battery usage. Maybe use some of the bigger case for repairability…
Agreed. Give me a phone thick and durable enough that I don't feel the need to add a screen protector and case to it, or strap a battery to the back to make it last.
It seems they are often peeling away useful features, which then you have to replace - yielding a worse experience often.
Small screen, thick, durable, good battery. Would pay $
But that will rob people of those multiple extremely satisfying feelings across those one or two years, before they change the iPhone, of paying more to Apple for battery packs and then another and then another… etc. You should think of that as well.
will someone please make this? a phone with a browser, basic camera, large battery and a UI that doesnt suck ass? a phone for adults that is affordable? i want more and more each day to get away from apple
this makes absolute sense. most of the times when my iphone 14 is literally in life support. honestly would trade off the thickness to not have to charge everyday
"Impossibly thin" is right in line with Patrick McGee's "Apple in China" who argues that the main reason for Apple's designs is to keep imitators at bay by introducing manufacturing challenges that only they can meet. Indeed impossible at the time of release. One generation after the other. He estimates this gains them about 6 months of headway. Tough world.
(Yes, to be fair, there is more to this new phone than just "impossibly thin".)
0.16mm is roughly the diameter of a strand of human hair. (0.1 to 0.18mm.) In a consumer product, that's basically imperceptible -- and, in all but the most precision-engineered products, it would be within standard manufacturing tolerances.
So I suppose there already is a phone with an analogous form factor.
Yeah. I got a kick out of looking at the specs and the Edge and the Air had the same exact imperial measurement of 0.22 inches.
It just spurred the rage that we still haven't adopted metric in the US -- even after spending a good chunk of the 1970s learning it in school and being promised metric would be the new measurement standard.
In all seriousness everybody still probably needs to learn it in school, because the scientific literature is entirely in metric. Even papers authored by Americans and published by, e.g., the American Chemical Society, all use µg/mg/g/kg and µm/mm/cm/m for their measurements. If you don't have an intuitive understanding of those measurements, you can run into visualization problems.
The funny part is that in elementary school here in the mid to late 90s, growing up in a rural area, metric was only touched upon for a day at most and until high school chemistry and physics classes, I very rarely had to deal with metric. Which sucked! My math classes kept to U.S. customary system / imperial units for example.
(It wasn't even told to me that it was the default for most of the world. It was disappointing to learn later how much resistance to metric there was in the U.S.)
weird. i did elementary in the midwest during the 1980s and we spent equal time on metric and imperial, in fact i think it was some kind of requirement that both were given equal attention
It turns out they have been teaching metric in (US) schools, through the grades, not just for an hour or whatever, again. Why? I don't know, but I approve.
>but I literally had store security walk up to me and ask me not to do that.
Are you suggesting they did this because they expected it to bend because it was thin?
If so, I doubt it. Regardless of thickness, I suspect security would ask someone not to physically damage their devices.
I kinda metered the amount of force I was using very closely. For lack of a better description, I tested the springiness very carefully. But yeah, would've paid for it.
This just seems like Apple's reality distortion field in full force. There are already thinner phones. Just like there were thinner laptops than Macbook Air when it was launched but Apple fans in their Apple bubble hadn't heard of them and so bought Apple's propaganda.
I say this as someone that owns 2 MacBooks Pros, an Apple TV and an iPhone.
Absolutely, and yes on the Macbook Air! Although the Honor phone mentioned elsewhere calls itself "thinnest at 8.8mm", +/- camera mesa, etc... So at best 8.8mm folded in pocket for a complete phone. Much thicker that an iPhone Air complete phone (and more screen space).
But mostly one thing that's difficult for us to evaluate is whether this is "at scale and profitably". On the competitors' side anyway. The Honor seems to be a $2000 phone (higher even than Google's foldable!) - probably before tariffs, not clear. How many will sell? What margin will Honor make on this? Hard to tell although it would be possible to dig the historical numbers.
Is anyone buying an iPhone because it's slightly thinner than other phones? I've never heard anyone say the width of the phone was their reason for picking an iPhone, or any phone for that matter.
There are certainly people buying iPhones essentially for fashion/status-symbol reasons: i.e., because they look visually different from other phones, whether that is because of thinness or anything else. Why else would so many Android devices have copied the FaceID notch so soon after it was released?
Its unlikely anyone is buying a phone because of how thin it is (within reason), but it is quite likely that they are more likely to learn about a new phone available to buy if it is "impossibly" thin. Advertising is important — even for recognized names like Apple.
In a month we'll get the inevitable slew of stories about bent and broken iPhone Airs as sure as water is wet. I really don't care how thick my phone is, I care that when I drop it, it's not automatically broken.
I generally like and buy Apple stuff, but yeah, I'm weary as hell. I don't do subscriptions and I don't like the tech bros--agree 100% with the rant on here about how crappy everything has become--"enshitification."
>Is anyone buying an iPhone because it's slightly thinner than other phones?
Yes. I have at least two co-workers that have stated (we will see if they follow through) that they are going to move from their current phones (13 Pro and 15 Pro) to the Air because of the thinness.
People who buy iPhones don't need a reason to buy iPhones other than just for the sake of buying iPhones. That's the key to Apple's trillions. Apple would have made this phone 2.75cm thick and there would have longer lines and same people singing paeans of thick phones and how it is going to change the world and solve global warming and eventually bring everlasting peace.
I'm strapping phone to my arms during runs; for me, shaving off those extra grams count. Bought an Infinix specifically for this reason. I didn't specifically look for the thinnest but it came the the most lightweight.
What’s the evidence for which way causality works? Apple solving design problems they care about would inevitably involve solutions only viable at their scale. It’s hard to say whether that’s how they choose their design problems.
Their process seems pretty similar to their approach with unibody MacBooks or the original MacBook Air, both of which were introduced long before imitators were their primary competition.
> What’s the evidence for which way causality works?
One qualifier would be "at scale and profitably."
But for more detail, yes, the situation has changed over time and probably the reasoning has changed over time.
McGee spends a lot of time on the difficulty for Apple R&D to keep up with Apple design bureau's demands. To the point that Apple execs arrive at decisions that for the sake of internal peace and meeting deadlines, Apple Industrial Design is not to make arbitrary demands (like they used to) and must consider manufacturing realities. Which still leaves Manufacturing struggling at every step to keep up. So - usually - manufacturing is very much pushed to the edge of what's possible by Design. Even though Apple teach China phone manufacturing (again "at scale and profitably"). Design are the ones pushing. Whether Design is really concerned with keeping ahead of competitors... is not explicitely told by Apple people. They do seem to love "impossible". In my recollection, it's more McGee's observations and conclusion.
Apple mainland China companies competition has also been a widely varying quantity. In part due to Chinese fashion trends and in part due to Apple political difficulties in China (which come and go). Underlying should be "at scale and profitably": Apple rightly shouldn't care if a few exotic phones come out. That wouldn't matter to their bottom line. They are described as caring when there is a flood of matching phones coming out - and even then with some latency.
Overall btw, "Apple in China" is fantastic. With massive amounts of local color and "story viewed from the Apple China people's side". Lots of bits that were missed if you mostly followed Apple from the side of what we see in the US.
Thinnest smartphone so far is Chinese HONOR Magic V5 folding phone at 4.1mm, though. iPhone Air is thicker by 1.5mm(1/16") at 5.6mm. Thinnest Samsung Galaxy is 5.8mm.
That was partly true when he was writing the book or doing research, but is no longer true today. China have manage to make phone that is under 5mm, and even stated the only thing that is stopping them getting even thinner is the USB-C port.
Very interesting that it has Thread too. I wonder if that will be a somewhat viable system in a decade. (Show me where I can buy a cheap Thread border gateway that isn't an Apple or Google voice assistant or whatever.)
We're now on the third generation of iPhones that include Thread radios. Mines been sitting dormant for two years waiting for software that utilizes it.
The Aqara Hub M100 is a nice cheap Thread border router.
its a low level protocol like WiFi on top of which Smart Home protocols, like Matter, run. It allows for IoT devices to be managed, registered and configured completely local with a hub (any iPad, HomePod and so on) and requires no servers. It is private by design and more secure in some ways, as no one but your hub can control the device. Currently a lot of IoT devices rely on a server that registers and controls them, and is in the hands of a random company you need to trust.
NFC is handled by an NXP chip which is completely different than the Broadcom (wifi, BLE) chip. its a simple, extremely well engineered chip that costs nickels and is passively powered so it doesn't affect battery life at all. No incentives whatsoever to build it in-house. Broadcom and Qualcomm were a whole different story.
I'm going to add +1 to the crowd that thinks that almost no one ever said "Nice, but I wish it was thinner". Who would that be really? Surely apple made their market research before spending the R&D money creating this product. So presumably there is a market segment for it. But who is it?
The standard 17 and Pro seems very much the great product they always are. Incremental refinement. Don't like it? Get one 1-2 generations older. My iPhone 11 still feels very much good enough (which I imagine must be terrible for Apple). Perhaps their idea is that you can't just refine the 15-16-17 every year. You need to try _something_ else, or eventually people will stop paying attention?
This is total speculation on my uninformed part, but to me, the Air seems like the result of their research into foldables. The way hardware is laid out in that upper area is very reminiscent of the Flip category from other manufacturers with their a-symmetric halfs and considering Apple is a very efficiency focused company these days, letting that effort linger till display tech catches up to whatever Apple is waiting for, would feel like a waste perhaps.
Also, as long as we retain an actual Pro version that is willing to be a bit chunkier, I don't see any issue in having an Air line for casual users, maybe that will be the way mainstream devices go with future efficiency gains, similar to the MacBook Air now being "good enough" for most people. Silicon-carbon batteries will likely enable some of that pretty soon, suspect that like with GaN, the supply chain cannot handle Apple level demands yet. Remember, the original three MacBook Airs were beyond compromised too.
Just don't fall into the trap of making the Pro thinner, akin to the 2016 MacBook Pro disaster. Keep the iPhone Pros like the current MacBook Pros chunky for those who actually use these devices and we are golden in my book.
> letting that effort linger till display tech catches up to whatever Apple is waiting for, would feel like a waste perhaps.
To add to this, it's often said that research can only take you so far, at some point you have to ship something to get the opinions and hands on from a wider audience of users to make further discoveries and improvements.
> My iPhone 11 still feels very much good enough (which I imagine must be terrible for Apple)
I think Apple has come to terms with the fact that people are no longer upgrading their phones every 1-2 years. They are probably happy just to keep you in the Apple ecosystem where they can sell you apps, services, accessories, other compatible apple products - and hopefully get your repeat business when you do one day feel the need to upgrade.
As someone who is still on 12 pro and probably won't upgrade to a 17 because of no real need - there really is no better way to ensure my repeat business than selling me a phone that lasted me this long.
I'm pretty sure they know people aren't upgrading every 1-2 years - they have some pretty extensive data on that front. There is a subset but there are some pretty sharp people working at Apple even if this thread likes to rip them every chance they get.
You are comparing cheaper phones with substantially more expensive ones. For a meaningful comparison we have to compare phones with a similar price but different size.
False and irrelevant. The claim was "Phones kept getting larger and larger because larger phones sold better."
That claim is demonstrably false. Whether attendant facts like adjusting for price point lead to a subtler inference does not change the absolute fact that the proposition is not consistent with reality.
I’d very much prefer a phone that’s shaped like a slab (smooth back), no weird camera plateaus and no sad excuse for a battery, but something that can last days.
Pixel user here, but I feel the same way. The fact that my phones are getting heavier instead of lighter seems counterintuitive on its face.
Pixel 1 (143g)
Pixel 3 (148g)
Pixel 5 (151g)
Pixel 8 (187g)
Pixel 9 Pro (198g)
Of course the displays of these models get bigger which presumably contributes to the weight increase. But still, you'd think parts get lighter over time, not heavier.
> you'd think parts get lighter over time, not heavier.
I'm just guessing, but I would assume that parts get _smaller_ (so, maybe lighter but not in a "less dense" way) but any space gained is taken up by new parts for new functionality or extra battery
I would actually like a phone that is lighter but fatter. Having empty space inside. Letting a good enough camera be flush with the back and the wider sides could add sturdiness. But as others have pointed out, consumer choice is an illusion. It's "you want this".
I have an XS and wanted to upgrade. But I still don't see a super appealing reason. Battery still decent at 72%. Photos still good enough. browsing fast, apps fast...
It is the best iPhone I owned (3, 6s).
But yeah, spotlight is slow and the phone constantly runs out of storage, so apps need to be deleted before installing updates and least used apps are constantly removed. Additionally the screens are way better now and you do see the difference with photos made on an iPhone 16. I guess I'll upgrade late this year when I am sure the 17 (pro?) is a reliable piece of hardware, like my iPhone XS is.
Agree. I don’t understand the teen of making the phones thinner but larger. I guess I’m part of the small demographics that love the mini, hope my mini 12 have a couple or more years of live in it.
In the same boat, the 12 mini is the perfect size. My hands are probably average or slightly above average size for a man and I find any phone larger than the mini difficult to securely hold while using it with one hand.
Just going to keep this one until they make something similar again.
I see people every day who have their iphone in their back pocket while sitting. I can’t imagine this model would handle that unless it’s made from pure unobtanium.
especially if you're signed into an account that manages your phone. As we discovered its perfectly possible (or was) to remote wipe a personal android phone if they are signed in using your company google account.
but less paranoid-ly it means you can put your workphone physically else where so you are not tempted to "check in" or have out of hours fun ruin your time off.
Definitely not advocating for the same device used for work and personal stuff, but for on call I think extra work device (phone), if not really needed other than receiving a ping, is just useless. Apps that notify you about incidents are not really doing anything "outside" of on-call shifts.
But you still have to carry two phones, or using work phone during personal time (as part of on-call).
How is this better than just having PagerDuty/Incident.io/whatever and receiving pings there? You are disrupting your time anyway, but having an extra phone for that seems redundant.
Honestly I do. I want it thinner and lighter. I don’t use my phone very much so I don’t care about battery very much nor do I about any kind of specs.
Wait… yeah that’s why I won’t buy it I love my iPhone 13 mini
I've ever owned an iPhone and probably never will, but I very much like smaller, lighter, thinner. For a device that stays with you all day, the less cumbersome the better, no?
That is the dumbest side profile I have ever seen. The camera bump and camera together are thicker than the rest of this thing. By its design it now demands a massive case or just won't ever sit even reasonably flat on a table. Ridiculous.
It won't be completely stable, when used without a case. The geometry is such that on the side of the lens it's the lens that is touching the surface where you put it, not the bar-shaped bump. Meaning, it won't sit on the long edge of the bar.
Yes, see for example the hands-on video of The Verge.
You can also tell from the side profile images on the Apple website. Drawing a straight line from the lens to the bottom edge of the phone doesn't cross or touch the edge of the "plateau", by a good bit.
I've got an iPhone XR with a chunky (highly protective) Speck Presidio case that's comfortably thicker than the camera protrusion and therefore lays 100% flat.
Gotta say it would drive me nuts to have a phone that didn't lay flat and couldn't therefore be put down safely on the edge of the sink etc.
It is really freaking obnoxious, I can attest to that. I think they either don't want to be mistaken for a Pixel for vanity reasons, or it's easier to do the magic camera switching if the 3 cameras are closer together. But for whatever reason, I hate not having the cameras in a row with a plateau that is symmetrical.
Website says "Up to 27 hours video playback", which is apparently 7–8 hours more than the iPhones 13–15 and 4–5 more than the 13–15 Pro. Also normally their battery estimates are conservative.
I don't want/need the whole thing to be flat but I do prefer it to be stable. For instance if the plateau were a bit thicker so that the camera lens was flush with the surface (even just an extra bar sort of inside the plateau) it would mean that when I put it down it would never rock back and forth when I'm tapping at it on a table.
The problem with the one-sided camera bump is that the phone is unstable. It wobbles when you touch it, making using it while lying “flat” on the table incredibly annoying.
Right now I have to lean my phone on my purse to get a nice reading angle, because the lens block is lopsided and my phone wobbles around otherwise. The Air bump is still a better angle than flat, and I bet the lens doesn’t keep it from resting stably on the lower edge of the chin (?) rather than the lens edge.
It's not about the thickness — this is surely Apple just flexing some of the engineering work that has gone into building a future foldable phone (which inevitably requires thinner hardware to fit two screens in the thickness of one).
So don't take this at face value, it's just a prelude to a foldable phone next year.
I agree but cynicism makes me think it’s a beta, not a flex. Shipping half your next flagship phone to learn about manufacturing, durability etc etc in the real world is kind of genius.
They often discard with the version number for the first release of a product bifurcating, and from then on it follows its own version path.
The first Apple Watch Ultra wasn't the Apple Watch Series 8 Ultra. Subsequent Ultras follow their own versioning. The same with the SE, Air Pod Pros, iPad Air, and so on.
Yet that's precisely what Apple has done repeatedly across product lines. Just yesterday they introduced the Apple Watch Series 11, and its low cost variant the Apple Watch SE 3. They also introduced the ruggedized larger variant the Ultra 3.
I’d place a bet that Apple does not go down the foldable route, they must have seen what happened with Samsung and their Z Fold. Much hyped but turned out to be somewhat of a dud.
Yeah I was first very excited to see a smaller iPhone again, but was very very disappointing that is about the thickness.
NO BODY cares about the thickness!!! I want something that I can hold like the iPhone 5!!!! Or iPod touch size!! Don't want a big screen to watch netflix!!!
This is freaking phone for god sake, back in the old iphone days there were a balance.
Stuff like this is what turns me back to dump phone. I want a phone, not a freaking computer in my hand!
I sincerely hope that apple will consider making a phone with a worse camera that is flatter. As someone who rarely takes photos, and never photos of importance, the bump is just a dead weight to me. My dream phone has a body like iPhone 12 mini (which I currently use) without the protruding camera. As long as it runs all the common communication apps reliably, I'm happy. I'll pay $100 more than the standard body version even. But it doesn't seem like apple (or any notable phone brand) thinks this is worth doing.
It's the peril of being a niche customer. I can and have voted with my wallet, but it doesn't nudge the needle anyway.
> As someone who rarely takes photos, and never photos of importance
Even people who do take photos often would probably gladly sacrifice some image quality to loose that massive thing on the back of the phone. The thinness of the phone almost make it look worse as long as that camera sticks out like that; like a huge watch with a thin strap or something...
> My dream phone has a body like iPhone 12 mini (which I currently use) without the protruding camera.
Sounds similar to the iPhone 4, still my favorite of all the form factors in terms of "hand feel". It was the right thickness for me, just a bit heavy for it's size. If they refreshed it to reduce weight and extended the screen to the borders I think it would be amazing
Have you tried the iPhone SE 1st gen ? Lighter, better processor and screen but almost same design. It’s only 9.5yo and still works perfectly, you can find plenty second hand for 100€.
I still have my SE 1st gen that I pull out from time to time because I use it as the 2FA for my other Apple account, and I am always struck by by how much better it feels to use than even the 12 mini. It is such an ergonomic size for single hand use, and it surprisingly still runs very smoothly.
Using an SE 3rd generation and don't want any other iPhone. Had it for 1.5 years and it still makes me happy - as on the first day.
I was comparing models and probably the “next similar” would be an 16e but I really don’t want the “apple intelligence” - I’ve got my own thanks.
It’s a pity that the SE is going the way of the dodo and dinos - much better phone than a mini-tablet. I still miss my iPhone 3 and the rounded corners and solid aluminium back. Good times.
My phone is an iPhone SE 2nd gen. It's much more ergonomic and I can use it with only one hand, typing text included. Previously I had an iPhone 6S, same screen size (4.7″).
Other iPhone models are giant walkie-talkies for me. They need one hand to hold them and another to type text or slide the screen.
No, I haven’t. I guess the feel isn’t my most important feature. I usually buy the latest high end model but keep it for a while. Using a 12 pro still and it’s already starting to feel sluggish so I might upgrade to this 17 version, it’s different enough to spark my interest but I think I’ll need to hold the Air before deciding if I like it. It looks comically out of proportion in the marketing pictures. I also don’t use cases and I feel like this is begging for one.
If you take Apple's presentation at face value, most of the iPhone Air hardware is within the plateau, with the rest of the body being almost entirely battery. So it's not immediately obvious that even if they did do away with the bump, that there'd be a useable phone left over once considering the necessary reduction in battery size.
You might want to check the 16e.
It has 16 insides (without magsafe and uwb chip), with screen from 14 and not very protruding (although still) but good camera. Its also cheaper than base model iphone.
I agree with this so much. I recently upgraded to the 13 Mini and had to go back to the 12 Mini because I hated the big camera thing on the back. I actually like the 12 Mini camera more than the 13 Mini also. It felt like the 13 Mini couldn’t take close up photos worth a damn.
Incredible lift-to-weight ratio is going to contribute to epic hang times from this thing while the camera bump provides a center of gravity for it to rotate around for predictable flight paths.
For the reference...there was an app (I think it's banned on all the stores now?) that used the phone's sensors to record its hangtime when thrown in the air (pending it survived the landing, I guess). I think there was a scoreboard?
1. Biggest is that Apple can finally tell if people really want a thinner phone (I don’t). Maybe once they find out the answer, they can finally start using the space more productively.
2. They mentioned local LLM in passing, but this is the biggest possible selling point of the executives actually back real work on making them consumer-level easy. Have a LLM marketplace. Let users sub-train with their own ideas and local data. Enable users to privately and safely port their personal LLMs to their next Apple. Apple has the best most efficient hardware available and they have it in millions of pockets. It’s about time they use that to become the dominant phone and personal device maker. Instead of focusing on anorexic phones.
Sigh. I can't stand the camera bump. I would run not walk to the nearest Apple store with all my savings if they made a phone where the camera bump is made flush by adding thickness elsewhere to match, filled with extra battery. Thing would last for weeks. Ah well back to reality.
I see this said all the time but I think people underestimate what an extra few millimeters of thickness would feel like in the hand. Both in terms of grip-ability and weight. I would reckon if people actually got to use a device like that they'd quickly realize they don't want to use it in their day to day.
The iPhone 14 Pro was noticeably heavy, but the switch to titanium the following year made the 15 Pro feel way lighter. The only difference was 206 grams -> 187 grams, but you'd swear it was 25% lighter.
Okay but in this scenario there would still be a slimmer/lighter iPhone to buy, so what's the problem?
The apple watch ultra is thicker and overall bigger than the regular one in the name of better battery life, and people that don't need that buy the regular one. Win win!
The Apple Watch Ultra is thicker but still within reason for a thing you wear on your wrist. For a thing you're pulling in and out of your pockets and is already straining people's pinkies at their current sizes, I can't imagine a phone that's as thick as the camera protrudes being at all usable by a normal person's measure. The iPhone 16 Pro is advertised as 8.25mm thick. The camera bump is an extra 4.3mm, so flattening it out would make the thing 12.55mm thick. Spread across a big 149.6mm x 71.5mm body, or in the Pro Max case, 163.0mm x 77.6mm, you're adding a lot of mass.
Now I'm curious to do the math.
The iPhone 16 Pro's volume (not counting camera bump, you don't hold that in your hand anyway) is 149.6 x 71.5 * 8.25 = 88,245.3mm^3
Bumping the thickness to 12.55mm you end up with 149.6 x 71.5 * 12.55 = 134,239.82mm^3
A 52% increase in volume.
In the Pro Max you'd go from 104,352.6mm^3 to 158,742.44mm^3
The iPhone Minis sold millions of units and Apple still determined it wasn't enough to justify existing. I'd bet a big brick iPhone would be far more niche. I'd certainly like to see one and hold it in my hands but I think you can see why Apple wouldn't go for that.
Well, take this as a data point of one. I hate thin phones. It's like holding a dull knife. It's not comfortable. There's a reason OXO and other brands started making utensils with THICKER handles. They feel better to many people (me included)
I also don't care about weight, up to a point. No phone I've owned in the last 25 years has felt too heavy.
This. I wish it was flush - typically it's actually protruding.
I've seen one guy attach an ECG lead to the back so that he could lay the phone down without the camera part touching the surface. As a bonus you could spin the device on it.
They don't make it protruding as a design choice. There's a bunch of room needed under there in order to take the incredible photos that phones are capable these days. Google what those lens modules look like under the bump.
I love the wide camera bump of the Pixels. It means the phone sits solid on the table without rocking and serves as a nice ledge on the bad for holding it. I wouldn't mind if the phone was thicker for extra battery but the bump is actually a plus in my book.
I kinda like it. I'm not much of a mobile gamer, so mine only comes on to prolong battery health when the battery is fast-charging. The next model is said to gain water and dust resistance too as well as keeping the active cooling fan: https://www.gsmarena.com/redmagic_11_will_boast_a_world_firs...
I will most likely upgrade to an 11S around this time next year. The other factors that drew me to it were the huge (6500mAh) battery, a real analog headphone jack (used daily with my Etymotic ER4XR), and no dumbass notch cut out of the screen.
Which is such a shame because the Pixel 1 was exactly what they are describing. It was a physically perfect phone. It had no camera bump and the front screen wasn't bulging up past the sides so you could drop it without shattering the screen.
You can do it with a case, but a case with a battery in it is even thicker.
I'd be at least INTERESTED in seeing what my iPhone 15 Pro Max would look like without a case and with a built-in battery that made it not have a camera hump.
It's thinner, but at 165 grams it's not appreciably lighter than a regular-sized iPhone (the 16e in particular at 167 grams). People generally want a more lightweight phone more than they want a thinner phone. So it's only for people who also want a larger-than-regular iPhone screen.
Of course, but if your main concern is weight and you don't necessarily want a larger display (or would even prefer to go smaller than 6.1"), then it fails to be an improvement.
The sides can be made grippier and the back of the phone left slippery, so the in-out of pocket experience is nice, while the grippier parts fit in the palm when in use.
The added thickness on the border is also a welcome affordance, and as your fingertips are on the thinner back it feels thin still.
That's fair. The corresponding full-body case Apple is releasing for $49 does have a conspicious extra lip higher than the camera bulge (albeit that's typical to mitigate camera flash glare). https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGH24LL/A/iphone-air-case...
The 16e is 167 grams, where the Air is 165 grams. It feels like the Air is to the 16e what the Pro is to the standard titled iPhone — the expensive version.
Which makes the marketing feel a bit incongruent with what we've gotten here. It's not noticeably more lightweight than what is currently offered, it's less featureful than the 17, but more expensive than the 17 (albeit perhaps prettier).
It seems like engineering failed to make a true superlight in its class despite narratively trying to re-evoke what we really did experience with the original MacBook Air. Instead we got an elegant up sized 16e priced like a Pro.
Air, as a product line, quite famously started with Jobs emphasising the thinness of the MacBook Air by pulling it from a paper folder. Taking what are ultimately marketing terms as literal face-value descriptors isn't particularly useful.
Definitely. I think many larger screen buyers of iPhonee will be happy there is the option to trade off the extra battery they used to get by default with a large screen for now less weight.
It's just odd to me that despite its price it feels closer to a superthin upscaled e, rather than a superthin upscaled 17 or instead being extralight. Now I imagine they didn't have a lot of weight to lose given how optimized for weight phone components were already. The Air branding just had me hoping they had a bigger engineering statement to make than what they did.
A lot of pseudo-intellectual babble over what is clearly a cool piece of engineering that many people are excited about. Turns out, you can just do things, some people will think it's awesome while the people in the middle of the curve continue to keep the midwit meme alive.
It’s clear that super thinness is a technology imperative necessary to get Foldable IPhones. In order to fold, you first must solve thinness (since the final decide will be 2x once folded).
Apple focusing on thinness is proof to me a foldable phone is next.
LOL. I have perfectly fine pants, thank you. I already carry my keys, my wallet, my phone, the last thing I want in there is another item that's bigger than my phone.
And most people are like me, which you will see in a few years, when foldable sales take off.
My laptop isn’t 7” wide because I do my work on it, and that work involves reading long text files and requires a keyboard big enough to comfortably type said long text files, not because “bigger screen = always better”. It’s all about the use case.
I attempted to replace my 13 mini's battery today using the iFixit kit. I broke the OLED panel doing so. Removing the screen take much more force than I though.
I did this hopping to keep my iPhone maybe 2 more years. Now I am waiting for ordering the 17 next Friday. I will have to manage having half of my screen being white until then...
> Removing the screen take much more force than I though.
Sorry, how is applying less force more dangerous?
(in general, wish the force meters would be widespread so that iFixit kit just had a monitor with a number and a beeper once you reach the needed force level)
Yes; the mini phones never sold very well, yet there are always commenters that ask for it. There are no small phones on the market, even the asus zenphone - which used to be the best compact android - is just a big phone now.
Fentanyl is a fascinating market case study because nobody actually wants fentanyl, they want oxycodone or heroin.
It's the "market data reveals that consumers actually want the cheapest shittiest airplane tickets" of drugs. And you can read that in a couple different ways.
When a phone costs north of 1000USD something is terribly wrong. 99% of "modern" phone use is basically (doom) scrolling, browsing the web, using core apps (like maps) for directions, taking pictures and finally communicating with whatsapp and making the odd/rare old school phone call.
This should not require spending 1000-1500USD on a phone.
Im doing all of the above with a iPhone SE for what i paid like 300-350USD for.
Second hand phones are even cheaper, just change the battery and you are good to go.
Okay, if your use case doesn’t require it, then don’t buy it…? You aren’t the only person in the world and some people might actually make use of this phone’s features(?)
You can hate Apple for it, but the phone costs $1000+ because people will buy it. Apple has been proven right year after year since 2017 (iPhone X)
You can still do everything you mentioned on a $150 phone, which exists in parts of the world. If anything, one could complain that the $150 phone still takes pictures worse than an iPhone 5
Your comment is like complaining about luxury handbags when cheap ones exist too.
I don't know what you're suggesting. Companies shouldn't make expensive versions of things even when there are consumers who want to buy them?
You should also realize that it's people buying the expensive versions of things that helps subsidize the cheaper ones made by the same company. And it's the quality Apple is providing that even makes a secondhand market viable, because their devices last much more than other brands.
In Turkey, iPhone Pro 17 costs $2,610, yet there are still queues outside Apple stores. Considering that the average income is much lower than in the United States, people are still willing to pay more for this phone than you might expect.
Also, It's a bummer that they didn't launch something for the mini series. I prefer smaller screens that fit into my pocket, I don't care about thinness. 13-mini will be the last iPhone I can upgrade to in a few years, after that I'll have to look into other phones
Another thing that stuck out, what's the point with having such a thin phone, yet the camera system points out? I would much prefer a complete flat backside
Interesting. So apart of camera and battery life, the upgrade from iphone 12 mini to iphone 17 is unimpressive and for someone like me who likes smaller sized phones and don't care about refresh rate (my goal is to decrease my screen time rather then increase), its actually a downgrade.
No kidding. I just want one that I can use one handed again. I’m on the IPhone SE, have hands that can play an octave + 2 additional keys on a piano, and I can’t reach the whole screen with a single hand.
The trick to this is to attach a handle to the back of it. I'm using one that telescopes from the "popsockets" brand (I'm unaffiliated and have no idea how it compares with other brands). It makes it possible for me to access all parts of my screen holding it one handed. It should be a standard feature.
I want a handle on the back of my phone even less than I want a larger phone. I also refuse to use cases and any other contraption that adds further bulk.
I have had an excellent experience with the OhSnap grip. https://ohsnap.com/products/snap-grip It is significantly smaller than the popsocket and adds a strong magnet which can attach your phone to magnetic surfaces. It looks flimsy, but I've had it two years and even moved phones and it shows no signs of breaking.
That helps with reaching up, but my thumb also doesn't reach the far bottom corner either. I don't have a super-octave handspan but I don't have small hands either.
Thanks to their incredibly poor demos I believed until THIS MORNING that to do that maneuver, you had to start your downward swipe ON the little bar that's about 2px from the bottom of the screen (which works, but is nearly impossible with a case).
I'm glad other people have chimed in. It drives me insane that no one thought to make one-hand mode not change the width as well or be a total aspect change.
We're in the minority. The iPhone Minis did not sell well. I think women especially do not want a small phone because they carry it in a purse anyway (and slap a case on it with an extra handle to make it easier to hold).
The Mini didn’t fail because it was too small. It failed because it wasn’t small enough.
I want a small phone that I can use single-handedly. A smaller screen is a tradeoff. The Mini had the disadvantage of a smaller screen plus the disadvantage of not being usable with a single hand. Because of that, I never bought one - if I’m going to be handicapped anyway, I’d rather have a larger screen.
I've never seen a preference like this, in real life. Usually the thing closest to what you want is the preferred option. You're suggesting there's a hump in the preference curve, pushing people away from their preference, buying a larger phone than the smallest, when they "want" a smaller one.
I have trouble believing this is true. Do you have any other example of this type of preference curve? I suppose the "uncanny valley" may be one, but that seems more understandable.
Small phone vs. larger phone is a very simple tradeoffs calculation.
Large phone: good screen, bad ergonomics
Small phone: small (thus worse) screen, best ergonomics
I'm willing to pick the second option above.
Unfortunately the Mini is somewhere in the middle: smaller screen than the larger phone - thus worse in that aspect -, combined with worse ergonomics than an actually small phone. It's the worst of both worlds.
I don't know about other things, but ever since the iPhone 5 I've been wanting another model that I could use with a single hand. The Mini was never that, so why would I sacrifice a good feature (larger screen) for... nothing in return?
The iPhone Mini size isn't to bad, but I agree to some extent - I think perfect size phone for me would be about original iPhone SE size. It could have a 5" screen if you made it edge-to-edge (for ref the iPhone Mini has a 5.4" screen).
Actually, yes. The mini already has limited space to work with, they had already to shrink the MB, the battery. It would take much more effort to put a pro camera into it. Also those camera do heat up.
Personally, i think the camera setup on ip13mini is fine.
This is a very funny typo, considering the topic at hand.
But yeah, I think I stopped being happy with phone sizes when they started going beyond 4" or so. It's hilarious to me that they can make a phone that's ~5.5" and call it "mini".
I'm an Android guy, and had high hopes for https://smallandroidphone.com/, but the guy who was originally driving it is running his resurrected Pebble company now, and there's been basically no useful activity in the Discord for at least a couple years now, so I assume it's dead.
Insightful! That's a great point: A period where a lot of people (especially the average-higher-income Apple demographic) were more likely to be sitting at home all day. Having a phone that is heavy and barely pocketable is nbd if you just have it sit on the coffee table or desk all day.
> I think women especially do not want a small phone because they carry it in a purse anyway
Yeah, I've noticed this. Many women also wear clothing where they either have no pockets at all, or the pockets are more decorative than functional, small enough that a truly small phone would have trouble fitting (certainly not the 5.5" iPhone "mini", which is hardly mini at all).
I honestly think they didn't sell well because they were called 'mini'. They should have just marketed them as the base level iPhone and it might have had a chance.
I recently doubled the thickness of my iPhone SE by adding an external battery. Fits in my jeans pocket fine along with several other things in the same pocket. If they can get it that thin, why don't they just add more battery and take us back to the time when we could run phones for weeks between charges.
[edit] I'll answer my own question. Nobody is going to replace an iPhone because it drops from 21 days battery to 14 days battery, but they probably will replace an iPhone that drops from 21 hours battery to 14 hours.
My battery was going out on my 12 and I got an SE. It's a good experience. If you can get a thumb print one, I personally like it a lot more than face ID.
I like the size of a regular iPhone. What I really want is a lighter phone.
Unfortunately, compared to the iPhone 17, the Air is about 30% thinner, with worse battery life, camera, etc, but only around 7% lighter. I was expecting at least 20% lighter if it's called "Air".
You have to sacrifice screen size to shrink the other dimensions, and they already have smaller screen iPhones. It seems most people care more about big screens than size in that dimension
They don't have smaller screen iPhones anymore lol what? the iPhone 13 Mini is the last phone that can be in that category. Does anyone really think that 6.1 inches is a "small" device?
The 17 does technically have a smaller screen than the Air, but only by 0.2". Not exactly a small phone. They don't even have a 6.1" phone anymore - smallest now is going to be 6.3".
I remember a coworker getting a Dell Streak Android phone in 2010 and it was enormous. Definitely felt more like a small tablet.
The GSM Arena review is mostly about the confusion of whether it should still be considered a phone at this size. Ultimately they decide it's just too damn big for a phone.[1].
Even with a 5" screen, it was bigger than for example iPhone 17 in every single dimension due to its hefty bezels (and not insignificantly so; iPhone 17 is closer in width to iPhone 13 Mini than a Dell Streak).
Screen diameter is in general a bit misleading figure for phones from different generations as "full screen" phones tend to have a taller aspect ratio and hence larger diameter even with same body dimensions.
Only a little bigger but you're right, I didn't think the bezels on the Streak looked that big but I see they're really pretty substantial. It's the dimensions of a modern 6.5" phone, basically.
Does it have all the normal US bands? their site doesn't give much assurance, and they have a graphic with every non-US carrier's logo and no US carrier logos.
I’ve been a little concerned that the (non-transparent) back is “protected” by glass. I understand that Marketing has to work with what they’re given, but that’s a bit much.
You need it to be glass and not plastic because otherwise it would cut in half the number of expensive repairs, which would likely tempt people to risk not having AppleCare, a very profitable business.
I got the Samsung 25 Edge and did move from a the regular sized phone to "plus" without the constraints and weight that usually follows. I can reach the screen edges that I can't on the same size plus version. Added bonus that i don't get a strain in my pinky from the weight and its still very pocketable. So I'm sold on thinner phones except the wobble from hell when its laying on the table.
It’s because they’re working on a foldable phone. And to make that work you need to phone half as thin first. This is not because they think people want thinner phones. It’s because they think people will want bigger screens and this will get them there.
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for smart phones with a bigger screen.
Every time a new iPhone comes up people on hacker news pine for a new mini, which I understand. But everytime someone has to bring back up that the 12 and 13 minis were the worst selling sku two gens in a row, with at one point the 13 mini only attributing to 3% of 13 sales [1].
I'm sorry, but the market has spoken. And there's Android phones in that form factor if you really want it.
When I looked for a new phone on gsmarena with a similar form factor as my old one, there were pretty much no options. So few even, my old phone appeared in the results. I too would be interested.
People underestimate what you can do with trillions of dollars at your disposal.
They could build a small town with all things you can imagine, cars, cinemas, hospitals, schools, whatever then get people to live there for months and use whatever new device prototypes they plan to launch a year later, and have an army of analysts even looking at their damn micro-expressions each time they pick up their phones in different ways and all of that might come down to like 50 million a year, which is like 0.05% of their revenue.
Apple is not anymore a startup where two/three guys make major decisions out of intuition (they ousted Ive because of that), again, this is a 2 trillion dollar company, they're not just vibing, lmao.
If you’ve been following the rumour mill and also understand Tim “zero waste” Cook’s MO of reusing parts in multiple models, this whole thing makes a lot more sense when you realise they’re going to release a folding iPhone next year, and it’ll be the thickness of two Airs.
(side note) And the folding phone will be a "Apple First".
I wonder if they still still have a stupid camera notch on the device. They is no point (to me) have a thin phone even you end up having a 5mm notch the size of your phone
“Thinnest” should be measured by the thickest slice for a given dimension.
I have an iPhone 11 which also has a camera bump and the experience of typing while the phone is on a flat surface is laughably annoying. For a company that prides itself on design aesthetics, it is honestly an embarrassing miss.
Genuinely curious: why do you often find yourself typing on the phone resting on a flat surface? I can’t think of a single time where that’s been the best way to handle my device.
I do this all the time, but I switched to iPhone only this year after a decade as a Nexus/Pixel user. I really wonder if this behavior comes from people who got accustomed to using phones with iOS vs Android, because it's certainly much more frustrating on iPhone.
Basically, whenever I sit down at my desk, I always have my phone sitting there, too. That's how I keep tabs on my personal life during work. But it works much better in Android:
* The Always On display came to Pixels a long time ago, so it was very useful to have your lock screen showing the date, time, and what sort of notifications you have.
* The notification management is just light years better in Android, so you don't have to even unlock your phone all the time to see what's going on.
* The Swiping keyboard was introduced a long time ago in Android, and is far superior in my experience, to the iPhone one, so it's pretty tolerable to type up quick things with the phone lying flat on the surface.
I'm actually kind of surprised that you don't interact with your phone on a desk or table. Do you just leave it in your pocket all day? Do you leave it on your desk, too, but just find it too cumbersome to deal with there and are constantly picking it up?
I do this all the time, often when I'm at a desk or table. I had to get a bulky case for my iPhone just so it didn't unstably contact at only 2 points and rock with each tap.
I find myself using the phone on the desk, placed between my keyboard and monitor. I do this because I find having stuff in pockets less comfortable than not, so I put things on my desk. I sometimes want to communicate with my wife about domestic logistics and prefer typing short replies without lifting the phone every time. My work laptop is not logged into my iCloud account, so cannot reply there. Happens a few times a week.
So people would like Apple to make a radically different decision about camera sensor size or phone thickness so that those who want to hammer out a short message a couple times a week on their desk don’t have their phone wobble slightly or, even worse, need to pick up their phone to use it in hand?
Which is an interesting comparison because most of the people were indeed unrealistically deathgripping their iPhone just to see the antenna bars drop.
I’d do it more if it wasn’t an annoying UX! I have message previews on lock screen turned off. If I get a message when my phone is sitting next to my keyboard on my desk, I unlock it to view the message. Might type a quick reply.
Apple doesn't advertise this as the intent, but until the Air I felt that the Phone+Case combo is the complete phone, as it is intended to be used. Add any of Apple's official cases, leather, silicone, whatever, and that's the official "thickness" of the phone. The cameras are recessed, the front display is recessed, the whole phone is wrapped in leather and further customized to your style.
Now the Air has a bump that is so big no case can hide it without also being unreasonably thicc, breaking the trend. I wonder what a case mfg could stuff into the awkward space on the peninsula where the camera is missing so the case provides a uniform surface when laying flat, even if that means a bigger bump on the top when cased. The phone would have a natural angle towards the user, that's kinda nice. Maybe a little bluetooth speaker setup so owners of the Air can more efficiently irritate their fellow passengers.
Just do not understand the market for this one. The current size of phones is a solved problem. Nobody is asking for these things to be thinner. Most people use cases and are happy to add some thickness for battery life. Besides, the camera "plateau" makes it all futile.
Parent is wrong, the Air is 165g, not 146g. The previously lightest iPhone in production is the 16e at 167g, so almost no difference in weight between those two.
I've been hoping for Apple to return to "thin" and it's nice that they're trying. I don't know whether I would buy this, but my current iPhone 14 Pro feels like a brick — thick stainless steel
When I go for a run, it's uncomfortable to have in a pocket depending on what running clothes I am wearing. The heaviness makes it feel far more likely to break all the times I have dropped it (and I have dropped it many times, without a case)
Why would you want worse battery life just for shaving 2,31 mm and 12g. That's a ridiculous compromise, especially since weight is the more important factor and it's going to be barely noticeable in this case.
Battery life isn't just about runtime it's also about the number of cyles you will be able to do before you have to deal with the bullshit that is iPhone battery replacement.
There is objectively no good reason to prefer that compromise appart from the "feeling" factor, which is not a reason by definition.
If get the battery compromise in the mini iPhones (even thought they could have just made them a bit thicker without changing much of the feel/functionality) because that's part of the deal with the form factor but going with a very large display only to make the phone thinner is beyond stupid.
And it's more expensive when most of the specs sheet is equal or worse.
also in the thinner camp here, and would gladly have accepted a way worse camera if they made the back uniformly thin actually. the closer we get to the "just a glass plate" thin design from the expanse the better :-)
but yeah, everywhere around all day there is charging options easily even in many public transports here around europe, battery life is simply not a convern anymore for most people at all. the only time i even thin kis when I forgot recharging over night for some reason, but then in the office theres plenty of options to recharge too
Yes I have a charger in the car, downstairs in my house upstairs in my house in the office and have a portable anker charger if I fly or go backcountry skiing for the entire day
A charger is like $50
Why would I carry around a brick in my pocket instead to save a few chargers
How does that make any sense
Also my iPhone 14 Pro lasts a full day 90% of my days on 1 charge
I use my iPad or MacBook most of the day for work or am driving
When you go travelling and do not want to carry around a backpack, and 1 day of heavy video recording, watching youtube on train plus 1 year of lithium battery degradation. That's when I want larger battery.
Most planes and trains in Asia don't have chargers. Maybe your country does. Your country is not the norm. Places that do have chargers are swarmed by people with tiny batteries desperately trying to charge up. And those charging spots charge about 1% every 15 minutes.
As someone who's been all around the world and goes places every week, I'd take a battery that lasts all day and charges when I sleep over needing to stop and try to get another 5% of charge wherever I can and constantly being on the lookout for chargers.
Also, people go into nature. We take hikes and walks in the park. It's nice to have a map there. It's also not easy to charge in the middle of the forest. And there are lots of people outside and needing good batteries. Nobody is staying home 90% of the time.
Aside from desiring a longer battery life, you'll likely be shocked to hear that some of us (non-iphone users) still use the Aux jack and the SD card slot too!
It's all about the tail scenarios. Sure, my daily life is OK. But what about when traveling or spending a weekend day bopping around doing errands, getting a bite to eat, then going to a friend's house? I never want to think about charging my phone until I go to bed.
Yes that's it. I'm dumbfounded by the people arguing about the common life.
It's when you need the phone the most that battery life matters and it's usually when you are very far from your common routine/habits.
When you are in holydays in a foreign city, constantly taking pictures, looking up stuff, using GPS to find places, this is when battery life is the most needed and relevant. Inconveniently, it's exactly the times where it will be hard to find a convenient power sources, exactly when you don't have time to wait in a single spot to let your phone charge and precisely when it's a pain in the ass to have to deal with external batteries and other half-assed inconvenient "solutions".
It makes a huge difference.
But Apple doesn't sell useful technology anymore, they are in the business of selling high end luxury fashion, that sometimes cosplay as technology, so whatever I guess...
When you are doing all those things isn’t your phone in your pocket and therefore not draining battery?
When travelling how? By car you have a cable charger or wireless charger in 99% of cars I’ve been in
Planes have plugs
Trains have plugs
Ubers have plugs
It seems like that is a once in a while occurrence for you
In which case you’d be better off with a thin phone the vast majority of other days and pack a thin MagSafe charger for those once in a blue moon travel days and it would just be slightly thicker than a thick phone while the vast other days you’d have a thin phone
I travel internationally pretty often. I also use my phone as a GPS when driving. Both cases have resulted in me having my battery at under 10% and desperately hoping I have enough power to get to where I need to go. And always having a charger or backup battery of some sort is just inconvenient.
For the people who are at home 90% of the time, they're probably not using a phone the whole time. They'd be better served by a desktop.
Since they aren't going to offer the smaller profile it seems that at least some segment of people want, and they don't have any new ideas to innovate on, they have to release something in order to maintain "growth" - which we all know must happen on schedule.
i hardly use my phone. it mostly sits in my hip pack. i'm extremely interested in the Air. the thinness means it takes up less space in there, which is very much appreciated. since they won't make another mini, this is the next best alternative. i'm also thrilled about having all-Apple silicon down to the cellular radios. more power-efficient and faster updates when improvements to cellular capabilities come out. very exciting.
the small battery won't affect me much. web browsing is the most demanding workload on my phone, which is not a problem on this a19 soc unlike the 13 mini whose soc struggles to keep up. i also charge my phone every night before i go to sleep and these phones do a great job at not draining overnight.
I'm actually curious about this one. Something that feels more seamless in my pocket, however like you mentioned, it would require for me to not use a case, which is something I might do.
It's wild to see the HN crowd, bleeding-edge technologists, regularly bring up "lying flat on a table" as a critical feature for a supercomputer inside a camera that fits in your pocket.
Somebody (many somebodies?) is rolling over in his grave.
"a supercomputer inside a camera that fits in your pocket" stopped being a novelty 15 years ago. We call it just "phone" now!
"lying flat on a table" is a critical feature for a device that on a daily basis lays on the table.
If it clanks and thuds every time you press it (and pressing it is the only way to use it) while lying on the table, then it is bad design that should be addressed.
I legit don't think I have even once used my phone lying on a table. Ergonomically that makes no sense. But then again I neither use my iPad nor Macbook lying flat on a table either, so what do I know...
Huh, that shocks me. I'd say half my day my phone is on my desk here. I'll occasionally swipe/tap it to deal with notifications and various other things.
But I came up using Nexus/Pixels, which had an "always on" display very early, a great UI around "glanceability" putting all kinds of useful and interesting things front and center, a much better Swipe keyboard, and a much more functional notifications experience, so maybe that trained this behavior.
Do you not? Do you just... leave your phone in your pocket all day?
What an absurd take. If we use FLOPS as a crude measure, the Air would be comparable to the leading supercomputers of ~1999/2000. There's many reasons why that's a very poor comparison but ignoring the absolute insanity of the raw compute available in a pocketable, thin, battery-powered handheld that you can buy literally this week, is ridiculous. Modern smartphones are nothing short of sci-fi when compared to even recent living memory. We're simply used to them due to their sheer ubiquity.
The A19 GPU doesn't even have hardware support for FP64, which is the precision used for TOP500. No, it is not comparable to leading supercomputers of 1999/2000.
Wow, a phone with a battery that's so bad, they're selling an extra one to strap to the back of it, on launch day... The most innovative thing that Apple has done recently is figuring out how to have their CEO deliver a gift wrapped gold bar to the president. [1]
If you check the actual specs, the Air’s battery life is the same 27 hours as the 16Pro. That’s pretty good for such a thin device. Obviously 27 hours is an optimistic estimate but to match the 16Pro means that the Air battery isn’t actually bad.
They likely offer the battery pack to make people feel more comfortable who don’t ready the specs but just make an assumption based on looks.
> [...] the same 27 hours as the 16Pro. That’s pretty good for such a thin device.
Maybe pretty good for a thin device that they made so thin for no good reason at all. Making it so thin is not something to be proud of, and we certainly shouldn't let it slide as an excuse for bad battery life.
I mean, when did "remarkable all‑day battery life" become something to be proud of? I consider a phone that doesn't last a full day defective. All-day battery life is the bare minimum, not something to be proud of.
Made it thin for no good reason that appeals to YOU. Doesn’t mean that others don’t appreciate the design. We don’t all value and need massive battery capacity. I’d be glad to trade a little battery capacity for a slimmer device. As it turns out, if you are upgrading, there is no reduction in battery. It only looks lesser compared to the new 17 and 17 Pro which also got battery tech upgrades.
Then don't get the Air?? The iPhone 17 is normal phone thickness. Or you can go for the iPhone 17 Pro which is extra thick and which Apple specifically called out as having their largest battery in an iPhone ever.
Ever since Apple started making their phones big I've wanted a smaller one. I never bought a mini because it has a worse camera and that's more important to me.
My wife actually has a 13 mini and loves it. I also wish that there were good smaller phones, but I can't really blame companies for focusing on what sells.
I'm also curious who the market is for a thinner phone. I imagine pockets on some clothes women commonly wear might work better with a thinner phone, but those pockets are almost always too small in other dimensions to actually hold the phone
Pure speculation but the fact that it has a strap accessory. Feels like something for the younger generation. Life is on your phone. You take your phone everywhere but you don’t care about pro features. Reminds me how a lot of younger folks either don’t drive or are uninterested in it.
the strap is probably more for Asian markets. for instance whenever I go to Japan I see a lot of people still use straps (it's been a thing for years now). But here in California it's pretty rare to see slings used like that.
>I'm also curious who the market is for a thinner phone
Hm, i'd consider it (if i was upgrading yet again).
Why? My 15 Pro (not-Max) gets way too hot way too fast doing basically nothing and it p*sses me off - so, i'd rather not (yet?) take a bet if the new 17 Pro (Max) does better with an entire new thermal design - considering _something_ is _always_ off with new Apple hardware designs, starting with the iPhone 4...
I just want them to release a new iteration of 13 Mini at some point. I don't want a larger phone, I don't care about how thin it is with a massive extruding camera bump; give me an actual handheld phone.
For now my 13 Mini works perfectly fine so I'm in no rush, but when the time comes, I'm going going to buy a massive device that I can't comfortable use with a single hand.
This reminds me of Nokia's glory days around the turn of the millennium, when the mobile phone's essential functionality was well established and they excelled at packaging the same thing into ever-smaller cases made of ever-fancier metals.
I actually sold my Nakamichi cassette deck to afford the NOKIA Communicator back then. The OS was problematic and couldn’t deliver the functionality that I expected. I ended up switching to a Palm or Handspring device, can't remember which, and stuck with a Nokia monochrome phone until the iPhone came along and changed everything.
5.6 mm? Pah! The Moto Z beat them by .4 mm almost 10 years ago: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/05/the-moto-z-was-so-a... And, more importantly, the Moto Z had a reason for being so thin: the ability to add "mods" that attached to the back of the phone magnetically.
What I don't like about iPhones in terms of practicality is that the corner camera makes it impossible to lay them on a table without wobbling. Google does a better job with its Pixel phones.
The unfortunate part is that you can make anything better in a single parameter, but Apple has effectively no competitors. People who buy Apple will continue to buy Apple.
For people to switch, the competition has to come out with something that is visibly and unbeatably better than what Apple has.
I know many people in developing countries who'd rather have a 5 year old iPhone than a new android.
So there's one feature the Air is missing according to a deep dive of the Compare sheet (https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/): The Air does not support mmWave cellular connectivity, while the other models (and previous models going back awhile) do support it.
That is...weird? Why would the Air's design prevent that?
The mmWave functionality requires a glass section on the frame as it can't pass through metals. They've redesigned this on the 17 Pro[1], but likely didn't find a way to integrate into the Air's design.
When Camera Control was introduced on iPhone 16, Apple moved the 5G mmWave antenna to pass through the back glass of the iPhone, that way it was no longer something you needed to see.
Now though, with iPhone 17 Pro – that can’t work. The iPhone is now largely made of aluminum, requiring Apple to revert to an old design technique: a glass cutout for 5G mmWave passthrough
I remember having ~150Mbps with an iPhone 8 on LTE in 2017. Bandwidth itself has basically never been the limiting factor for the last decade or so. The problem is always data caps, and unless 5G/mmWave/etc is somehow magically exempt, it's not really a benefit (you can now burn through your monthly quota in seconds instead of minutes - great!).
I talked to ChatGPT about it for a while. It says mmWave means you can get 1-3gbps speeds if you're in a covered area. However, most are stadiums, airports, etc.. Verizon has by far the largest coverage, then AT&T.
At least in my daily use, it means nothing. I've also never seen speeds like that when I've tested the phone.
I'd be paranoid all the time about breaking it by accidentally sitting on it. Thinner just means it won't have as much strength to resist being bent into an ass-shaped curve, right?
i'm sure most people reacted like you in focus groups. I dont know how many times they said "its our most durable phone" and "its so strong" etc. Got to be a way to directly counter this first impression.
iPad still _is_ pretty useless, unless you opt for the "pro" models which let you do some productivity work on them. otherwise it's just suitable for consuming content.
I view my phone primarily as something I'm obligated to carry on myself at all times to function in modern society. The easier it is to carry the better. When I need to upgrade my phone, I'll always choose the smallest iPhone by weight.
Same. There are really only two features I care about in a phone: a high refresh rates and weight. At 165 grams the iPhone air is by far the lightest 120hz phone apple has ever made. Second place is the iPhone 15 Pro at 187 grams. Getting ready to ditch my 15 pro.
Me too, and I’m planning the same upgrade. Always wanted to downsize but 60Hz was a deal breaker for me. Been using 120-144Hz+ displays exclusively since the VG248QE in 2013.
I was quite surprised to see this entire thread full of HN users who apparently want some brick phone to doom scroll lying flat on a table all day until the battery dies.
Right, thinness doesn't help with anything. I want smaller width and height (i.e., a iPhone 17 mini) so that the phone will fit better in my jeans pocket.
I'm not sure about this. I think that if the weight balance is weird (esp. in the heavy top light bottom scenario - I sincerely hope it's not a thing with this new iPhone), it'll act as a lever and put more strain on your fingers to hold the phone.
Not sure you'd like the weight. All the major phone makers have consumer research saying they've reached the limits of weight comfort and many makers are working hard to pull back from those limits.
HN is mostly male. We need the opinion of the women that put a lot of effort into their appearance. Not wishing to over-generalise, but they need a thin phone that takes awesome selfies and shows that they are higher status than those with old fashioned bulky phones. Apple have ticked the boxes and they have probably booked out all the prime advertising spots to reach this demographic.
The most annoying thing about handling my 12 Pro Max one-handed is the weight, with thickness being 2nd, and screen size being a distant 3rd.
I went from someone who had to have the latest phone on pre-order to someone who doesn't bother: this is the first time I'm considering a new phone release in years. I suspect many other people are in the same boat.
I'm just not sure if I'll miss 3 cameras too much.
It's a UI problem not an hardware one imo. Pretty much when iPhone came out UI research flattened and everything seems so standardized now, I only see gimmick stuff like liquid glass. For example, I don't see why a submit button cannot float near the thumb on the right or left side of the bottom of the device(could predict by checking device orientation)
I cannot totally agree. From my experience, if the phone is wider than ~68mm, I cannot hold it firmly in my hand and operate it. The UI comes after that, for how far I can reach.
for it to align with the case the case would need to be as thick as the camera bump thus negating the entire point of a thin phone while introducing all the problems of a thin phone.
When Samsung came out with its ultra-thin phone earlier this year, reviewers said you can't really tell from pictures but it really does feel different in-hand, and is substantially lighter. This one is slightly thinner than Samsung's
Not enough for me to upgrade, but I would consider this one if I were buying this year
The rumors are also strong for a folding iPhone next year, in which case this may just be them using the same thinness work they already had to do for that. A foldable would prompt me to upgrade
Around 2000-2005 there was a race for the smallest phone with ludicrously small displays. I believe Nokia was kind of leading and “winning” the race. Then blackberry and iPhone reversed trajectory and suddenly bigger was better, and Nokia died out.
I think we are on the same path here, thinner is not what I want. I want a powerhouse that can run AI for at least 48 hours on the worst conditions, a week at least in an ideal scenario.
My memory is from around 1998-1999 when I did some research to buy my first phone. From memory, I think that at that point Ericsson was winning that race in the more affordable end of the market, with models that I remember being smaller than Nokia models from the same time, such as:
In the end I realised that size was not the most important factor for me so instead I got a Motorola 8700 [1] which I didn't enjoy using, then sold it shortly after to get a Nokia 5110 [2] which I liked very much.
It wouldn’t weigh 4lbs if Apple invested on that research. Who really cares about this much thin phones really, Apple is out of ideas, far from revolutionary anymore. They have the hardware to run LLMs, they should invest on batteries and inference quality and consumption with SLMs, rather than delegate AI to Gemini and ChatGPT…
You know what has been grind my gears for a while?
It's the protruding camera lenses being off-center. I don't mind the "protruding" part but, every time I interact with my phone lying onto a table or countertop or whatever, I have to bear with that silly tick-tack because the damn phone is not level.
iPhones last killer feature was usbc. These are all good and appreciated upgrades for someone with no phone, but my wallet is happy none of it is really that interesting and enough to warrant an upgrade. Right now I don’t know what they could do to get me to want to. Folding? Even more zoom? Even more battery? Return of the headphone jack???? I won’t lie, a headphone jack might…
They did increase the RAM for the iPhone17 by 50% (8GB -> 12GB [sorry, there was no RAM bump, I was looking at the iPhone17 and iPhone17 Pro page and confused the 17Pro RAM for the 17 RAM amount]) and the 128GB storage option is gone, so the 256GB option is the minimum now, for the same price as the initial iPhone16.
Fortunately different Operating Systems have different RAM needs and they’ve been making the trade-off between power usage (battery weight) and RAM fairly well.
Every time I hear "people/customers want it" I answer that I don't want it and immediately hear in response "but you are not a human/customer". I'm confused... I stopped asking.
It is quite telling when they boast about the battery life of the other models, but the Air is just "All day battery life", and then immediately announce their magsafe power bank 20 seconds later in the broadcast!
It's late but I spent way too long looking at the top image wondering what the weird phone angles were on the left and right until I realised it said AIR
Same! Though it was some liquid glass distortion of the phone or something.
And then I stared at the line about "remarkable all‑day battery life" and wondered what is so remarkable about that. Anyway... "The new iPhone Air MagSafe Battery has a thin and light design that magnetically attaches to the back of iPhone Air to extend battery life during busier days." So you can always turn it into a normal thickness phone with normal battery life it seems.
> Google Cloud revealed Tuesday it has lined up about $58 billion in new revenue over the next two years as it vies to become a more central component of the tech giant's future.
> The company said during its July earnings that the cloud division had surpassed a $50 billion annual revenue run rate. Google Cloud's backlog of non-recognized sales contracts is growing even faster than its revenue, unit chief Thomas Kurian told investors at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology conference.
Yes, a move in the global share of mobile phones a few percentage points from apple ecosystem to google ecosystem is even more important now Ai is the denominator in every valuation.
I think the long and the short of it (place your bets) is that it could be perceived that Apple has lost its foothold on this ever-important (tm) share of the AI marketplace, whereas Google is happily integrating Gemini into all of its services, in a way that is actually functional / useful, with the most obvious entry point being its own Pixel hardware. They just dodged a regulatory bullet, partly due to AI competitiveness, but maybe they're not going to be on the whipping end of that sea change, after all ...
One small disagreement - the most obvious entry point is one of the 3.5 billion android devices in the world (against apples 1.5b)
The relatively small changes in share price (~ -2% vs +2%) is likely just some optionality coming out of the respective company valuations for the small probability apple announced something big like Ai that works or a $400 phone for the mythical people who don't live in silicon valley and make 7 fig salaries.
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for smart phones with a bigger screen.
I have iphone 11 and you can have battery replaced just fine. I did it few months ago and the phone became like new. I am not sure about Apple in US but if they won't do it then some third party will.
The bigger problem is that app and web designers have stopped accommodating smaller screen sizes. I can't use my bank's app on an iPhone mini, because the buttons end up off the bottom of the screen (and the app doesn't scroll). Ditto for a number of popular web apps.
My eyes aren't great - I need three different sets of glasses: reading, office, long distance - and I'm clinging on to my 13 mini, desperately hoping that they in fact end up making something smaller. Granted, I bet I'm not the median buyer, but I would instantly upgrade to an iPhone that's around the size of the 4.
Things that we called "feature" phones nowadays and iPhone 3 worked alright with all sorts of people. Maybe phone manufacturers shouldn't opt for putting so much bullshit into the screens. Reading news, video calling people, audio calling, recording voice, messaging. They all work alright with small screen estate and good UI design.
The only thing I see a possible issue is dealing with camera features. But, you know, tech companies should actually innovate stuff... I know radical.
Can't be just me who feels underwhelmed by the announcements yesterday? I can't imagine why they prioritise making thinner iPhones at the expense of longer battery life.
Can I get regular thickness but twice the battery life instead? "All day battery life" is the bare minimum dressed up as a feature - I get at least two out of my cheap android.
Unless you can deliver multi-day battery, it's useless to provide anything more than all day battery. If the battery can only last 1.5 days for example, then the user is stuck trying to find a charge in the middle of the day. All day battery means they just need to charge overnight (which most users already do).
> Unless you can deliver multi-day battery, it's useless to provide anything more than all day battery
The battery time estimates are based on certain usage patterns, not 100% utilization of power-hungry apps. A battery that can last "36 hours" can offer more real-world usage per day than one that only lasts for 24.
Edit: Looks like the only estimates Apple provides any more are video playback hours, which is much more power-efficient than general app usage and internet browsing.
But a phone with a 36 hour battery that still requires charging at night leaves the user/owner thinking "This is disappointing, I thought I could get 36 hours". As opposed to a user who has "all day charge" and charges at night thinks "This is what I bought and expect".
A user whose phone has "all day charge" that has to plug their phone in at 3pm because they used it too much in the morning would be, IMO, more disappointed.
Ultimately "all day"/"36 hours" are marketing labels that are at best rough approximations of reality. Your original argument sounds like "if Apple says that the iPhone Air's 3,149 mAh lasts all day, then a 4,500 mAh battery is useless", but as any heavy phone user can attest, with high usage even a new iPhone battery will need to be charged midday, regardless of what Apple says, and an extra 50% battery capacity can be the difference between regularly needing to charge midday and not.
The magsafe battery thing is actually pretty neat, but not using it to instead have a thinner phone feels pointless because you still have the giant bulge from the camera.
Apple obviously could create a multi day phone battery, they would just need to make it thicker. But there are 230 million people that buy an iPhone every year. I suspect Apple knows what it's doing.
I remember Matt Honan's ridiculou8s write-up in Wired magazine when he was Editor, complaining about getting in a taxi with the iPhone 6 in his back pocket and it bending. I'm sure we will see more of that.
The transformation here is not size or performance or intelligence but security.
The iPhone Air and iPhone 17 with MIE (Memory integrity enforcement) promise to be the first devices capable of resisting even nation-state-level attacks, through hardware+software integration of memory tagging to stem use-after-free and buffer overflow attacks, and hardware defenses against speculative execution attacks.
Third-party software developers can opt in to MIE now; users should insist on it from their application vendors.
A19 uses the 3nm process and its benchmarks look similiar to the A18. My two cents I would hold off to next version of the air/pro with the 2nm process and the A20 series chips.
AppleCare+ is really good IMO if you're interested in caseless. I can get my screen or back replaced same day for as little as $29. On my iPhone 17 I've broken the screen twice and gotten repairs done same day.
I broke the back glass on my 15 Pro a few months ago, still covered by AppleCare+. I made an appointment at the biggest store in town, and they didn't have the part in stock when I got there. The Genius ordered the part and told me they'd have it in a few days. Nine days later, they finally got it. I made a new appointment, showed up, and they told me they had the part but didn't have a replacement phone in stock in case something went wrong during the repair. They offered to have me go to another store nearby, which had both the part and the replacement device, but I opted to just take the gamble (since back glass replacement seems like a low-risk repair).
The whole experience left me very disappointed with AppleCare+ and the Genius Bar in general.
Why the heck didn't they have the part in stock given that I made an appointment several days in advance? (You go through a little menu saying exactly which part is broken, rather than a free-form text field, so their systems _should_ have known that they'd need a replacement back glass in my color.) Why didn't they tell me before I hauled myself in for my appointment that they wouldn't have the part in stock? Why does it take 9 days to get replacements? Why didn't the first Genius tell me that other stores in town had the part in stock? Why didn't they have the backup device in stock or warn me in advance of my second appointment?
I worry that Apple has gotten complacent with service because they can get away with it.
I'm sorry you had that experience. That has not been my experience, but I am on the latest iPhone so I could see that an older model might have more trouble. Hope you have a better experience in the future, it's not acceptable that's for sure. I'll keep this in mind when recommending AppleCare+ in the future.
I don't know, this still feels like hassle to go there, hand in your phone, plan accordingly as you'll spend some hours without, and go get it back later. If that happens once a year fine, but still, I'd rather just get a case (and save the $10/month AppleCare+ seems to cost).
It's not a problem for me to be without my phone for a few hours, as I can still text from my Mac (except for RCS + SMS messages). But yes, it's definitely a downside. I prefer the comfort and weight of a caseless phone. For me, the phone has been incredibly resilient and outside of once having a potlid drop from the ceiling on my phone, shattering the front and back of the phone (which was replaced in 3 hours, next day, when I broke the phone at 9pm).
Interesting. I think I want to avoid the downtime of my phone (and preserve resale value), but that insurance price point isn't bad if you want to go caseless and also cover less-predictable oopses.
I feel like this is more of a tech demo than a product. It is impressive engineering, for sure, but you can pay $100 more for the Pro and get significantly more features and battery life.
> you can pay $100 more for the Pro and get significantly more features and battery life
Segmentation. More features aren't material if you don't use them. And plenty of people (not me) habitually charge their phones to the extent that carrying around extra battery just in case is sort of like having a 400-mile EV for grocery runs.
I don't feel like I need a thin phone. I need a smartphone which can last for a week after a single charge. From what I understand, the energy density in modern battery processes is enough to pack 100 Wh battery into a phone, but for some reason we are stuck with 20 Wh for years.
I believe the counterargument here is that we've gotten used to phones being relatively thin, and people have learned to charge their phones every night anyway. Something about stated vs. true desires, just like with the Minis where people said they wanted smaller phones but then nobody bought them. I believe it might be a similar thing where people say they want thicker phones with big batteries but they won't actually buy them when they realize they will be noticeably thicker and heavier.
Summing up, a company that has no more ideas about how to innovate and resorting to tactics like "we improved last year's model by x (with x not so big or relevant to you, user), and if x is not good enough, we have also made it thinner".
Truly boring. But you can't pretend more from a boat manned by a boring captain, focused exclusively on money/market/stocks.
Not an iPhone nor Apple user, but I feel like we're regressing on battery life. My old Moto G used to last a full week with single charge (yes, I'm a very light user: no social media, games etc.). My newer Google Pixel's battery, with its larger capacity, with the same usage pattern, lasts for 2 days if I'm lucky. That is to say, the normalized idling time for newer phones have grown significantly shorter.
Now, this Apple ad appears to be boasting as if battery that lasts single day is a generous offering. Perhaps it's adjusted for a heavy user. Still, I don't get the impression that we aren't getting actual improvements on battery life.
This. Absolutely this. Presumably the foldable flips back up and extends to just beneath the camera bump, hence most of the phone is effectively double the thinnest part of the iPhone air.
I understand the market "has spoken" but I feel like I'm on crazy pills when I put a ruler across my iPhone 13 mini and look at where the 6.5" mark is. No other dimension is relevant to me until we get this one under control.
The pixel has had a "visor" style bump for many years, last year's model rounded it off for the current look. This year's model is design-wise very similar to last year's.
Edit: forgot which thread I’m on, yes the air looks much more like Pixel.
Copying pixel would have been great. They copied AND made it worse.
I wouldn’t in a million years buy a pixel, but their team deserves credit for making really beautiful hardware. IMO better than iPhone 16 Pro and MUCH better than iPhone 17 Pro.
I don't really see the point of making phones so thin when the camera sticks out as much as much as the phone is thick. I would rather have a flat phone that is thicker
I feel like phones are currently in the "Osprey backpack" stage of product development. There's nothing new happening and no new problems to solve, short of a miracle like making your backpack half the weight or something. So what they do instead is add features one year but take others away so they can add them back later.
So it's like: year 1: super thin, super light (shit battery life, no headphone port etc), then year 2 it will be: awesome battery life, headphone jack (but thick, heavy).
Basically they have to be careful they don't ever make the perfect phone. They do have planned obsolescence as another trick up their sleeve, though. So you'll never see an Apple phone with upgradable storage etc (the Android ones go more for having the software becoming obsolete).
Given the no one has any idea about how much power the A19 Pro SOC will use for activity, what actual purpose would that serve?
They actually have both offline and streaming video playback time, which had been pretty standard for iPhone for a long time as their battery life measurements.
Every time I read an apple press release, I immediately bounce off because of the purposeful omission of the definite article when referring to their products; like "iPhone Air features ..." instead of "The iPhone Air features ...".
It's irrational, but it's like an uncanny valley via text for me.
That bothers me way more than it ought to too. When I hear people saying it IRL I keep thinking that trillion dollar companies are engineering our speech.
I'm genuinely bummed that Apple killed the Plus iPhone.
For years, it was the perfect sweet spot -- bigger screen and bigger battery without the Pro price tag. It was especially great for elderly users: easier to read, easier to hold, and they didn't have to pay $1,000+ just to get a phone they could actually see and use.
The jump from the base model to the Plus was usually just $100, but you got a noticeably larger display and often better battery life -- the kind of practical upgrade most people actually cared about.
Now, if you want a larger screen without breaking the bank... well, you can't. Apple's lineup basically forces you into the Pro models, which feels like a loss for accessibility and for people who just want "big and simple."
I wish they'd kept the Plus around. It wasn't flashy, but it served a real audience.
It's actually not that thinner (1.9mm compared to 12 mini) so I doubt it will. And it definitely can't make for the huge size difference (134mm of extra width).
Ditto. This adds 10.5mm of width, but shaves 4mm of depth (2mm on each side, as measured when holding in one hand). So the net increase is only 6mm. I won't be pre-ordering one of these, since I want to feel it in-store prior to purchasing.
The weight is also significantly (in percentage terms) greater.
We will have Silicon Carbon battery that has 2x energy density of normal lithium battery shipping on Smartphone later this year. Apple is very slow in new battery technology adoption, but one could imagine in a few years time this iPhone Air will have double the battery life.
who is 'we will have'?
I've had this in my Oppo Find N5 for the last half year already. Bigger battery than any iPhone on the market including the upcoming ones.
And that certainly wasn't the first on the market silicon carbon phone
The thinness of the letters in the title really accentuate the camera bump. For me it makes it looks like it's called APR and really draws attention to a design feature I dislike, having said that I know that some people find camera bumps a positive feature.
So basically: thinner, shinier, faster. Itэs impressive from an engineering standpoint but at what point does thinness stop being a feature and start being a liability? I feel like we’ve been here before with bendgate.
I thought this. I've had a previous phine with bending issues and I'd personally stay well clear of anything this thin.
I notice the release claims "our most durable iphone ever" - curious if this is actually true and whether there's any design to stop the risk of bending.
I just can't imagine anyone wanting this? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but do people really want a thinner phone? I love my 16 Pro and plan to get the 17 Pro.
Definitely feel like thicker and longer battery is better. Heavier feels nice.
Saw another comment that said this will give Apple the opportunity to learn if people really want a thinner iPhone. I hope they learn that people don't. Curious to find out the answer.
It's annoying me that Apple has called it "iPhone Air" and not "iPhone 17 Air", this is Apple creating (again) confusion for every tech person in the future
If you're going to do a phone-width camera bump, at least make it flat so I can put my phone down without it wobbling. Apple's bump on a bump is the worst of both worlds.
I've yet to notice a substantive difference between my current Moto g 5g, which cost ~150 USD and my previous phone, a Pixel 5a which cost ~450 USD. I balked at the price of the pixel at the time, but figured that's just the price of admission these days. It is now useless since the screen/mobo failed soon after I switched. After it was obsoleted, I just opted for the cheap Moto and will probably never spend more than 200 USD on a phone again.
If you're on here, you probably work in tech, and if you work in tech, you're probably pretty affluent, which means you don't need to signal that you're affluent.
I wish they could just make a phone that has 3 or 4 day battery life. I never understood this obsession with thickness, even the normal iPhone is too thin to properly hold without a case.
totally agree, chasing ultrathin designs has diminishing returns. There's so many practical ways to extend battery life such as letting users selectively dial down performance, adding a bit of extra thickness/weight, rethinking how power hungry features are scheduled... It's a matter of priorities, and Apple is obsessed with design (with dubious results, ie magic mouse charging port)
I completely agree with this; in practice I have to charge my iPhone in the daytime to make it through the day (probably not when it was new). It would be great
to have it go multi day for the days I don’t/cant do an overnight charge.
Based on what evidence that adding more battery necessarily makes it a pound?
Based on what precedent of mainstream phones ever approaching that weight?
“A new titanium USB-C port is 3D-printed to be thinner and stronger, fitting into the slim design while using 33 percent less material than a conventional forging process.”
I have nothing intelligent to add to this (other than wanting a phone that lays flat), but it's interesting that this thread has almost 1800 comments, far more than the iPhone thread (currently at 256) and the iPhone Pro thread (currently at 89). Maybe people are just excited to talk about a slightly different form factor?
> iPhone Air features an eSIM-only design that saves space internally, helping enable the unbelievably light and thin form factor.
I've only ever had phones with at least one (regular/physical) eSIM, and a 'slot' for an eSIM for travel.
What are the pros/cons of only eSIMs?
Edit: I'm not questioning eSIMs, which I know can be handy: my iPhone SE3 is physical+eSIM. I'm curious about no physical SIM. If you can support 1-eSIM+physical is it a big deal to go to >1-eSIM+physical?
I have an only esim since the iPhone 11 was released.
Pros:
- Super easy to get esims while traveling. e.g. in Mexico i downloaded an app while still in the airport and paid $5 with apple pay and instantly activated a 1 month esim.
- You can have multiple esimss. With physical sims you are limited to the physical number of sim slots on your phone, usually 1 or at most 2. With esim there is no such restriction.
- More secure. esims can't be cloned (e.g. sim swapping attack) or simply removed from a stolen phone like physical sims.
Cons:
- If you get a new phone, you cant just pop your physical sim in. You need to go through your provider to transfer, which requires calling them and verifying your identity.
I actually dont see this as a con really, I see this as a security benefit. Since I only get a new phone every 3-4 years, the 20 min on the phone it takes to transfer is not a significant burden.
> If you get a new phone, you cant just pop your physical sim in. You need to go through your provider to transfer
Which, at least with my provider, you cannot do while roaming. So if I break my phone while travelling, I cannot access my online banking until I get back home.
> - Super easy to get esims while traveling. e.g. in Mexico i downloaded an app while still in the airport and paid $5 with apple pay and instantly activated a 1 month esim.
This can be done with physical+esim, which my iPhone SE3 has.
Is there a distinct advantage to eSIM-only, with no physical slot, for travel?
> - You can have multiple esimss. With physical sims you are limited to the physical number of sim slots on your phone, usually 1 or at most 2. With esim there is no such restriction.
If you already have 1-eSIM capability, would it be hard to go to >1-eSIM+physical?
> Is there a distinct advantage to eSIM-only, with no physical slot, for travel?
IDK about only but it’s easier to get an eSIM setup ahead of time. It’s also easier to keep a bunch of esims handy vs physical sims. Guess it depends on your needs.
> esims can't be cloned (e.g. sim swapping attack)
This is incorrect. eSIMs are no different from physical SIMs once provisioned. The only difference is that instead of you having a physical smartcard, there is now a JavaCard-compatible card (embedded on the logic board or emulated by the modem) that gets provisioned remotely.
SIM swap attacks have nothing to do with your physical (or emulated) SIM, they were always about a social engineering attack onto the carrier's staff to replace the (e?)SIM associated with your account. eSIMs actually do make this easier because instead of the attacker having to show up in person at a store to pick up a physical SIM they can skip that step and do the whole process online.
> simply removed from a stolen phone like physical sims
If this is an attack vector you care about, you can enable a SIM PIN. In fact, this also works with eSIM if you really want to. But beware, doing so means once a phone reboots it will not have a data connection so things like Find My iPhone/etc won't work.
When they first introduced eSIM only on the 13 iirc, not every country had that rolled out especially with old telcos in South America so if you travelled there for work or family you were completely shut out and it means buying a burner. I am not sure how that has progressed in the past 4 years but hopefully more telcos adopt it. The downside is no real portability of cheap plans using regular sim cards.
SIM cards are huge. Even the smallest form factor is a pretty large component. It has to be accessible from the exterior of the device and often has an ejection method of some kind. Getting rid of it is huge from a form factor standpoint.
I am sure there are downsides to eSIM but particularly for the average consumer who gets a SIM in their new phone and never changes it... there is probably zero difference.
I asked my provider to issue a new e-sim that I could use in another phone, but it asked me to verify my id by sending me a text message I couldn't receive because I didn't have a phone.
I couldn't buy a new phone without a new sim, because I had forgotten the pin of the card I needed to use, and the pin was visible on a website that was protected with 2FA.
So I bought a physical sim card from my provider shop (using my last physical 10 euros), then went to a used iphone reseller, who let me setup the phone before paying, so that I could use the phone to actually pay for it.
You can swap them between iPhones pretty easily. There are some issues with virtual carriers - I went to Japan recently and the travel eSIM I got didn't work for most of the trip until I realized there was an old busted APN configuration profile installed from the last time I went.
eSIM is essentially a client-server protocol for provisioning secrets into an embedded SIM (whether discrete chip soldered on the mainboard or emulated by the modem).
The QR code you get when you purchase an eSIM is merely an access token to initiate the provisioning process. Some carriers may make these single-use, or attach extra restrictions such as fees if you want to get a new one, or restrictions they themselves don't know about like that you must be on an IP from your carrier's home country to reach the provisioning server (good luck debugging that if you're not already aware of it - and no, on-device VPNs won't save you as the OS will not use your VPN for this traffic).
Even the mechanism that allows you to move an eSIM from one iPhone to another requires carrier involvement, which they have to support (internally I don't believe it moves anything, instead merely requesting a new SM-DP code in the background and sending that to the new phone). It doesn't work for all carriers.
Oh and you already need to have some existing IP connection to provision the eSIM in the first place, so first-time provisioning is tricky. I'm sure there is a workaround for it, but again carrier support varies.
TLDR: it allows the carrier to interfere when provisioning or moving the eSIM which carriers can and do take advantage to make the process more costly/painful and discourage easily using alternative carriers.
This is an interesting move. Extend the moat. At the same time I'm considering hard wiring a powerbank to my phone so it will have a month of stand-by time.
Por the love of god. I'm already scared of dropping my current phone because its so small in my hand unless I put a beefy case on it. Just leave it thick and use the innovations to put a bigger battery in there. I don't give a shit about saving 2mm but and extra 10 hours of battery life would def perk my ears.
They're just flexing their engineering skills. Mass producing such a thin phone, where most of the non battery internals are housed in the camera bump can translate to meaningful products
Like wearables, glasses, etc. The fact that they're mass producing this is key
As much as I want this to succeed because Apple makes great products, I don't know who asked for it. People have voted unanimously with their wallets that bigger screens with longer battery life is what they want. The trend to thin down phones stopped around iPhone 8 or so, when the big screen was introduced. Since then we have seen many cycles where the phones got bulkier with larger batteries and screens. No one complained.
I have Samsung S25 Edge which is essentially same thickness (5.8mm) the biggest difference is weight, phone feels really light compared to my old phone.
The most annoying thing on the phone is wobbling when it is on flat surface thanks to lenses sticking out.
Battery life is alright. I can get 2-3 days of life from it with light use. If I am using it a little bit more, then it is barely one day of battery life.
For this they could engineer a good plastic but it wouldn't sell because it wouldn't feel "premium" enough. So instead, we get nonsense like that.
And it suits them well because the thing is that much more likely to break so they get more chances to have the customer pay for repair or phone change.
Win-Win for them, lose-lose for the customer, basically everything Apple is about currently.
Steel is too heavy. As they pointed out aluminum is much better at dissipating heat than titanium. Shooting video has always heated phones up. A lot of the video features were aimed directly at actual professional video work so I’m not surprised if preventing throttling was a key goal. Game performance will come along for the ride as well.
They also said that this was the first unibody iPhone. Can titanium be made the same way? The unibody MacBooks are really nice though I’m not sure if the same rigidity issues are at play in such small devices.
I’m hoping we see that C1X chip in Macbooks soon. I have a cellular 5g iPad and it’s incredibly stable with my work VPN and doesn’t have the constant drops and reconnect issues that I have with hotspoting through my iPhone.
The thinnest phone is still the Vivo X5 Max from 10 years ago. It was 4.75 mm (iPhone Air: 5.5 mm) without significant camera bump to speak of. Here are some pictures:
I'm always impressed how Apple can name so many products with so few words. Recycling Mac[Book] / Pad / Pod, Air, Pro, and 'i' (hardly even a word) gives you basically their whole product lineup. iPad Pro, MacBook Air, AirPods, iPhone Air, iMac Pro. AirTag must be the only one that has a unique word in it.
They’re running out of ways to innovate across all of their product lines. Introducing yet another product size is the easiest way for them to make it look like the iPhone is still innovating. I’m sure there will eventually be an Apple Watch Air as well as iPad Pro Max/Ultra too.
I don't get the effort of reaching that thickness and then bumping that monster at the top. It will unbalance the phone for sure. I mean there must be a consumer base that would buy an ultra light smartphone without the back camera so to make it consistently thin? I'd buy it
The Plateau also includes all logic boards and most other components for the phone except those that must be physically located on other edges, so getting rid of the camera wouldn’t really help.
The main body of the phone is just battery and display.
Based on what teardown are you concluding the logic boards take up that much?
Based on what phone design history where removing cameras failed to free up meaningful space?
They really know how to get your consumer juices flowing
Aside from Macs for development I've never been an iPhone person but I'm seeing this like ooh. But no I'm good with my $160 motorolla android phone, no shade against this phone, good enough for my needs.
They introduced N1 network chip. I noticed "thread" technology along with wifi and bluetooth. Tbh, it's first time I heard of this tech. Could anyone enlighten me what this "thread" wireless technology is and its impact?
Don't see much improvements that really matter to a common phone user. Battery, maybe?
Reminds me of Windows versions that came after Windows 7. Why don't people just stop doing new versions after the product has reached its saturation point?
Recently got a iphone 16 pro to my mom. First thing i reacted on when opening the package was. Damm that is a thick phone. Compared to my S25 and older android phones i have the iphone 16 feel old and clunky, like from another era.
I'm concerned about HN database storage capacity, so here's a simple way to think about this. If you're interested, consider buying it. If it's not for you, no need to argue a whole lot. Plenty of other topics worthy of discussion. XD
The camera hump removes all the "feeling" of having a super thin phone. Also, my phone not being thin enough was never a problem I had. Laptops being thin? Yes that makes sense. But this is barely lighter than the other iPhones. It's all aesthetic.
Ad has nothing for me. I want to know more about it's satellite reception, it's physical limits (actual specifications with units too much to ask?), it's hardware security improvements, how many GB of storage, and the final cost.
I've bought an iPhone 16 this year so it will be at least 4 years before I start thinking about a new one. Hopefully we'll have some sci-fi tech until then.
I was hoping for an Apple TV that can do AV1 decoding.
Let me know when I can replace the battery. Of course that’ll ruin the current business model because it’ll be even more apparent how rarely we’ll need to upgrade these things.
I have the largest version of the iPhone 16 and it isn't that big. When I first upgraded the size difference was very noticeable, but that faded pretty quickly. It is annoying that it fits into my front pocket when turned diagonally.
I get the thinness. My current iPhone is perfectly thin enough on its own, but when you add a case… yeah, the whole package could stand to be thinner. Not sure if that is achieved given the bump.
This announcement contains so many fake marketing words I can't help but read it in DJT's voice...
Add Tim Apple's present and yeah, cool tech, not interested.
That's the iPhone I was waiting for. I love mu iPhone 14 pro but despise its heft. My previous iPhone was iPhone 6s and when I see it in the drawer and take it in my hand I feel nostalgic for that age when the phone wasn't so in your face with the wight and the tick feel in my pocket.
The valid comparison is against the phone with the features I want. In my case ip14pro is a great phone but too thick and heavy and iPhone air has all the features I care but its thin and lightweight
The iphone air is not lightweight. It's only 11 grams lighter than the iphone 17, which is a superior phone to the iPhone 14 pro in every way, as far as I can tell.
Good luck taking any telephoto pictures with that iPhone 17. Or anything needing LIDAR.
Or doing any sustained gaming.
Or doing anything advanced with photography or video requiring RAW.
But admittedly the differences are smaller than they’ve ever been.
My iPhone 13 mini (5.4" display) is 141g and it's immediately noticeable how much lighter it feels than a pro phone. I can imagine the effect being more exaggerated given the larger but thin profile of the 17.
I don't need a thinner phone. I need a phone that can use a physical SIM card, has a physical keyboard (something like the N900), and a 3.5mm headphone jack... I'll just skip on that overpriced piece of junk.
The first thing I do after opening this page (or any other phone announcement) on Hacker News is press cmd+f and search for "headphone". Turns out not many people care about this anymore.
> Dual Capture is a new feature that combines the front and rear cameras, so users can record themselves while at a concert or get their reaction to a game’s big play.
I think the Air makes a lot more sense through the lens of a foldable iPhone.
Even for Apple, there are a significant amount of challenges in building a best-in-class foldable. Supply chain, manufacturing, hardware design, software. Apple is well known for planning ahead; breaking down problems by tackling some in an Air model first seems in line with how they operate.
The price difference really drives this home. It’s only $100 difference between a Pro and an Air. By the time you buy the perhaps-essential battery pack it’s the same price.
I don’t expect this model to continue more than a year or two, it’s a niche option only there to set the stage for a foldable that will take its place.
i have been waiting for an updated iphone SE and with this event i am officially giving up. there is no phone that is simple, functional, reliable and not overpriced. apple is the company that is supposed to make it but i guess they have moved on to other strategies. instead they focus on making hideous bulges and UI that would make steve jobs’ head explode. im fed up with it
It really does feel like there is a long term strategy with miniaturization and functional integration.
The power of a MacBook Pro in the bump of a phone, the rest is just battery, screen, antennas and heat dissipation. What other form factors are they working towards?
Software is eating hardware. I mean, who needs a phone or a laptop if they can be virtualized from a headset? Maybe the phone in the pocket becomes just a folding keyboard + battery combo.
Who needs compute in their headset when their phone already has enough to drive it?
One of my long term personal projects is a "post-laptop" portable computer combining a keyboard with an ARM computer module. The assumption being you could do without a screen and just use headset display like the xreal
Design-wise it's iPhone 4 for me. It still feels great to hold. I wish the Pro models went back to this all-flat design, and let the other models worry about thinness.
I love the new colors, especially Sky Blue but why do I need my phone to be wafer thin? It's an engineering marvel, and I'm definitely not complaining, but it just seems odd to make every part of the phone except the top part where the camera resides as thin as possible.
I would have gladly taken uniform thickness and a bigger battery or better transceivers any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Call me a Philistine, but all I really want out of my phone is its ability as a communications device (voice, video, email, SMS, etc) and a GPS. I spend so much time in front of a computer, that by the end of the day I want to unplug myself and touch grass.
Either way, big respect to some former undergrad classmates of mine at Apple who may have played a role in this. This new generation of Apple devices is bringing back color and personality, and I'm all for it. Same for ever-improving FaceTime cameras. The camera on the front is more important to me than the one on the back.
IF ONLY MY PHONE WERE THINNER, I SCREAM INTO THE VOID.
Ok, to not be totally glib, I think my reaction to this is coming from a place where, if I made a big list of every single thing I want in a phone, "thinner" would be at the bottom.
I want more freedom to do what I want with my phone, primarily to stop it from spying on my activity to give information to advertisers. I would get a phone twice as thick as my current phone if I could just use it to tell advertisers and information brokers and monopolies to f-OFF with it. I do not care about this and I hate that thousands of man hours and millions of dollars are going into this shit.
Well, a thick phone with a thick case is very thick while a thin phone with a thick case is only somewhat thick and a thin phone with a think case is only barely thick.
There's a small potential for enthusiasts to potentially make an aftermarket shell that sits flush and uses the space for an additional battery. Won't be cost-effective nor mass market but people have done crazier things (like add USB-C support to Lightning phones) before.
Phones are the main computing device for young people and hosted LLMs are eating the world right now. Not everyone will find a problem with this, but I am hoping for practical local LLMs sooner than later, and for maximum impact, they should also be able to run on phones. This amount of computing power in a phone is what could help make that happen.
This might be an unpopular opinion but does anyone else think that phones are now targeted towards teenagers and young adults and not the general crowd anymore ? I feel Apple has completely made their phones a social tool and not a technology innovation product. Camera, colors and the ability to distinguish your phone from others in selfies (another social feature) and in public is what it seems to be about. Gaming on the phone is another aspect. The phones look different each year (on purpose) and they are increasingly targeted towards young adults who can spend 1000$ of their savings all year towards just looking cool on social media with better pictures and a social profile. I noticed this transition around iPhone X era where design language lost meaning as long as they could compete in the social media world. I feel Instagram and TikTok should thank apple for becoming more social.
I really like the 15 camera I have and feels really good for a casual photo person. I feel that the 16e is more than enough for 99% of those not into social media. Like the phone without social media is just keeping in touch with close friends and family and occasionally taking pictures and making payments. And once in a while a few apps that help you track something like maps or health apps.
The 16e feels like a really enough phone if you don't want to get into the rat race.
My old 13 pro is quite thin and uncomfortable to hold in hand without a case. Why would someone push so hard for a thinner phone? Boosting about extra battery if SIM slot is removed, while doing insane over-engineering to shave a few millimeters is quite a tell.
I know Apple is super successful and will have another great set of quarters, but this is quite disappointing.
I have the 13 pro. I personally find it quite heavy (quite a thwack when you drop it) or just tension when you wear shorts for example. That said, I have zero interest in this phone.
> Why would someone push so hard for a thinner phone?
They have to "inovate" somewhere. The suckers won't pay hundreds of dollars for the same crap over and over again. They tried to "inovate" the GUI, it was a disaster. Now they turned to HW.
If this thinnest iphone air has 27 hours of video playback, why does the regular iphone 17, which looks twice as thick only has 30 hours? At this point, I just want long battery life. Like an "all-week" battery life would be a nice start.
when will apple make an iphone for adults? adults who need good battery life and have better things to do than take pictures for social media. a good UI wouldnt hurt either
Once you start rocking case accessories, profile of phones can definitely get thinner, i.e. phone loops, those suction cups. I'm fine with going thinner with the trend and I think we're going to get some pretty slick phone cases/accessories that makes actual thinner flusher carrying profile.
At the end of the day, I want future phones to be a A4 piece of paper that I can fold up like ... a piece of paper. If it means dumping stupid billions to shave sub millimeters of generations... then I guess that's the price to pay.
Here’s an actual hot take compared to the sentiment in this discussion: this will be the best selling iPhone ever.
Specs wise sure, I’d also love a bigger battery than it being thin*. But the iPhone has been an unbelievable fashion statement, and this insanely sexy iPhone will be the strongest yet.
I’m pretty sure when it comes out, people will actually hold it in their hands and the sentiment will turn. Not talking to you tech nerds, but for the other 99% of the world.
I remember this take when the iPhone X came out, which incidentally also felt like the first year (here in the US) where Apple was truly detested, publicly. Instagram and Twitter were chock-full of memes like "999x Kinder Chocolate or 1x iPhone X?" and the notch/design overhaul met a pretty lukewarm reception. The agony of yearly upgrades really set in, then.
It's not impossible for this to take off, but I won't hold my breath. It's a small gamble that could go either way.
Pretty excited about this one. The amount of tech went into this is obviously insane. Happy to see the company is still the driver of innovation. I bet we'll see more slim phones coming up next months from other vendors.
Long time apple fanboy. I've watched most of these unveilings for the past 20 years. The new phones are impressive. But it was all speeds and feeds. The examples felt so wrong. The women dancing while on the phone. The guy running with while recording. The person needing translation to buy roses? None of those feel grounded in reality. It's like they are building tech for made up in corporate conference room use cases.
Live translation u/i feels like a significant upgrade for that specific product, especially if you are in a dense area with different types of speakers. It feels like a way better MVP than Meta Glasses that are only meant to do troll videos on tiktok or youtube. The examples they trotted out feel ridiculous but that's because they have been approved by their internal systems.
Impossible to oversee. Everyone presenting was so old. It's like they were imagining what was hip and cool. Lets have a women doing salsa facetiming... who would she even be talking to in that scenario??
> It's like they are building tech for made up in corporate conference room use cases.
Totally felt the same during the live-translation demo, when these two casual business folks were talking about "the client will love the new strategy". Dystopian corporate gibberish.
The lack of authentic examples diminishes the impressive tech. Great design is all about function. Why is it so hard to show how this would actually be used in the real world?
By purchasing a new iPhone you are directly contributing to the humanitarian crisis in the Congo. A thin phone won’t change your life but it might be responsible for a life being lost.
What's so great about this? A phone with a weird shape due to the camera? Yahoo, yay so light /sarcasm. Who cares? $1000 for another shiny object thats thin, that has "ALL DAY" battery? Like every other iPhone or phone on the market?
It's not innovative -- innovative would be an "ALL WEEK" solution. This is worth looking at: https://youtu.be/WEmZpHXwu5k
Really?! It’s 2025 and this is what they saw as important. We need repairable tech not this peanut butter and jelly nonsense that’ll be in the trash heap literal months from now. Feels like we’re back to the old Performa, Centris and Quadra era of rolling our more and more barely differentiated products u til folks loose track of what to buy. Have you been in an Apple Store recently, it’s starting to feel pretty cluttered.
Another data point, Googles own phone ad right now is literally along the lines of ‘feel like your existing phone never changes’, clearly a dig at Apple’s product atrophy.
The problem is that these people are very loud on the internet but sales for small phones are abysmal.
The laptop class (myself included) just don't understand. A huge portion of the world only has 1 computer and it's their phone. They rely on it for work, entertainment, and connectivity. They don't have a laptop where they can do all these things on whenever they want. Their phone is it. They want a big screen phone. It's no surprise that every time Apple made the screen bigger, it sold better.
I loved my 13 Mini but I understand why Apple has given up on it. It was a very good effort. They tried. Didn't sell. Maybe a foldable can solve this problem for both sides.
They didn't put the good cameras in the Minis so it wasn't really a good experiment. I don't want a cheaper phone, just a smaller one. The improved camera is the only reason I upgraded past the 1st gen SE.
They also made the displays have some weird scaling factor that caused an annoying bloom in dark mode. Took me a while to realize why it felt off, even though the form factor was right up my alley.
Most likely, the market for a small phone from a mainstream manufacturer is more than strong enough to sustain itself and even be profitable. The real culprit here is that there’s been a shift in the industry — it’s not enough for products to “just” make a profit, they now have to also be smash hits and money printers. Niche audiences may as well not exist, no matter how dedicated they may be, everything must target the masses.
I think Apple discontinued the Mini line because it's a bit like new software features makes the code harder to maintain over time. Every time Apple introduces a new generation of iPhones, they'd have to figure out how to make the upgrades fit in a much smaller chassis.
The limiting factor for that is currently the more recent iPhone SE 3 (2022), so that argument isn't convincing. Regarding screen size, the Display Zoom resolution of the Pro Max is the same as the iPhone mini resolution, and the Display Zoom resolution of the Pro is the same as the Display Zoom resolution of the mini [0], so dropping the mini didn't actually remove any supported resolution. What's true is that the hardware design and layout is more constrained for the mini size, mostly regarding battery capacity, but I don't really see a limitation for the software. Even regarding battery capacity, the 16e has really great battery life, so a mini using similar tech should still be acceptable.
I would expect the opposite, given continued miniaturazation, consolidation of functions into the SoC, and battery energy density improvements. The same advances that allow the iPhone Air to exist would also be helpful for a Mini model.
Chips are getting bigger physically because of the end of Moore's law. More power hungry too which means a better cooling system. Bigger camera sensors. Bigger battery. All these things rely on being physically larger.
Apple is long past a minimal phone lineup. It's not a question of offering just grey or white as the only choices. I'm stuck with an ancient iphone and would upgrade if a pocket-sized one happened. Hasn't happened.
exactly. the only reason the 13 mini even existed at all is because it was too late to cancel the model entirely when the absolutely abysmal sales numbers for the 12 mini finally rolled in. my partner absolutely loves her 13 mini, but agreed its a very vocal minority
> A huge portion of the world only has 1 computer and it's their phone.
If those people wish to use phones for something they're not suited for, that's their business. But companies can, and should, have more than one product for different use cases. Nobody says "well only 5% of the market wears this size clothes so you better get used to going naked", instead manufacturers make all different sizes so as to capture more profits. I don't even particularly care if the smaller phone costs more because it's not as much in demand (so, less economy of scale). The problem is that nobody makes one at all, so I can't get what I want at any price whatsoever.
I wonder if there isn't a market for budget Androids in this range. Personally I have an Oppo Asomething that was around $50. I'd pay more for a smaller version which would probably have slightly better performance.
> A huge portion of the world only has 1 computer and it's their phone.
This is something that really surprised me to realise a couple of years ago - that unless they work in tech, most households (I don't know if most isn't an exaggeration, but a large proportion) don't have a laptop or desktop between them now.
> I wonder if there isn't a market for budget Androids in this range.
I think there is: https://smallandroidphone.com/ This was started up by the people behind Pebble (including its re-launch this year). I actually emailed them a while back asking for a status update. They told me there are literally no high quality screens of an appropriate size available to OEMs. They would have to design & spin up their own display hardware, which is where things change from "expensive" to "infeasible." If there was an existing, high quality 4.5~5" screen, I think it'd be an easy slam dunk. But there apparently is not...
Too bad. I just hold out hope Apple will try the Mini again before my 13 dies.
> This is something that really surprised me to realise a couple of years ago - that unless they work in tech, most households (I don't know if most isn't an exaggeration, but a large proportion) don't have a laptop or desktop between them now.
This is noticeable when you interact with consumer software where the mobile app is clearly the preferred or only way to perform some action.
> that unless they work in tech, most households (I don't know if most isn't an exaggeration, but a large proportion) don't have a laptop or desktop between them now.
They have been told since 10 years that phones are "computers" [1]. Some even believe this.
[1] from this point of view, a washing machine or a fridge are also "computers".
This is something that really surprised me to realise a couple of years ago - that unless they work in tech, most households (I don't know if most isn't an exaggeration, but a large proportion) don't have a laptop or desktop between them now.
There was a joke I saw recently where Millenials have to teach Gen Z employees how to use a computer like they do for a boomer. Gen Z people, especially the younger ones, do everything on their phones or tablets. They don't know how to use a computer like Windows or a Mac.
Also, I've been in poorer countries where the vast majority of the population rely on their phones to work. My real estate agent only used her phone for work including marketing herself, talking to clients on chat apps, and even doing the lease contract. Their phone is literally how they make a living.
Personally the lifespan of my phone is much shorter when I can't easily hold it and type on it with the same hand. Inevitably I end up dropping it trying to do that anyway.
So I really don't understand people who would choose a larger phone, over a smaller one and then save the money they would have spent replacing it (plus the money they would have paid extra because larger is more expensive) to buy a cheap laptop or something
As an oldtimer (Gen-X), I can't even with that mode of use. My thumb (is that what you use?) cramps up when trying to do that even a little.. I guess 30+ years of typing will do that.. The best I've done one-handed is type in my pin and launch an app and click an icon or two.
As it is, I hold my S21 with left hand, type with index finger of right - it's abysmal in terms of performance, but it's all I got.. landscape with both thumbs is usually worse because of such little lookahead / lookbehind - I can barely read the line I'm typing on - and fat thumbs. My kids do it all the time, but, well, their little girlish fingers (they are female) seem to manage it and they're quite quick at it.
My favorite phone (at least in terms of idea, execution wasn't perfect) was the Motorola Photon Q - full-size with slide-out keyboard. At least I could somewhat type quickly even if the keyboard wasn't great. Alas, 2012..
With a newish phone? I can probably type 10-20x as fast on my MS Natural keyboard (only one I can use for more than 30-40 minutes without RSI getting bad).. No wonder I don't "live on my phone" - I use it when necessary, and prefer my 40"+ 4K screen + real keyboard.
They want a bigger screen because they don't have a laptop.
> save the money they would have spent replacing it (plus the money they would have paid extra because larger is more expensive) to buy a cheap laptop or something
The kind of people who want an iPhone are not going to settle for a Cheap Laptop. A MacBook Air can only really be had new for around $800 nowadays and those big iPhones are only like $599 right now (if iPhone 16e).
I buy larger phones, and I don't drop them...so no money saved/lost there.
I have big hands, and can use my 16 Pro Max one handed no problem with minimal shifting of the device in my hands. I've never dropped it during one handed use on the go either.
Smaller devices are almost impossible for me to type on/be precise with touches because of this.
It is a lot like demand for spacious pockets in fashionable clothing. People largely think you can get that with no tradeoff on anything regarding the clothes. And, you just can't.
So, for phones, people say they want a small one to fit in your pocket. With, fair. But that generally means a smaller screen when you are using it. Which people don't really want.
Foldables help a ton with this. And I think that will ultimately pan out. People are understandably worried about being early on that train, though.
Foldables are weird at the moment, they are bulky and the aspect ratio (because it's a square) means that the viewable screen is often comparable to the S24 for example.
Even casual pants. I never realized before I got a pair of pants from a gf who couldn't wear them anymore. Zipper for the left hand (wtf) and TINY pockets. These were medium fit black corduroy pants, they had the space!
This comment section is making me realize the gulf between the average dev and the average consumer (again)
This is the first iPhone is 5+ years that is will be hard to ignore for the massive base of users who'd given up on yearly upgrades.
I came here expecting to see that reflected (and see how others feel about the camera trade-off) but it's mostly repetitive comments asking who wants a thinner phone (ignoring it's almost 40% lighter than the most of the Pro Max devices out there)
Air: 6.5in, 165gm
Pro 17: 6.9in, 233gm
My current Pro Max 15: 6.7in, 221gm
Coming from the PM15, I give up 0.2in, but it weighs 56gm less. I do 95%+ of my reading on my phone - articles, books, everything. But I find the PM15 screen juuuuust slightly too large to be comfortable in the hand, and the normal Pro screen much too small for lots of reading. And I’ve been noticing early signs of RSI.
These dimensions are the goldilocks combination I’ve been waiting for.
This seems to be true for almost every product update. Everyone hates everything. It's true when a new gen of a car comes out - "I guess I'm keeping my <last gen> model forever." or user interfaces or seemingly anything else. People hate change and predict the massive failure of every product revision. Flash forward six months and everyone has forgotten about these rants and likely owns the new version. Now, someone will come along and say "well, I personally" - Apple/Toyota/whoever doesn't care about "you personally", they care about everyone else who is going to buy the product. I'm not saying this is good or bad, it just is.
I'll be honest when I first saw the post I was intrigued, I thought it looked beautiful. Then I saw the size of the camera, the eSim only trade off, the boast about "all day battery" and slowly but surely started to realise that the things I care about in a phone are not those that would be hidden by a case. If they made the thinnest ever fold, then maybe.
The Pro Max was the best-selling model of the last couple of generations, then the Pro, the the base. I agree with you, and I bet the Air will not be in 4th place like the Plus and Mini models.
I built up a bit of a stash before they discontinued them for good. Hopefully the (sealed and unused) batteries don't degrade too much while in storage so I can have enough spares to last me until software support is discontinued. It's like the modern equivalent of a wine reserve.
"all the people" do not exist. Apple is obviously good for building small devices. They have built multiple of them, explicitly, against the direction the market was going.
If "all the people" wanted these phones, they would still exist.
They nailed it. Big horizontal dimensions so it’s hard to hold in one hand (yes, I realize that many users want this, but many users don’t want this), a big thick camera so it doesn’t actually fit well in slim pockets (but lots of young people seem to like their phone sticking out of their pocket?!), and super thin everywhere else so a high capacity battery doesn’t fit. Nice job!
Seriously, Apple has not attempted a narrow high-end phone since the iPhone 5. The 12 and 13 minis were not positioned as premium phones and they did not have great cameras or battery life. If Apple had tried for a 13 Pro Mini and it didn’t sell, then maybe I’d believe that their market statistics were worth something.
At this point I am like “fuck (perception of) privacy!”. I will just buy the 9a, or Pixel 10a if one releases by the time I switch from my (already large) iPhone 14. At least I won’t have to deal with the never ending shenanigans, the crazy prices, and the very real possibility that if there’s a damage it might be cheaper to buy a new one (in warranty).
I think that could be the killer feature of this use that space for thin batteries maybe only 2500mah. i can carry 3-4 in my bag and have as much battery life as i care to carry around. and rather than push the charging to 30+ watts that turns my phone into a hotplate can recharge 3 batteries at once at 10w in same time. Bonus to apple on accessories sales
Problem is that magsafe means wireless charging which is highly unefficient. It's not that big of a deal for stationary applications, but for attaching a spare battery (which is itself limited by its capacity) you are probably wasting 30% of it on the overhead of the wireless power transfer.
Small phones don't sell well. The numbers prove this. Most people want to doom scroll or consume video content on their phones and it is better to do that when the screen is bigger.
Once again, stuff I don't care about. We would be 3x as impressed if it was 3x as wide and 3x battery life.
TouchID is also still sorely missed, and I will die on that hill. I'm on a 2022 SE hoping they change their mind one day. FaceID is a repellent experience.
Now take all of that manufacturing brilliance and, keeping the volume the same, turn it into a small thick phone which will fit in my pocket and hand. Won't need a camera bump
This is becoming comical. iPhone Air only supports USB 2 speeds. Seriously?
Also iPhone Pro only comes with USB 3 speeds while amplifying ProRes RAW support...
I don't think I have ever plugged in my phone, like at all, ever, and it's not even an iPhone. And if I want to get any photos/videos I made with it, they are just in Google photos?
Like I get there are some people who maybe use the thing as an actual camera and they suddenly need to download tens if not hundreds of gigabytes of media off the phone but like.....I guess it's just not the phone for them? And like you said the Pro supports USB3 speeds so what's the issue? 5gbps is really not fast enough?
That is really wrong way of looking at things. USB 4 support doesn't require ANY innovation from Apple, any extra $$$ (maybe pennies) - it's pure representation that they lost focus and simply don't care. That port is CRITICAL for many things they actually focused on in the prerecorded ads we all watched today - video. All add-ons, storage are in 99% of cases directly connected to the phone via USB-C port. To not support the latest technology available but charge premium is really disappointing...
200mbps is still wishful thinking in a typical household with ISP-provided consumer-grade router/AP in a suboptimal location. At the very least it will slow everything else down while it takes ~11 hours at a sustained 200mbps to transfer 1TB.
Not sure that I expect the average hacker news commenters to stick with their ISP-provided router in a suboptimal location - you can pick up a wifi6 router for under $100, that will happily maintain gigabit speeds over a normal-sized house
I've been a PC guy my whole live, and was forced onto a MacBook Pro this year for work.
The battery life is insane. The idea of charging my laptop has become this weird ritual now, only known of in lore and legend, that I partake of only when there is a blood moon.
Meanwhile my 2019 i9 16" MacBook Pro gets battery life on par with the MacBook Wheel (as seen in this classic from The Onion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA) I kid you not, the hummingbird battery is real.
At least I have something to look forward to when I upgrade.
The battery life while in use is amazing. The battery life while closed and apparently asleep is abysmal and probably the worst of any laptop I’ve used in the last 20 years.
I think the problem is that Safari allows tabs to ask to be periodically woken while the laptop is asleep, and there is no obvious way to turn this off. And it will keep doing this until the battery is so low that the laptop needs to hibernate.
Safari on Desktop is just appalling, every year you wish there are some improvements and it is the same. webkit gets some update in terms of web features and bug fix. Safari itself doesn't seems to want to improve. Even Orion using same webkit engine is better.
I read that. It contains no actual useful or authoritative explanation. It references Apple docs that sort of say that it's not supported on Apple Silicon. The man page says:
> powernap - enable/disable Power Nap on supported machines (value = 0/1)
I assume they're getting ready for a folding iPhone, so the thinness tech is being developed largely for that. They're releasing this thin iPhone to test the market and to make use of it in the meantime.
hear me out: they make a slim phone, just to develop the supply chain around a foldable display to finally release a folding phone that is a sandwich of the air!
Alright, buckle up — here’s a *Curb Your Enthusiasm scene* where Larry takes the iPhone Air press release way too personally at the Apple Store.
---
### Scene: Apple Store, Santa Monica
*Larry* walks in, holding his old iPhone with a cracked screen. He approaches a blue-shirted *Apple Genius*.
*Larry:*
So I hear you got this new iPhone Air. Thinnest phone ever, huh? Five-point-six millimeters. What is this, a phone or a Wheat Thin?
*Genius:*
It’s our most advanced design yet. Stronger, lighter—
*Larry:*
Stronger? If it’s so strong, why is it thinner than a Ritz cracker? You ever eaten a Ritz cracker? Crumbles right in your hand! That’s what I’m gonna be holding here. Crumbs! Phone crumbs in my pocket!
*Larry:*
Oh! Aerospace. Yeah, good. Because when I’m playing Sudoku on the toilet, I really want NASA technology under my thumbs. Very important. “Houston, I got a number two problem.”
*Genius:*
The new 48-megapixel Fusion camera—
*Larry:*
Fusion? What am I, splitting atoms now? I just want to take a picture of a sandwich. I don’t need the Manhattan Project in my pocket. And the front camera’s square? Square! Cameras are round, wheels are round, even faces are round. You make it square, now I look like SpongeBob in every selfie.
*Genius:*
Well, the square sensor lets you take landscape photos while holding your phone vertically.
*Larry:*
Vertically? Vertically?! Oh, thank you, Apple, you’ve saved me from rotating my wrist. What a terrible burden it’s been. Centuries of humanity struggling, and finally Apple says, “Don’t move your wrist, Larry, we’ll do it for you.” Unbelievable.
*Genius:*
It also has all-day battery life.
*Larry:*
All-day? What’s “all day”? My day? Your day? A raccoon’s day? Be specific! At 11:58 p.m. the phone dies and you go, “Oh, sorry Larry, guess your day’s over!” I still got two episodes of Columbo left, pal!
*Genius:*
It’s also eSIM only.
*Larry:*
Oh, fantastic. No physical SIM. So if I lose signal, I can’t even take it out, blow on it, do the old Nintendo trick. I just stare at my \$1,000 “air” sandwich and pray. That’s the feature? Praying?
*Genius:*
It starts at \$999—
*Larry:*
Nine-ninety-nine! For a phone that could slip between two couch cushions and vanish forever. You should sell it with a metal detector. “Find your iPhone Air before it suffocates under the ottoman!”
(Larry storms out, muttering.)
*Larry:*
Thin phone, thick price. What a world.
---
Want me to *write another one where Larry’s actually at the launch keynote*, interrupting Tim Cook from the audience like a heckler?
As part of our efforts to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, iPhone Air does not include a power adapter or EarPods. Included in the box is a USB‑C Charge Cable that supports fast charging and is compatible with USB‑C power adapters and computer ports.
I was seriously thinking of buying it for a minute till I remembered how much they just exude smugness. I like apple hardware but the company absolutely disgusts me.
My experience is "air" in an Apple product's name means battery life is measured in tens of minutes and the fan makes a horrible racket because the CPU is underpowered and intended for only short suprts of activity. That's fine for a laptop because you can keep it plugged in and use your other computer to do tasks that require CPU, but not appropriate for a mobile phone that you may want to operate untethered for hours at a time.
I'm sure Apple's official word on this is battery life is sufficient for more than a couple of hours of untethered stand-by. I'm just questioning the wisdom of the naming convention. They trained their user community to understand that "air" means low-CPU power / low battery life / thinner package. Are there enough potential customers who will prioritize thin form factor over usability?
Nevermind. I just answered my own question.
[Edit: I understand the Apple fanbois will want to down-vote this, but look at the second sentence of the second paragraph. I am not saying the iPhone Air will be bad. I am saying that the "Air" name has, in the past, been applied to some pretty sub-standard products. I am asking if it's wise to apply a name that has been used for lower-end products to new products that aren't "lower end."]
It's been long enough that this doesn't seem true anymore. The current Macbook Air is fanless, and has around 18 hours of battery life with an 8-core M4.
Did you read my comment? I did not say the iPhone Air has 2 hours of battery life. I said previous apple products that had the "Air" name were "less capable." I was wondering aloud why a company would apply this sobriquet to a new product, regardless of it's capabilities.
Ah, fair enough! I read this as saying almost exactly that, but yeah, I get what you mean.
> but not appropriate for a mobile phone that you may want to operate untethered for hours at a time.
I do think this shifted a little when the first M1 Air came out. Anecdotally, many now associate it with being more than capable unless you’re an actual professional.
Eh the new bumpers and clear cases look interesting (but the white MagSafe pattern is just stupid — should just leave it off). I'll probably get an Air and one of these cases, or a thin third party case.
Imagine putting the phone on the table and seeing it rocking side to side when you press it, the nightmare. Somebody needs to change this stupid trend urgently, we don't need thinner phones.
What I would like is an iphone for like $200 with a stable set of features that I don't have to buy off the used market. I don't care if it's 2 generations behind, because these new phones don't offer anything I care about.
As far as I can tell from the announcement, they're focusing on content creators. Since I don't stream and am not an Instagrammer, it's irrelevant to me. Selling me one of these cameras is just a waste. I don't even know how to make the phone use the second (or third) camera.
This with the glass ui thing feels like now they're doing "innovation" for the sake of "innovation". But as someone said on the other thread about this thing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45185576), at this point they could just make a cardboard phone, wrap it with some fancy words and would sell it like crazy.
I see many comments screaming "WE NEED MORE BATTERY LIFE!"
I'm curious who needs more battery life than the iPhone air will provide? Every single person I know of commutes to and from work daily either in a car where they can charge their phone or to a desk that has a charger (wired or wireless).
The iPhone Air is rated for 27 hours of videoplayback. Let's say it works for a QUARTER of that, its still 7 hours of playback.
What kind of people are away from a charger for more than 7 hours who also only consume content for those 7 hours on a regular basis?
What kind of individuals are these? Please explain
I am not using a car, I do not commute, I do not go to an office.
I usually spend my days outside, roaming the city, sitting in parks and cafes. I have a 13mini and started to carry a lightweight power bank in my backpack because it tends to run empty before I get back home, which is a problem with electronic ticket for public transport.
A lot of people will also simply prefer the convenience of not having to plug their phone in more often than necessary. They have it in their backpack or purse, which makes it extra inconvenient to think of taking it out just to charge plus needing a cable and charger in multiple places, compared to the evenings when you may remove multiple items from it.
Proximity to a charger isn’t the answer. I’m home all day, but I still don’t want to be monitoring battery life all day or tied to chargers. I only want to change while I sleep.
I have a 16 Pro and every so often something runs in the background that destroys my battery in half a day. I still don’t know what it is. The settings don’t make it clear.
I haven’t complained about the battery life on the Air, but I’d rather have a bigger battery to the point of eliminating the camera bump, than having a marginally thinner phone that shoves everything in a bigger relative bump.
Something running in the background is a software issue. Trying to solve that by throwing more hardware is the most expensive least efficient way to solve your problem
Upgrading to a bigger battery won’t solve whatever is draining your battery
While that is all true, it does give more time to realize what is going on, so I can address the issue, without leaving me in a bad spot.
On days with normal battery usage, how is having more battery life ever a negative? Long travel days, which may also have heavy map usage, leave users outside of normal patterns and often with unpredictable access to charging. Having a long battery life would ease stress around those days and be preferable to carrying a battery bank.
Those days are not the norm. So having a heavier phone 90% of the time so that 10% of the time can be less stressful is not efficient. Just attach a magsafe battery pack those days and you have full day battery life.
How many people hike longer than their battery lasts?
Isn’t the phone not being used when hiking?
Are they live streaming the hike that they need such insane battery life?
I hike and bike ride with my kids very often. Other than the odd picture and video I have my phone in my pocket during those hikes. The battery barely drains
My iPhone mini lasts about 6 hours. If I hike in the cold it lasts maybe 2.5 hours tops, and hikes are usually 4-6 hours total, so it's usually dead by the time I'm done, and so I can't tap to ride the train home unless I bring a power bank.
If I have a long train ride, like 2 hours, and I read on it, it'll usually use about 50% of the battery in that duration.
If I go somewhere new, and use google maps a lot to navigate around, it'll last about 3 hours total.
If I go somewhere with bad cellular signal, it constantly fights to connect and drains incredibly quickly, often in a matter of 2 hours.
The Air looks like it's supposed to have a battery that's about 30% larger than the mini's, and the mini is wildly insufficient for regular use.
That seems extraordinarily poor battery performance. FWIW, I often go on hikes that take a similar 4-6h time. Granted, I get to charge it on the drive over so I usually start the hike with 100%.
We'll use my phone to take photos and videos on the hike. Never ran into battery issues. And it's Canada, so hikes are in cold-ish temperatures.
Being far from a cell tower would also place a lot of stress on the battery, so hiking by itself is probably more draining than you'd expect
TheDong, can you test if putting it on air plane mode makes any difference? Maybe you're on the edge of multiple cell towers and your phone is trying to connect/disconnect too aggresively?
People go on hikes in areas where there are multiple days between charging opportunities.
Hiking often also occurs in areas with bad or no coverage causing higher battery consumption with the phone trying to connect. If you don't mitigate this (with eg. turning off or enabling airplane mode) this will burn through battery much faster than the usual city dwelling.
A very tiny percentage of the population does that. Apple is not going to make the form factor of a device that sells ~100,000,000 units in 90 days to accommodate the 0.01% of people who take multiple day hikes.
Like this guy who burnt down a forest when this exact thing happened (while he should have prepared better, don't burn down forests if you find yourself in this situation, it is inexcusable)
Replied to the other comment - but I poorly read your message that I responded to. You're absolutely right that this wouldn't be a normal / routine use-case.
I already carry a power bank with me when I know I will stay long away from home. So in some way, one does not need to pay apple for that. I also know people who carry some monster phones with them with huge batteries that last for several days, but I would rather carry a power bank than forcing the extra weight in my pocket.
Also, with android you have more options to optimise for battery life (eg low refresh rate and resolution) that are great if this is what you want to optimise (and did this for some time), but apple would never sell an iphone like that, and also ime these are becoming rarer in the android market too. If the sole alternative is just bigger batteries, I would rather not have this bigger battery attached to the phone all the time even if this is suboptimal for some other reasons.
In a hike you probably want to use your phone to look up the map/gps location, take photos etc. Ime iphones are struggling with this use case a bit without a power bank. Putting them in low power and airplane mode, while using a lightweight app for navigation with downloaded maps helps a lot, though it is still not gonna take you as far as other phones with larger battery life. I would never go for a hike where I know I need my iphone without a power bank with me. But not doing these and using google maps to navigate will not take you very far into the hike at all.
It has A19 Pro. A19 Pro has matmul acceleration in its GPU, the equivalent of Nvidia's Tensor cores. This would make future Macs extremely viable for local LLMs. Currently, Macs have high memory bandwidth and high VRAM capacity but low prompt processing speeds. Give it a large context and it'll take forever before the first token is generated.
If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us.
That's the most exciting thing from this Apple's event in my opinion.
PS. I also like the idea of the ultra thin iPhone Air, the 2x better noise cancellation and live translation of Airpods 3, high blood pressure detection of the new Watch, and the bold sexy orange color of the iPhone 17 Pro. Overall, this is as good as it gets for incremental updates in Apple's ecosystem in a while.
> bold sexy orange color
Luckily they added the blood pressure check for when you get too excited about the color orange.
It is almost strange, since iPhones were only available in ugly drab colors for several generations. And the Pro models in particular were previously never available in a decent color.
99% of people uses a case for the phone so the color doesn’t change anything
If this was true wouldn't there be a market for a ruggedized version that has the toughness of a case, from the factory as shipped? Its a little silly for Apply to shave every possible half-millimeter from the design and then have 99% of people add back the thickness plus a lot of extra by adding a case. Why not have a factory-ruggedized version which isn't as thick as adding that case but is just as rugged?
Considering the price and re-sale value of iphones I would add a case even if they ruggedized it.
My current (Android) phone is from 2020 and I have bought three cases for it because the previous ones got wear and tear. The phone inside still looks brand new.
But yeah, the trend of ultra-thin phones is silly.
That open a new business for them to sell $60 cases that are worth $2 of materials and have a great panel to match people’s taste which is even more appealing to buy
If you like the color, you can use a transparent case.
I bought a blue iPhone 16 last year at this time; I've never used a case. More people are going case-less these days.
Transparent cases are a thing dontchaknow!
Ask workers of cell phone stores and you’ll find that figure is way off. Not everyone wants a case. Having a case significantly changes the feeling of the device in hand.
As someone who does not use a case, I almost never see anyone else without one. To the point that when I do, I usually mistake their phone for mine.
The 15s and 16s both had titanium bodies which (as I recall at least) don't take on colour as well when they're anodized, so that could be the cause of drab colour ways.
edit: It was only the Pros and up which had titanium bodies. The 17s are all aluminum.
Anodizing titanium creates an oxide layer, the thickness of which varies with the voltage used. The thickness of that oxide layer determines which wavelengths of light it refracts [0]. In practical terms, your choices for color are pretty limited[1].
I'm not a chemist, but I looked into this years back when I was wondering why everything titanium is offered in the same couple of colors. Personally, I like the plain gray.
[0] https://wisensemachining.com/titanium-anodizing-guide/
[1] https://www.snowpeak.com/collections/cups/products/ti-single...
Hey, cool! This is very interesting and explains a lot. Thanks for connecting more dots for me
> I looked into this years back when I was wondering why everything titanium is offered in the same couple of colors
I wondered the same thing, but never hit that threshold of urgency to actually look into it!
this is so cool! thanks for sharing! 18 pro rainbow phone anyone?
But even the non-Pro phones had mostly ugly colors in the last couple years. Maybe to match the ugliness of the Pro models?
A realization that I came to today is the fact that I’m still on my 12 because it’s (one of the?) last PRODUCT(RED) one.
The Sage Air has my eye. Would match my AirPods Max. But that orange pro is also calling.
I don't get why Apple doesn't do consistent colors. I loved the blue of my iPhone 12 Pro, but I can't even get that anymore... I would have upgraded a few generatiosn back if they had kept consistent colors.
The changed colors are the signal that you have the new one.
They're the signal I wont be buying it if it doesn't match the colors I've liked.
You don't have to buy a phone every generation and it's not really intended that you do.
but 250 000 000 other people will.
i'm def one of them
> I don't get why Apple doesn't do consistent colors
The materials used is a factor: the last few iPhones were built with aluminum (iPhone 16), titanium (iPhone 16 Pro) and stainless steel (iPhone 13 Pro).
Not all colors work with all materials; my understanding is titanium is particularly bad for bright colors. The colors for the iPhone Pro models have been pretty drab--not this year.
And i have no idea what color my phone was when i got it. It has been inside an otterbox case since the hour i first had it. For me, the color of a cellphone is about as relevent as the color of a motherboard. It will look cool for, at most, a few minutes before it is forever locked inside a case.
I have that one, I sometimes take the case off just to look at it.
But somehow the trademark silver is disappearing.
BondiBlue4lyfe
A19 supports MTE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186265
Which is a very powerful feature for anyone who likes security or finding bugs in their code. Or other people's code. Even if you didn't really want to find them.
MIE
MIE is a combination of enhanced MTE (EMTE) and some highly-overdue software allocator improvements.
It certainly took them a while to introduce MTE! Pixel 8 came out in 2023. I wonder how it compares against hardened_malloc with 48-bit address space and 33-bit ASLR in Graphene. Apple's security team has reported that MIE could break all "known" exploit chains, but so does hardened_malloc. Hard to tell right now which one is best (most def MIE) but everything else included in Graphene is probably making the point moot anyway.
Yes, but it is not MTE, they are technically different. That's what I was attempting to point out but thought it may have been a typo
If you compare the specs of the 10 and 11 series watches you will see they both claim high blood pressure detection.
https://www.apple.com/watch/compare/?modelList=watch-series-...
In the past few weeks the oxymeter feature was enabled by a firmware update on series 10. Measurements are done on the watch, results are only reported on a phone.
Good to know! The fine print:
As of September 9, 2025, hypertension notifications are currently under FDA review and expected to be cleared this month, with availability on Apple Watch Series 9 and later and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. The feature is not intended for use by people under 22 years old, those who have been previously diagnosed with hypertension, or pregnant persons.
> [hypertension notifications] is not intended for use by people [...] who have been previously diagnosed with hypertension
Sounds a bit ironic but I guess it's for legal reasons.
legal, and also: if you already have been diagnosed, you should already be under medical professional supervision (meds, checkups,…) anyway.
my guess is this is more like the heart irregularities feature: it’s for the first diagnosis. (a relative of mine actually got diagnosed that way)
I believe this is for the fringe cases where you have been diagnosed with hypertension, but your apple Watch does not tell you that you have hypertension risk, then you may decide to not take your drugs, since your watch told you all clear. This could trigger lawsuits if complications set in when you decide not to take your drugs because of "lack of alarm"
Then you get a new fringe case: you are not yet diagnosed with hypertension, but you are aware that your apple watch has that functionality so you decide you don't need to be diagnosed.
Going to be interesting comparing the series 10 blood pressure sensing against my Hilo (formerly Aktiia) band on the other wrist. Although without calibration against a cuff, I'm not super convinced the Apple Watch will give reliable information.
> the bold sexy orange color of the iPhone 17 Pro
The color line up reminds me of the au MEDIA SKIN phones (Japanese carrier) circa 2007. Maybe it's because I had one back in the day, but I can't help but think they took some influence.
> MEDIA SKIN phones
Wow, thanks for sharing the name, these are really good! I don't know why I was surprised to realize that great designers have made fantastic products even in the past...
Some sites with images, for anyone curious: 1. https://www.dezeen.com/2007/01/17/tokujin-yoshioka-launches-... 2. https://spoon-tamago.com/best-of-2007-part-iv/
If you like these, check out the INFOBAR phones from a few years prior. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/cho... People like the multi-colored one, but I've always been partial to the green. I believe there's been a few newer homages to these over the years.
I've always been a bit confused about when to run models on the GPU vs the neural engine. The best I can tell, GPU is simpler to use as a developer especially when shipping a cross platform app. But an optimized neural engine model can run lower power.
With the addition of NPUs to the GPU, this story gets even more confusing...
In reality you don’t much of a choice. Most of the APIs Apple exposes for running neural nets don’t let you pick. Instead some Apple magic in one of their frameworks decides where it’s going to host your network. At least from what I’ve read, these frameworks will usually distribute your networks over all available matmul compute, starting on the neural net (assuming your specific network is compatible) and spilling onto the GPU as needed.
But there isn’t a trivial way to specifically target the neural engine.
You're right there is no way to specifically target the neural engine. You have to use it via CoreML which abstracts away the execution.
If you use Metal / GPU compute shaders it's going to run exclusively on GPU. Some inference libraries like TensorFlow/LiteRT with backend = .gpu use this.
Exactly. And most folks are using a framework like llama.cpp which does control where it’s run.
Hoping this budget macbook rumour based on A19/A19 Pro is real.
Isn’t the MacBook Air already pretty cheap at $999?
$998, $997, etc.
A couple more examples would have been nice; it took a while to understand your point.
Made my day lol thanks
Competing at high end budget PC laptop will increase market share, but more importantly it’d be an easy recommendation to make when people see a lower priced PC laptop. Rumours were $699.
Sure but the one he's referring to is rumored to cost $599-$699.
Considering inflation $999 is cheaper.
Where did you see the matmul acceleration support? I couldn't find this detail online.
Apple calls it "Neural Accelerators". It's all over their A19 marketing.
What a ridiculous way to market "linear algebra transistor array".
Hey man, it helps you think different. You just never knew your neurons needed accelerating.
I accelerate them every morning with an Americano.
I have to ask out of curiosity, why is your first comment made with one account, and the reply with a similarly-named alt?
To confuse all those neural accelerators scraping this conversation.
That seems incredibly prescient for accounts created before even GPT-1. Obviously broad data scraping existed before then, but even amongst this crowd I find it hard to believe that’s the real motivator.
Account on laptop, account on mobile.
I really hope someone got fired for this blunder
Which means what, exactly, to someone whose not a machine learning researcher?
Don’t all of the M series chips contain neural cores?
Yes, they do. They're called Neural Engine, aka NPUs. They aren't being used for local LLMs on Macs because they are optimized for power efficiency running much smaller AI models.
Meanwhile, the GPU is powerful enough for LLMs but has been lacking matrix multiplication acceleration. This changes that.
The neural engine is used for the built-in LLM that does text summaries etc., just not third party LLMs.
And there's an official port of Stable Diffusion to it: https://github.com/apple/ml-stable-diffusion
I thought 1 of the reason we do ML on GPU is fast Matrix multiplication ?
So the new engine is accelerator for matmul accelerator ?
From a compute perspective, GPUs are mostly about fast vector arithmetic, with which you can implement decently fast matrix multiplication. But starting with NVIDIA's Volta architecture at the end of 2017, GPUs have been gaining dedicated hardware units for matrix multiplication. The main purpose of augmenting GPU architectures with matrix multiplication hardware is for machine learning. They aren't directly useful for 3D graphics rendering, but their inclusion in consumer GPUs has been justified by adding ML-based post-processing and upscaling like NVIDIA's various iterations of DLSS.
These are different these are built into the GPU Cores
Does this mean that equivalent logic for what has been called Neural Engine is now integrated into each CPU core?
Each GPU core, but yes, this was part of what they announced today - it’s now integral rather than separate.
I wish they would offer the 17 pro in some lighter colors (like the new sage green for the regular 17). Not everyone wants bold, and the color selection for pro is always so limited. They don't even have white with this generation, just silver.
The first SoC including Neural Engine was the A11 Bionic, used in iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X, introduced in 2017. Since then, every Apple A-series SoC has included a Neural Engine.
The Neural Engine is its own block. Neural Engine is not used for local LLMs on Macs. Neural Engine is optimized for power efficiency while running small models. It's not good for LARGE language models.
This change is strictly adding matmul acceleration into each GPU core where it is being used for LLMs.
The matmul stuff is part of the Neural Accelerator marketing, which is distinct from the Neural Engine you're talking about.
I don't blame you. It's confusing.
It's remaining and rearrangement of the same stuff. Not a new feature.
The NPU is still there. This adds matmul acceleration directly into each GPU core. It takes about ~10% more transistors to add these accelerators into the GPU so it's a significant investment for Apple.
1. It adds new features. Eg. see matmul and other to-be-detailed-soon features.
2. It moves some stuff from the external Neural Engine to the GPU, which substantially increases speeds for those workloads. That itself is a feature.
Will any of this really matter much to the average consumer at this point? Probably not. Not until Apple Intelligence gets off the ground.
Viable may be already here: demo of smollm3/3b <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44501413> on iphone with asr + tts: <https://x.com/adrgrondin/status/1965097304995889642>
Intrigued to explore with a19/m5 and test energy efficiency.
> If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us.
I don't think local LLMs will ever be a thing except for very specific use cases.
Servers will always have way more compute power than edge nodes. As server power increases, people will expect more and more of the LLMs and edge node compute will stay irrelevant since their relative power will stay the same.
LocalLLMs would be useful for low latency local language processing/home control, assuming they ever become fast enough where the 500ms to 1s network latency becomes a dominate factor in having a fluid conversation with a voice assistant. Right now the pauses are unbearable for anything but one way commands (Siri, do something! - 3 seconds later it starts doing the thing...that works but it wouldn't work if Siri needed to ask follow up questions). This is even more important if we consider low latency gaming situations.
Mobile applications are also relevant. An LLM in your car could be used for local intelligence. I'm pretty sure self driving cars use some about of local AI already (although obviously not LLM, and I don't really know how much of their processing is local vs done on a server somewhere).
If models stop advancing at a fast clip, hardware will eventually become fast and cheap enough that running models locally isn't something we think about as being a non-sensical luxury, in the same way that we don't think that rendering graphics locally is a luxury even though remote rendering is possible.
Network latency in most situations is not 500ms. The latency from New York California is under 70ms, and if you add in some transmission time you're still under 200ms. And that's ignoring that an NYC request will probably go only to VA (sub-15ms).
Even over LTE you're looking at under 120ms coast to coast.
You have to take any of those numbers and multiply them by two, since you have to go there and then back again.
No, those were round trip times already
> Servers will always have way more compute power than edge nodes
This doesn't seem right to me.
You take all the memory and CPU cycles of all the clients connected to a typical online service, compared to the memory and CPU in the datacenter serving it? The vast majority of compute involved in delivering that experience is on the client. And there's probably vast amounts of untapped compute available on that client - most websites only peg the client CPU by accident because they triggered an infinite loop in an ad bidding war; imagine what they could do if they actually used that compute power on purpose.
But even doing fairly trivial stuff, a typical browser tab is using hundreds of megs of memory and an appreciable percentage of the CPU of the machine it's loaded on, for the duration of the time it's being interacted with. Meanwhile, serving that content out to the browser took milliseconds, and was done at the same time as the server was handling thousands of other requests.
Edge compute scales with the amount of users who are using your service: each of them brings along their own hardware. Server compute has to scale at your expense.
Now, LLMs bring their special needs - large models that need to be loaded into vast fast memory... there are reasons to bring the compute to the model. But it's definitely not trivially the case that there's more compute in servers than clients.
The sum of all edge nodes exceed the power in the datacenter, but the peak power provided to you from the datacenter significantly exceed your edge node capabilities.
A single datacenter machine with state of the art GPUs serving LLM inference can be drawing in the tens of kilowatts, and you borrow a sizable portion for a moment when you run a prompt on the heavier models.
A phone that has to count individual watts, or a laptop that peaks on dual digit sustained draw, isn't remotely comparable, and the gap isn't one or two hardware features.
As an industry, we've swung from thin clients to fat clients and back countless times. I'm sure LLMs won't be immune to that phenomenon.
I adore this machinery, there's a lot of money riding on the idea that interest in AI/ML will result in the value being in owning bunch of big central metal like cloud era has produced, but I'm not so sure.
I'm sure the people placing multibillion dollar bets have done their research, but the trends I see are AI getting more efficient and hardware getting more powerful, so as time goes on, it'll be more and more viable to run AI locally.
Even with token consumption increasing as AI abilities increase, there will be a point where AI output is good enough for most people.
Granted, people are very willing to hand over their data and often money to rent a software licence from the big players, but if they're all charging subscription fees where a local LLM costs nothing, that might cause a few sleepless nights for a few execs.
We could potentially see one-time-purchase model checkpoints, where users pay to get a particular version for offline use, and future development is gated behind paying again- but certainly the issue of “some level of AI is good enough for most users” might hurt the infinite growth dreams of VCs
tts would be an interesting case-study. it hasn't really been in the lime-light, so could serve as a leading indicator for what will happen when attention to text generation inevitably wanes
I use Read Aloud across a few browser platforms cause sometimes I don't care to read an article I have some passing interest in.
The landscape is a mess:
it's not really bandwidth efficient to transmit on one count, local frameworks like Piper perform well in alot of cases, there's paid APIs from the big players, at least one player has incorporated api-powered neural tts and packaged it into their browser presumably ad-supported or something, yet another has incorporated into their OS, already (though it defaults to speak and spell for god knows why). I'm not willing to pay $0.20 per page though, after experimenting, especially when the free/private solution is good enough.
IMO the benefit of a local LLM on a smartphone isn't necessarily compute power/speed - it's reliability without a reliance on connectivity, it can offer privacy guarantees, and assuming the silicon cost is marginal, could mean you can offer permanent LLM capabilities without needing to offer some sort of cloud subscription.
Boom! [0]
> Deepseek-r1 was loaded and ran locally on the Mac Studio
> M3 Ultra chip [...] 32-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and the 32-core Neural Engine. [...] 512GB of unified memory, [...] memory bandwidth of 819GB/s.
> Deepseek-r1 was loaded [...] 671-billion-parameter model requiring [...] a bit less than 450 gigabytes of [unified] RAM to function.
> the Mac Studio was able to churn through queries at approximately 17 to 18 tokens per second
> it was observed as requiring 160 to 180 Watts during use
Considering getting this model. Looking into the future, a Mac Studio M5 Ultra should be something special.
[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/03/18/heavily-upgraded-...
"Maybe Apple will disprove you in the future" isn't a great refutation of the parent's point.
"Servers are more powerful" isn't a super strong point. Why aren't all PC gamers rendering games on servers if raw power was all that mattered? Why do workstation PCs even exist?
Society is already giving pushback to AI being pushed on them everywhere; see the rise of the word "clanker". We're seeing mental health issues pop up. We're all tired of AI slop content and engagement bait. Even the developers like us discussing it at the bleeding edge go round in circles with the same talking points reflexively. I don't see it as a given that there's public demand for even more AI, "if only it were more powerful on a server".
You make a good point, but you're still not refuting the original argument. The demand for high-power AI still exists, the products that Apple sells today do not even come close to meaningfully replacing that demand. If you own an iPhone, you're probably still using ChatGPT.
Speaking to your PC gaming analogy, there are render farms for graphics - they're just used for CGI and non-realtime use cases. What there isn't a huge demand for is consumer-grade hardware at datacenter prices. Apple found this out the hard way shipping Xserve prematurely.
> Speaking to your PC gaming analogy, there are render farms for graphics - they're just used for CGI and non-realtime use cases. What there isn't a huge demand for is consumer-grade hardware at datacenter prices.
Right, and that's despite the datacenter hardware being far more powerful and for most people cheaper to use per hour than the TCO of owning your own gaming rig. People still want to own their computer and want to eliminate network connectivity and latency being a factor even when it's generally a worse value prop. You don't see any potential parallels here with local vs hosted AI?
Local models on consumer grade hardware far inferior to buildings full of GPUs can already competently do tool calling. They can already generate tok/sec far beyond reading speed. The hardware isn't serving 100s of requests in parallel. Again, it just doesn't seem far fetched to think that the public will sway away from paying for more subscription services for something that can basically run on what they already own. Hosted frontier models won't go away, they _are_ better at most things, but can all of these companies sustain themselves as businesses if they can't keep encroaching into new areas to seek rent? For the average ChatGPT user, local Apple Intelligence and Gemma 3n basically already have the skills and smarts required, they just need more VRAM, and access to RAG'd world knowledge and access to the network to keep up.
> The demand for high-power AI still exists, the products that Apple sells today do not even come close to meaningfully replacing that demand.
Correct, though to me it seems that this comes at the price of narrowing the target audience (i.e. devs and very high-demanding analysis + production work).
For almost everything else people just open a bookmarked ChatGPT / Gemini link and let it flow, no matter how erroneous it might be.
The AI area is burning a lot of bridges and has done so for the last 1.5 - 2.0 years; they solidify the public's idea that they only peddle subscription income as hard as they can without providing more value.
Somebody finally had the right idea some months ago: sub-agents. Took them a while, and it was obvious right from the start that just dumping 50 pages on your favorite LLM is never going to produce impressive results. I mean, sometimes it does but people do a really bad job at quickly detecting when it does not, and are slow to correct course and just burn through tokens and their own patience.
Investors are gonna keep investor-ing, they will of course want the paywall and for there to be no open models at all. But happily the market and even general public perception are pushing back.
I am really curious what will come out of all this. One prediction is local LLMs that secretly transmit to the mothership, so the work of the AI startup is partially offloaded to its users. But I am known to be very cynical, so take this with a spoonful of salt.
If the future is AI, then a future where every compute has to pass through one of a handful of multinational corporations with GPU farms...is something to be wary of. Local LLMs is a great idea for smaller tasks.
but its not the future, we already can do that right now
the problem is people expectation, they want the model to be smart
people aren't having problem for if its local or not, but they want the model to be useful
Sure, that's why local LLMs aren't popular or mass market as of September 2025.
But cloud models will have diminishing returns, local hardware will get drastically faster, and techniques to efficiently inference them will be worked out further. At some point, local LLMs will have its day.
only in theory and that's not gonna be happening
this is the same happening with software and game industry
because free market forces people to raise the bar every year, the requirement of apps and games never met. its only goes up
human would never be satisfied, boundary would be push further
that's why we have 12gb or 16gb ram for smartphone right now only for system + apps
and now we must accommodate for local LLM too??? it would only goes up, people would demand smarter and smarter model
frontier model today would deem unusable(dumb) in 5 years
example: people literally screaming in agony when Antrophic quantized their model
I regularly use local LLMs at work (full stack dev) due to restrictions and occasionally I get some results comparable to gpt-5 or opus 4
this is really cool. could you say a bit about your setup (which llms, what tasks they’re best for, etc)?
I switch between gpt-oss:20b/qwen3:30b. Good for green fielding projects, setting up bash scripts, simple CRUD apis using express, and the occasional error in a React or Vue app.
That's assuming diminishing returns won't hit hard. If a 10x smaller local model is 95%(Whatever that means) as good as the remote model it makes sense to use local models most of the time. It remains to be seen if that will happen but it's certainly not unthinkable imp.
It's really task-dependent, text summarization and grammar corrections are fine with local models. I posit any tasks that are 'arms race-y' (image generation, creative text generation) are going to be offloaded to servers, as there's no 'good enough' bar above which they can't improve.
Apple literally mentioned local LLMs in the event video where they announced this phone and others.
Apple's privacy stance is to do as much as possible on the user's device and as little as possible in cloud. They have iCloud for storage to make inter-device synch easy, but even that is painful for them. They hate cloud. This is the direction they've had for some years now. It always makes me smile that so many commentators just can't understand it and insist that they're "so far behind" on AI.
All the recent academic literature suggests that LLM capability is beginning to plateau, and we don't have ideas on what to do next (and no, we can't ask the LLMs).
As you get more capable SLMs or LLMs, and the hardware gets better and better (who _really_ wants to be long on nVIDIA or Intel right now? Hmm?), people are going to find that they're "good enough" for a range of tasks, and Apple's customer demographic are going to be happy that's all happening on the device in their hand and not on a server [waves hands] "somewhere", in the cloud.
It's not difficult to find improvements to LLMs still.
Large issues: tokenizers exist, reasoning models are still next-token-prediction instead of having "internal thoughts", RL post-training destroys model calibration
Small issues: they're all trained to write Python instead of a good language, most of the benchmarks are bad, pretraining doesn't use document metadata (ie they have to learn from each document without being told the URL or that they're written by different people)
> don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us. I don't think local LLMs will ever be a thing except for very specific use cases.
I disagree.
There's a lot of interest in local LLMs in the LLM community. My internet was down for a few days and did I wish I had a local LLM on my laptop!
There's a big push for privacy; people are using LLMs for personal medical issues for example and don't want that going into the cloud.
Is it necessary to talk to a server just to check out a letter I wrote?
Obviously with Apple's release of iOS 26 and macOS 26 and the rest of their operating systems, tens of millions of devices are getting a local LLM with 3rd party apps that can take advantage of them.
I think they will be, but more for hand-off. Local will be great for starting timers, adding things to calendar, moving files around. Basic, local tasks. But it also needs to be intelligent enough to know when to hand off to server-side model.
Android crowd has been able to run LLMs on-device since LlamaCPP first came out. But the magic is in the integration with OS. As usual there will be hype around Apple, idk, inventing the very concept of LLMs or something. But the truth is neither Apple nor Android did this; only the wee team that wrote the attention is all you need paper + the many open source/hobbyist contributors inventing creative solutions like LoRA and creating natural ecosystems for them.
That's why I find this memo so cool (and will once again repost the link): https://semianalysis.com/2023/05/04/google-we-have-no-moat-a...
Couldn’t you apply that same thinking to all compute? Servers will always have more, timesharing means lower cost, people will probably only ever own dumb terminals?
Latency. You cant play video games on the cloud. Google tried and failed.
well, another way to recount it is that google tried and it worked okay but they decided it wasn't moving the needle, so they stopped trying.
Huh? GeForce NOW is a resounding success by many metrics. Anecdotally, I use it weekly to play multiplayer games and it’s an excellent experience. Google giving up on Stadia as a product says almost nothing about cloud gaming’s viability.
Do you mean Stadia? Stadia worked great. The only perceptible latency I initially had ended up coming from my TV and was fixed by switching it to so-called "gaming mode".
Never could figure out what the heck the value proposition was supposed to be though. Pay full price for a game that you can't even pretend you own? I don't think so. And the game conservation implications were also dire, so I'm not sad it went away in the end.
But on technical merits? It worked great.
No it did not.
The crux is how big the L is in the local LLMs. Depending on what it's used for, you can actually get really good performance on topically trained models when leveraged for their specific purpose.
There's alot of L's in LLLM, so overall it's hard to tell what you're trying to say...
Is it 'Local'?, 'Large?'...'Language?'
Clearly the Large part, given the context...LLMs usually miss stuff like this, funnily enough.
Do you see the C for Cheap in there? Me neither.
Sorry I'm not following. Cheap in terms of what, hardware cost?
From Apple's point of view a local model would be the cheapest possible to run, as the end-user pays for hardware plus consumption...
Username checks out.
It's a thing right now.
I'm running Qwen 30B code on my framework laptop to ask questions about ruby vs. python syntax because I can, and because the internet was flaky.
At some point, more doesn't mean I need it. LLMs will certainly get "good enough" and they'll be lower latency, no subscription, and no internet required.
pretty amazing, as a student I remember downloading offline copies of Wikipedia and Stack Overflow and felt that I have the entire world truly in my laptop and phones. Local LLMs are arguably even more useful than those archives.
If compute power is the deciding factor server vs edge discussion then we’d never have smartphones.
local LLM may not be good enough for answering questions (which I think won't be true really soon) or generating images, but it today should be good enough to infer deeplinks and app extension calls or agentic walk-through... and ushers a new era of controlling phone by voice command.
You can generate images on an iphone now with “draw things”
Because of the prompt processing speed, small models like Qwen 3 coder 30b a3b are the sweet spot for mac platform right now. Which means a 32 or 64GB mac is all you need to use Cline or your favorite agent locally.
Yes, I use LM Studio daily with Qwen 3 30b a3b. I can't believe how good it is locally.
Can you use your Qwen instance in CLIs like Claude code, codex, or whatever open source coding agent?
Or do you have to copy paste into LM studio?
Yeah you can, so long as you're hosting your local LLM through something with an OpenAI-compatible API (which is a given for almost all local servers at this point, including LM Studio).
https://opencode.ai and https://github.com/QwenLM/qwen-code both allow you to configure any API as the LLM provider.
That said, running agentic workloads on local LLMs will be a short and losing battle against context size if you don't have hardware specifically bought for this purpose. You can get it running and it will work for several autonomous actions but not nearly as long as a hosted frontier model will work.
Unfortunately, IDE integration like this tends to be very prefill intensive (more math than memory). That puts Apple Silicon at a disadvantage without the feature that we’re talking about. Presumably the upcoming M5 will also have dedicated matmul acceleration in the GPU. This could potentially change everything in favor of local AI, particularly on mobile devices like laptops.
Cline has a new "compact" prompt enabled for their LM Studio integration which greatly alleviates the long system prompt prefill problem, especially for Macs which suffer from low compute (though it disables MCP server usage, presumably the lost part of the prompt is what made that work well).
It seems to work better for me when I tested it and Cline's supposedly adding it to the Ollama integration. I suspect that type of alternate local configuration will proliferate into the adjacent projects like Roo, Kilo, Continue, etc.
Apple adding hardware to speed it up will be even better, the next time I buy a new computer.
LM Studio lets you run a model as a local API (OpenAI-compatible REST server).
Nah, memory is still the bottleneck. Kernel performance is already pretty good, but cpu memory is still dramatically slower than gpu memory.
I was reminded of this today for no particular reason:
"iPhone4 vs HTC Evo"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg
Apple is playing 3D chess while every other PC maker is learning how to play checkers.
I'm most excited about the heart rate sensor in Airpods Pro 3!
> It has A19 Pro.
But it's not general purpose. Broken by design.
I'll pass. Not going to support this. We need less of this crap not more.
I will believe this when I see it. It’s totally possible that those capabilities are locked behind some private API or that there’s some weedsy hardware complication not mentioned that makes them non-viable for what we want to do with them.
Already available via Metal: https://x.com/liuliu/status/1932158994698932505
They might recommend using CoreML to leverage them, though I imagine it will be available to Metal.
The whole point of CoreML is that your solution uses whatever hardware is available to you, including enlisting a heterogeneous set of units to conquer a large problem. Software written years ago would use the GPU matmul if deployed to a capable machine.
Good luck actually getting access to ANE. There is a reason why Pytorch doesn't use it even if its been around for a while.
No luck needed. This is for the GPU and is already available via Metal. https://x.com/liuliu/status/1932158994698932505
Ill believe it when I see it supported in Pytorch
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According to this page, [1] it reduces unwanted noise 4x as much as the original AirPods Pro and 2x as much as the AirPods Pro 2.
Though I do wonder, given the logarithmic nature of sound perception, are these numbers deceptive in terms of what the user will perceive?
1: https://www.apple.com/airpods-pro/
It was 4x over the original version IIRC so should be ~ 2x over the previous
So.. 6 hour batteries like the Apple Watch?
According to Apple's comparison tool, the Air has 27 hrs of video playback, compared to 30 for the 17 and 39 for the Pro.
Based on that, it doesn't sound like it's that much worse. Of course, if you're trying to maximize battery longevity by not exceeding 80% charge, that might make it not very useful for many people.
But there’s this now:
https://store.apple.com/uk/xc/product/MGPG4ZM/A
Heck make the phone even thinner and sell it with the battery pack and we'll have reinvented phones with swappable batteries
Except now your phone is getting energy wirelessly, which is less efficient and gets hot...
A big loss for a small coolness factor.
The Moto Z was ahead of its time! (it was thinner and had a magnetic battery add-on).
You did have to pay extra for the battery, mind.
It’s embarrassing how frequently they’ll yank out an important part and sell it as an add-on.
Yes, and then don’t even make it compatible with other phones. I’m a big fan of their previous (discontinued) MagSafe battery as that supports reverse charging, charge state display on phone and has the perfect size.
This new battery however is only compatible with the Air as other phones have a bigger camera bump.
And how much better would be if it had a physical connector so it's much more efficient. So you would have a bigger total charge and it wouldn't cook both batteries in the process. One can dream though.
Or one can buy. This works very well for me (as a stand and a battery pack):
https://freshnrebel.com/magnetic-wireless-powerbank-5000-mah...
It does the MagSafe thing, but will also offer a charge through the USB-C port.
Excuse me, that hump is the Iconic Plateau.
Signifying flatlining iPhone?
Different phones have different sizes and shapes. Not sure what you expect, for a product designed to match the phone's size exactly?
And batteries don't last forever. When you upgrade to a new phone after a few years you'd likely need a new one anyways.
Worst case scenario just sell the old one on eBay if it's still holding a good charge!
The previous MagSafe battery has the size of the MagSafe wallet and thus fits onto all the iPhones that have MagSafe down to the "Mini" variants. It's the perfect emergency power backup. But Apple discontinued this a while ago.
Selling a thin phone with half a battery where you have to buy the other half and keep it attached to get a proper battery runtime (turning it into a normal-sized phone) can't be the solution Apple intended. At least I hope so. And that battery doesn't fit other iPhones as the camera bump of those other phones is in the way.
Well, swappable batteries has the UX advantage of being able to swap in full charges.
I don't really understand all the complaining since it's merely a variant of the iPhone for people who prioritize thinness over battery.
For over a decade, HNers have complained that they don't want thinness to be forced on them and that there should be a separate SKU for it. Yet when it finally happens, HNers complain about the trade-off.
If the outcome is that non-air iPhones are allowed to get a little thicker now, that’d be super cool.
Consider that the folks complaining about one thing can be different groups from the ones complaining about another.
Either way, people have options now. If one doesn't like the compromises of the thin phone, they can buy the thick phone. Seems silly to complain about the thinness if you're not the target demographic.
Magsafe battery has also been a great fix for a 5-year old built-in battery for 1/3 the cost of a battery replacement, and when I finally replace this phone I'll still have the magsafe battery for travel/emergency.
3rd party versions of course, the official one was much more expensive than that.
"half a battery" yielding 27h seems kinda harsh criticism
why wouldn't it be compatible with other phones?
See this photo:
https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/1/as-images.apple.co...
The camera bump on other models protrudes more towards the centre of the body. And thus the battery wouldn't fit (flush) and the Qi charging wouldn't engage properly.
So running the battery perpendicular to this photo isn't an option?
I'm sorry if I'm not completely familiar with this product: you are to have this battery attached at all times while you're charging, and it just stays in place? (gawd I sound like I'm from a different planet, I apologize -- wireless charging just never has been interesting to me)
Yes, the power icon on the back of the phone cases is a set of magnets designed to ensure rotation and x,y center magnetic lock.
What on earth are you talking about? It includes a battery and there is both a cheaper and a more expensive version that has more battery, plus an add on battery pack. And you’re complaining about what exactly?
You could get an iPhone Max as your iPhone Air backup. Or maybe just get the iPhone Max...?
Seems like Apple is way ahead of you.
Some people: I don’t want to carry extra battery all the time for the one day a month I need it.
Other people: how dare you
I, for one, am looking forward to being forced to purchase the add-on MagSafe headphone adaptor. (And the MagSafe floppy drive.)
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I’ll wait for the MagSafe MiniDisc.
IMO it's underwhelming considering folding phones have been out for many years now and we still don't have a folding iPhone. What are the PMs doing at Apple.
I think folding phones will remain a small niche unless someone figures out how to make a foldable screen that doesn't get permanently scratched by your fingernails.
The "unless" argument is where apple has done well:
- mobile mp3 player sales are low unless disk and battery life are greatly improved
- large display touch screen phone market is small unless someone solves the "app problem"
- smart watch market is tiny if exists at all unless someone makes one that is useful and has improved battery life
Pebble had like a week long battery life. Apple’s pitch wasn’t better battery life, it was just “that thing for nerds? This is the same, but for everyone else.” I.e. it came with seamless integration with your phone, rings to close, a more expensive look, and more polished fitness tracking.
The breakthru that made touchscreen phones works wasn’t an app ecosystem. That came after people were already crazy about iPhones. It was capacitive touch screens. Basically everything before was resistive touch, which is why they usually had styluses. Getting touch, and really multi-touch, working well was the game changer that redefined cell phones.
To be fair, Apple Watch battery life is atrocious compared to competing models. Their marketing and ecosystem is better.
IMO there's a gap between "charge every day" and "charge once a week" that needs to be crossed.
In other words, if they made the battery last twice as long it'd still be equally as annoying (since your daily routine would be nearly the same, except now you also need to remember if it's a charge day or non-charge day).
To be fair maybe 3/4 days buys you some convenience. But anyways charging once a day is a reasonable place to get to, to get something better would require at minimum a 3x improvement which probably means a ground-up rework instead of continuous refinement.
A battery band might get you there but I suspect it'd be too clunky. At best Apple may redesign their watch to support a battery band and allow 3rd parties to make them for folks that need weeks of battery life.
For me, it comes down to two things. First, I do not want to have to charge every night since I use my watch as a silent vibrating alarm, and I track my sleep. It seems like Apple has basically overcome this hurdle, now that you can charge while you shower and basically get by.
The other issue is that I don't want to have to bring Yet Another Dongle™ every time I go away for a weekend or short business trip. Most of my trips are ≤ 4 days, so if AWs could reliably go that long (including battery degradation over time) then I'd consider getting one.
Right now, only the AWU even approaches this, and only in low-power mode. If it weren't a thousand dollars, I'd consider it. But between the low-power requirement and the pricing, it's just no contest in my book. I'm getting a new Pebble, which offers a month of battery life at 1/3 of the cost.
> The other issue is that I don't want to have to bring Yet Another Dongle™
I think reverse charging from your smartphone is a quite decent solution to the problem, which is supported by certain Android devices.
If this were possible, it would definitely make a difference for me.
I am surprised Apple doesn't sell a battery band for people who want a weeks charge.
That would be slick. Perhaps the problem is it would get hot, and possibly burn?
I watched the announcement yesterday and was very surprised to hear the watch battery life is still so shocking.
Especially considering how useful sleep data is, then I was surprised to see they're only getting sleep scores now.
My dirt cheap Huawei watches have had this for years. It's accurate enough (my own perception based on use). And I get a weeks battery life too (although I don't have the distracting fancy notifications perhaps). It does check blood oxygen levels, heart rate, stress etc.
I truly thought this was a solved problem (looking at headphones battery life, although I might need to check my assumptions here also apply to Airpods).
The watch has sleep data (for example phase durations like rem sleep and apnoe), the health app just doesn’t compute a „score“.
> I truly thought this was a solved problem.
I charge when showering in the morning. 15 minutes is enough for the day + night, half an hour to charge it fully.
That's not bad
I switched from Apple Watch to a Garmin Venu. The battery lasts for a week, and many of the sensors are more accurate.
And that's the fancy screen, gimmick edition garmin watch - the normal MIP display garmin watches (even an old, midrange Forerunner 255) will easily get a couple of weeks of battery life, more for the higher end ones.
OLED is just the wrong screen tech for these devices, never made any sense to me given how little I care about graphics and how little time I spend reading the display.
But it's not the screen that causes it to lose energy as fast, but the general purpose OS with a decent CPU.
New one is 24 hours is that still atrocious
Yes. My Pebble Steel got over a week of battery in 2015, had physical, tactile buttons that worked even wearing thick winter gloves, and had an always-on-no-matter-what screen that was clearly readable in full sunlight.
Every smartwatch that hasn't met that bar, which is almost all of them ever made, is a joke to me. I'd have ordered a RePebble had I not moved back to analogue dumbwatches instead just before they were announced (and were iOS not actively hostile to competing watch implementations).
And motorcycles get way better gas mileage than cars. But it’s still odd to frame a (totally understandable!) preference for one product category in those terms.
If you are okay with less smart smart watches, and okay with no hackability, Garmin should have a few with black and white display and >1 week battery life (even indefinite with sufficient solar).
That’s not really the same category of device
Isn’t that a laggy b&w screen, with no ability to respond to notifs, no cellular. I guess those are ok for some users
depends which camp of apple watch (or smart watch in general) users you are asking.
the camp that sees the smartwatch as an accessory to their smartphone that does fitness tracking and maybe a few other useful things to avoid pulling their phone out constantly - those people want MUCH longer battery life.
the camp that sees the smartwatch as a REPLACEMENT to their smartphone, they are perfectly fine with the current battery life.
I am closer to the first camp than the second, and I don’t understand why I would need longer battery life. The watch charges very quickly, and there is never a day when I don’t have the chance to charge at some point. I usually do it during my morning shower.
1. People use these GPS watches for Ironman triathlons, ultra running & cycling events etc. They can't and won't charge before the battery is done - and remember the battery with a daily charge will degrade significantly. If it's borderline on release, it'll be inadequate after a year.
2. Just for general convenience, having to take another special cable for every late night or overnight trip is maddening. I always have a phone anyway for any actual interactions.
I find it hard to believe many people are writing texts on their watches, it's just a nice to have gimmick feature that everyone I know has stopped using.
> and remember the battery with a daily charge will degrade significantly. If it's borderline on release, it'll be inadequate after a year.
That has not been my experience though - having used both an Apple Watch and a Pixel Watch for years on end every single day. Absolutely outside my area of expertise, but I would imagine that you can design batteries to have a much longer lifetime (no of recharge cycles) when their capacity is smaller.
That’s not how Lion charging works - degradation and lifetime (to a first approximation) depend on full charges. If you charge daily from 80% to 100% or charge every 5 days from 1% to 100%, your battery degradation and lifetime will be the same.
Yep, easily the worst part of mine, especially since it has to charge at a different time than my phone to allow for sleep tracking.
My biggest complaint with my Apple Watch is that I have to choose between sleep tracking and being able to wear my watch all day.
Yes, my 5 year old Garmin still lasts about 10 days. And thats with using GPS tracking + bluetooth audio for multiple recorded activities.
Yes. Simply yes for a lot of people.
Are those people who don’t need interactivity, ability to respond to notifs, cellular, etc or are you comparing with something comparable
I think a lot of people reach into their pocket and get their phone out if they need "interactivity, ability to respond to notifs, cellular, etc"
But if you want to leave your smartphone at home, but you still want cellular and notifications, I agree the apple watch is the only game in town even if the battery life sucks.
Most of this is because of the always-on screen. If you can live without it and switch back to the motion or button to wake mode, you get 30-50% more usage before the battery runs out, which is not a huge improvement but is a legitimate option.
A side effect is that this makes your watch look less new, and therefore less of a theft target.
real watches last like 24 months minimum
And bicycles go much further without needing petrol than cars.
I agree that Apple Watches don't last long enough between charges, but comparing them to a completely different class of device that's technically the same broad category is pointless.
Is this a thing? I've been using a Pixel 9 Pro Fold for one full year now and my inner screen looks pretty flawless. I don't see a single scratch, and I've never used any kind of protector on the inside. This kind of sounds like a "sour grapes" excuse where a really good thing is presumed to suck only because you can't have it. Personally, as someone who isn't really interested in a full tablet, the foldable is really really nice.
> Is this a thing?
From Google's official Pixel 9 Pro Fold handling instructions: (https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15090466?hl=en#...)
> Flexible screens are softer than traditional phone screens, so avoid contact with sand, crumbs, *fingernails* and sharp objects.
-> sour apple
I'm sure that if Apple invented the exact same thing in the exact same way, it would have been the "greatest thing since sliced bread".
I have an OG Pixel Fold and the inner screen is flawless. My iPhone 14 Pro screen is visibly scratched. The Fold replaced tablets and e readers for me.
Or an actual seemless hinge. My god are they ugly down the bend.
it's invisible if you look straight at your phone, never bothered me
Unfortunately my eyes can see it.
Look at the latest model, your eyes won't see it. Stop spreading FUD
I don't know what to tell you - I don't want to brag about my eyesight, but it's pretty good - No matter what angle, no matter what phone, the crease is visible. What would I have to gain lying about this? I could say the same thing - Stop trying to copium your purchase?
The tech isn't there yet.
Except it is, just try the new models
It is a feature, not a bug.
For those that are not chronically online, a mobile phone from a decade ago has everything they need. If you only have to phone the family, WhatsApp your neighbours, get the map out, use a search engine and do your online banking, then a flagship phone is a bit over the top. If anything, the old phone is preferable since its loss would not be the end of the world.
I have seen a few elderly neighbours rocking Samsung Galaxy S7s with no need to upgrade. Although the S7 isn't quite a decade old, the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come since there is this demographic of active users.
Now, what if we could get these people to upgrade every three years with a feature that the 'elderly neighbour' would want? Eyesight isn't what it used to be in old age, so how about a nice big screen?
You can't deliberately hobble the phone with poor battery life or programme it to go slow in an update because we know that isn't going to win the customer over, but a screen that gets tatty after three years? Sounds good to me.
> the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come
I have several apps that no longer work on my otherwise good phone bought in 2018 because I can no longer update the OS that they require.
Can you give any examples? My apps only stop upgrading, not stop working out of the blue.
Edit: This is a honest question.
Banking apps are a common example that requires you to be on latest, yet my phone is stuck in Android 10 land.
Whatsapp also no longer works on it, thus the phone is useless.
Which is sad, as it has a great camera, battery life and is very light.
That sounds like LG. Amazing camera and audio and I'm never buying one again.
Should be easy given they haven't made them for over 4 years.
Xiaomi Redmi Note 8.
https://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_redmi_note_8-9814.php
It's the software updates that's the problem. Apple aren't too bad, but their hardware support only seems to last 7 years.
The S7 you mention lasted 4 years, and received the last patch in 2020.
Not convinced that doing online banking on a phone that hasn't had software updates for 5 years is a good idea.
It's definitely a bad idea but people hate being coerced into spending $500+ just to continue doing what they already do.
A lot of us the techies can be strong-armed via FOMO and other tropes but good luck convincing the elderly neighbors.
Samsung Galaxy A40 checking in.
It's small, has dual sim card sockets, and a headphone jack.
I'm not sure how I'd replace it to be honest.
I'm still want a phone with expandable storage and a headphone jack. Sony had one, but I don't know if they're selling them and I've heard they have their own issues too.
Honest question here - is there a situation where you need to be able to use the headphone jack and USB-C at the same time?
Because there are very cheap, lightweight adaptors to headphone jack from USB-C.
One extra 'thing' to need - at the moment I know that I can play music through anything that has a line-in, with just a cable. However Bluetooth seems to work ok - for devices that support it.
Not OP but my concern is putting strain on the charging port by walking with headphones while my phone is in my pocket.
Wireless chargers are pretty good but it’s still a pain to wear out your port.
There are some 90-degree adapters that would probably minimise that.
I can dual-SIM my iphone by using one e-Sim and one physical. The only thing it is not, is small...
> What are the PMs doing at Apple.
Probably trying to find better screen materials, and addressing reliability issues.
I used Palm devices with resistive touch screens. It was good, but when you go glass, there's no turning back.
I would never buy a phone with folding screens protected by plastic. I want a dependable slab. Not a gimmicky gadget which can die any moment. I got my fix for dying flex cables with Casiopeia PDAs. Never again.
my girlfriend broke her iphone screen twice in two weeks, the second time we didn't bother repairing the screen and now she has a broken screen which looks really ugly. I've dropped my google pixel fold 9 countless time and the screen is still intact and flawless. So not sure what you're talking about.
I’ve dropped my iPhone 15 more times than any phone I’ve ever had. Still fine. I don’t know how I got away with it.
Am I representative? Dunno.
I've dropped my iPhone 12 a million times with no screen protection or cover. Still fine apart from some scratches around the edges.
My and my wife's iPhones took numerous dives over the years. They're fine, too.
Folding phones are ~1.5% of the market.
Apple cancelled their mini line which was 3% of sales.
It’s not a big enough slice for them to want to chase.
I prefer a smaller phone, something that fits in your pocket easily with glasses, and am still rocking an iPhone Mini 13.
I am getting more and more nervous that there will be no good upgrade for me. 13 Mini is such a good size!
Same! I grew up with small phones.... maybe it's us. hah
yeah.. and I am buying $2k unopened on eBay to keep for the future, if my current one is lost.
Folding phones are a niche because they are very expensive to be honest.
Sure, but I wouldn't buy one even if it was in the same price range as phones I usually buy. For me, it will be useful rarely and cumbersome to use the rest of the time.
I picked up a folding phone a while back just to test it out, and honestly they're still pretty underwhelming.
The screen isn't really big enough or the right shape to feel like a real upgrade for movies, and a lot of apps just aren't built with foldables in mind. Most of the time it just feels like a weirdly shaped, less powerful, less durable tablet.
On top of that you're dealing with a visible crease across the screen, higher prices for something that's actually more fragile, and bulkier hardware with smaller or split batteries. The tech is cool in theory, but in practice it's a lot of compromises without a clear killer use case.
which phone was that? I bought the pixel folding 9 last year and it has basically replaced my ipad pro. I watch movies, shows, youtube videos, read PDFs on it, it's really good
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold.
Things have evolved a ton. I've got an Oppo Find N5. Thinner than iPhone Air when unfolded. Same size as iPhone 16 Pro Max when folded. 16GB Ram, fastest Snapdragon, okay cameras, the screen is magnificent, crease basically invisible in day to day use. Battery larger than any iPhone battery (thanks to Silicon Carbon)
The tech has got really good really quickly!
I have a folding android and it’s very meh. Wouldn’t get one again. It was also free with a prepaid phone plan so I doubt cost is really the factor.
Free with a plan just means you paid for it in installments without them breaking down how much of your monthly payment is going towards the device vs towards the network use. Had you opted for a cheaper device you could have got the same plan for less money. The phone is never actually free, just cleverly marketed to seem free.
Good foldables are way above the $ 1000 mark.
I recently got one of these (Galaxy Z7 Fold) and I can't imagine ever going back to a regular phone. The big screen is what makes the phone finally begin to resemble actual productivity tool.
What makes a good foldable better than say a $700 RAZR?
They're tablet sized screens folding to phone size, instead of phone size folding to half phone size.
Apple should create 1.5x1.5 and 2x2 inch variations of a wrist "Panel Watch Ultra". Be great for diving - and everything else.
That would be the half sized phone I would buy.
> It was also free with a prepaid phone plan
It's not really free. It's just built in to the cost of your plan. Your plan would be half the price if you weren't paying for the phone.
Yeah, why do people call it free? You do pay for the phone, just not the full amount upfront.
It was a prepaid plan that was the same price whether I got the phone or not. I guess you could say everyone who didn’t get the phone was subsidizing those who did, but there’s no way to opt for lower pricing if you BYOD. So no, in this case that’s not really true. If it were Verizon where you can pay less if you BYOD then sure but that’s not what I did.
> It was a prepaid plan that was the same price whether I got the phone or not.
Fair enough, then it makes sense to get the phone.
> It’s not a big enough slice for them to want to chase.
Typical strat for them is not to be first with an innovation, but to wait and work out the kinks enough that they can convince people that the tradeoffs are well worth making. Apple wouldn't be chasing that existing slice, they'd be trying to entice a larger share of their customers to upgrade faster.
Folding phones are also double the price. If the price comes down I would expect them to dominate the market.
Yes, in some way everybody is in the 1.5% of something. Apple users will therefore never be 100% happy. Apple is a compromise. But they're also opinionated and very good at telling their users what they should like.
Folding phones are extremely popular in China, where nobody cares about Apple anymore. They are now seen as a status symbol because they are significantly more expensive.
I think they'd rather sell you an iPhone and an iPad Mini rather than one device that does both, just like they'd rather sell you an iPad Air/Pro and a MacBook with basically the same internals, rather than a convertible macOS tablet.
I basically stopped using my ipad pro since I bought the pixel folding pro
Aside from the obvious mechanical issues, the screen quality compromises, et cetera, folding phones are just dorky. Apple wants their products to be anything but dorky.
There will never be a folding iPhone, simple as.
Apple watch is like the definition of dorky looking - so much for that theory.
Also flip phones aren't dorky and have a 2000s vibe - but they don't fit Apple "you can have any color as long as it's black" approach to design.
In some ways I can't even fault them - fragmenting your device shapes/experiences to chase a niche look is not good business. But this is exactly what's pushing me out of Apple ecosystem - it's so locked down that if you don't want to fit into their narrow product lines you have no other options. There are no third party watch makers using apple watch hardware and software. No other phone makers with access to iPhone internals and iOS. Nobody can hack a PC OS onto an iPad or build a 2in1 MacOS device.
I feel like this is the last gen of Apple tech I'm in on - I just find there are so many devices that are compelling to me personally but don't fit into the walled garden. Plus Google seems light-year ahead on delivering a smart assistant.
I'm with you. Long term Apple customer and it feels like they really don't care about anything that I would like them to do.
It's OK but it feels bad because you are kind of trapped with their stuff if you invested in their ecosystem.
>Apple watch is like the definition of dorky looking
Meanwhile my Casio calculator watch: "bonjour"
I was going to write that the only nerdier thing I can think of is wearing a calculator watch - but even that's like nerd fashion and having a rectangular screen strapped to your wrist is just all about utility.
Rectangular watches have been around for over 100 years and have just been regular fashion for much of that time:
https://teddybaldassarre.com/blogs/watches/rectangle-watches...
If you mistake any of these for an apple watch at less than 100m you need glasses.
There's nothing wrong with rectangular watches - a fat bezel less screen rectangle around your wrist is not the same thing. The pro comes closest to a proper watch look but even that's "inspector gadget" teritory, not fashion accessory.
Don't know why you're downvoted. My boyfriend wears the Apple Watch Ultra in public and looks like a complete dork. He's got a pretty big wrist, too!
I left the ecosystem after Catalina, and my experience with macOS at work has horrified me enough to stay well away. Nowadays I'm happily using NixOS on the desktop, laptop and homeserver. My biggest gripe is that I didn't switch sooner, probably could have saved a decent amount of cash eschewing the Apple tax, SaaS fees and macOS migration hamster-wheel.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with the Apple Watch being labeled "dorky". I think they look pretty nice - and I don't own one. I wear a Timex Ironman.
There's no mistaking it for any watch out there - which means people wouldn't wear a watch like it if it wasn't for the function.
I definitely think everyone with an Apple Watch looks like a schmuck
That Apple Watch is ubiquitous suggests that it's not seen as dorky.
Apparently in 2022, 80% of iPhone owners also had the AW.
I found this stat a little hard to believe so I looked up what appears to be the source—it’s 81% of iPhone owners who own a smart watch https://www.statista.com/chart/31973/likelihood-of-iphone-us...
It’s hard to find a source of how many iPhone owners specifically also own a smartwatch, but in the US it seems like 35% might be a decent estimate of smartwatch ownership, so it’d be more in the realm of ~28% of iPhone owners also having an Apple Watch.
True, it did seem a bit unbelievable. Either way, if you look around, Apple Watch is worn by all walks of life and just doesn't have the dorky vibe HNers might insist it has.
100% of iPhone users also use the App Store. Anyone who owns a Mac will tell you that's not due to immense satisfaction or competitive zeal, though.
Watch the leaks over the next year or so. There have been rumours of a foldable coming as soon as next year.
I remember thinking that the first iPad was dorky, oh boy did I misread the market.
Oh and I remember everyone mocking the airpods pro when they came out. Now everyone is wearing them.
For phones what really matters for most people is... the screen size. And a folding phone is basically the best thing you can get right now for that.
The only problem is pricing at the moment.
They're in the right. Folding phones are great, and I've used one for years, but the technology hasn't reached Apple levels. Get rid of the crease, make the screen less scratchable, and make them waterproof, and then it could go in an iPhone.
Folders seem gimmicky to me
Im never going back to non-foldable. The ability to have a full sized phone take up half as much space in my pocket is amazing. Consistently more comfortable moving around.
Maybe half length, not sure half space.
Phones are already thin enough, I don't mind doubling the thickness. Length is the problem.
Yea the zfold style is the way to go
That’s because most Android phones are tablet sized. We could simply have smaller phones.
Until you use one
I tested the Samsung one in the store and that groove thing in the screen would drive me crazy
I have a google fold 9 for a year and I've never noticed it unless I look at the phone from the side. It's interesting that this is the criticism that comes up the most here where it's already been a solved issue
You think it’s solved - many people disagree.
Who havent used one
They have a nightmare of a crease. Every single one. Even slight warping causes me to recoil. No, I've used one, they are absolutely unusable for me.
You can't see the crease anymore. Source: I own a pixel folding 9 pro
If you hold it up to light to get a reflection, you are telling me there's zero perceptual warping of that reflection around the crease? None? It's as flat and perfect as a single sheet of glass?
I'd agree if there were fewer compromises required to pull it off.
What’s the main use case of this?
A pocketable tablet that is also your phone.
so what do you use on yours with more dexterity than without it?
watching videos and reading PDFs (whitepapers) are the two big upgrades, being able to take selfies and see yourself is often useful also
We're already in the trifold era. Check this video to see some useful features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp5i0jQggK4
iPads seem gimmicky to me. Somehow, they sell...
It's great for watching shows on a stationary bike, reading manga, and as a drawing tablet. There's a bunch of artists that only use procreate.
It's a hard sell for curmudgeons like me with a laptop that does everything you listed and more.
Maybe I'm the idiot, but you won't catch me dead paying laptop money for a neuter-computer.
I don't think this is fair. Of the uses listed:
iPads are better for watching shows on a stationary bike, since they fit on the bike
iPads are better for reading manga, since you can hold them vertically
and iPads are clearly better for drawing--you can't draw on a laptop.
There are some hybrid laptops that do these things, but they're bad at them. Especially drawing, I've used enough HP convertibles with "stylus support" over the years to know that.
Hey good for you man. It's still one of the most popular drawing tablets on the market.
The sous vide is one of the most popular ways to prepare a steak. It still doesn't replace even a 10th of what my kitchen is capable of.
But an awful lot of people have a sous vide cooker in their kitchen.
This, especially nowadays that Mac OS has an ARM target, and there’s essentially (literally?) no difference between an iPad and MacBook hardware
> there’s essentially (literally?) no difference between an iPad and MacBook hardware
Form factor. Touch screen. GPS. Cellular. Circular polarization. These are all literal hardware differences between the iPad and MacBook, and every single one of them makes the iPad suitable for my use case (ForeFlight running on an iPad mounted to the yoke) where a MacBook would not be.
You can get a laptop with all those built-in, though. The only reason the Mac lacks those things is artificial market segmentation.
Also, can you give an example of a laptop (or non-Apple tablet) with a circularly polarized LCD? I've never been able to find one, but it's not a spec that's often published…
Sure, but none of them run ForeFlight, so…
Schools--for better or for worse, schools buy gobs of ipads.
i see one at basically every store or bar as an easily configurable POS
Are you serious? For anything that needs more screen estate - reading, browsing, photo/video watching/organizing, or simply if your sight is not as good anymore, it's so much better than phone. And with the pricetag around $350 that is amazing value.
The PMs are probably thinking folding phones are dumb…because they are.
Someone else commented that the reason the iPhone Air is so thin is the result of Apple building a folding phone (they have to be thin). I agree. The iPhone Air basically looked like a low hanging fruit while they're still at it. Apple is known to take its time so that makes sense
Marques Brownlee said they have prototypes for a folding phone and will likely release one
Do any of the folding phones actually work well? I still haven't seen one in the wild (admittedly, I'm not living in a tech Mecca these days)
I've had the past three generations of Samsung folding phone (4,5,6).
My use-case is for travel, where I want to read books, and the very occasional time when I want to do some design work outside the office -- draw a diagram that sort of thing. A third rare use case is where a web site is buggy or limited in functionality for mobile browsers. In all these cases the unfolded screen allows me to do the thing I need to do without carrying a second device (tablet, eReader). Another marginal use-case is to show another person a photograph. The fold out screen is much easier to see and I think has better color rendition too.
For these use-cases I find the folding phone very worthwhile.
But...the benefit that trumps all that is that the phone itself is smaller (narrower) than the typical flagship phones these days. It fits in my pocket and my hand reaches across it. I'd never go back to a non-folding phone for this reason alone, even if I never unfolded it. In fact I almost never do unfold it, except when traveling.
fwiw it wasn't until the Fold6 that the "cover screen" typing experience was ok. I understand that the Fold7 is a bit wider and so probably better, but I can't justify the expense to upgrade so will sit out until the Fold8.
Tried the Fold on a Google event and it was really nice. I would get one, but I don't want to spend so much money.
The Z Fold 7 I tried works so well, I tempted to move away from Apple for the first time since my Galaxy Note 3.
they do work well but are fragile. I broke one by gently closing it on a hot day (about 100F). Saw another break from the kind of short fall that used to break phones before they all got gorilla glass.
I guess if you're the sort that is not clumsy and you're in a mild climate you might get your money's worth
for reference these were Samsung Z Flip devices
Owner of the pixel 9 folding here and I drop it constantly, no issues
The vertical fold ones might be better. I had the newest Samsung Flip (horizontal folding) and the screen died twice. Both times from a small rupture on the seam. The tech at the phone place said it happens constantly, and it costs hundreds of dollars to replace out of warranty.
The google folding pro works really well
I dunno, I always felt folding phones added unnecessary complexity and moving parts. The slab phone seems closer to a platonic ideal and from a user/engineering perspective, has less compromises
honestly most criticism I see on folding phone could basically be solved by just trying one, it's so useful when you need a larger screen
In all seriousness, is there a folding phone that doesn't have a crease in the screen while unfolded?
The one I have used felt like using a real phone through a layer of vinyl, definitely not a pleasant experience.
The crease is something you barely even notice 5 minutes into using one.
> IMO it's underwhelming considering folding phones have been out for many years now and we still don't have a folding iPhone. What are the PMs doing at Apple.
They're buying another year of very-high margin phones I guess...
I know they have been out for a while but I have yet to see a single one in person. They just don't make much of the market.
Why do we need a folding phone?
I would never have bought one before but nowadays it could actually be useful. You could have Codex or Claude Code in your pocket, and every ~15min check the work and write a new prompt. Tablets are too big (for me) to constantly carry around for this, and phones annoyingly small for that use.
because we want larger screens
what? why? they're already bigger than one hand -- way too big! Get a computer
It caters to a very specific target group: voice calls[1] and looking at a lot of information at once[2].
[1]: Mediocre folded experience doesn't bother them
[2]: Think calendars and whatever else middle managers look at
Why get a computer if you just want to read or watch videos?
youtube with ublock origin is a game changer.
Or you can pull up VLC and peruse your collection of locally-stored content
On Android you can just patch and recompile the native youtube app on your phone to disable ads with ReVanced.
Can someone that is actually interested in this explain the appeal? Thin on its own I get but thin with a giant bump 100% defeats the whole point for me. Seems clear at this point there is little hope of them engineering their way into thin cameras.
Doubt most people want it as thin as possible. This is just the phone industry running out of ideas and trying to tell people what they actually need.
There's not much left to "fix" on mobile phones, and no real important features to add. Lacking that, they need something to sell the phones with, so they're going for these strange "improvements". It needs to be something that has some wow factor so they can lead with. This seems to somehow work on normal people so they'll keep doing these "improvements".
I expect in the future they'll pull this trick again, moving bits of the phone upwards towards camera, and create a second notch from half way down, where the phone will get even thinner, and they'll sell that.
I can think of quite a few things to fix just they are extraordinarily difficult engineering problems versus 10-20% improvements on existing features or random tweaks:
- novel approach to camera optics that can completely flatten them into the phone - front camera hidden behind the screen removing the island or inset - dramatically better battery tech density leading to like week long usage - way more ram (100gb+) and processing power for powerful local llm and other ai - significant reduction in thickness and weight. like this air with no bump but also under 100 grams - maybe some stuff with projectors
They could fix the camera bump and improve the battery life, just by making the phone thicker.
With the introduction of the iPhone Air, it would have been a great opportunity to do this on the normal model.
Those who care about phone thickness could buy the Air, and the rest of us could have our large battery flat phones.
This. I don't want a very thin phone — I want one that fits in my pocket smoothly, and the bump ruins that. Give me a thicker phone, with a bigger battery and rounded edges like the original iPhone.
it's like that Mach 20 razor. keep adding more!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m6GpIOhbqRo
https://theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-...
You know, I forgot my razor and was on vacation in a very touristy place which only had expensive, "luxury" brands of everything just to pump up the price. So I got stuck buying one of those Mach 4's. I have to say, it was actually a very nice shave. I'm usually a total skeptic and this is obviously Mad did a great job with this commercial, but there is something to be said for that product. I haven't bothered paying the higher price for it in general, but I do kinda miss it.
First time I'm seeing an ad on hacker news, well disguised.
Interesting! I hadn’t seen that Mad TV ad before. It’s quite reminiscent of this one from The Late Show on Australian TV in 1992. I can totally see people having a similar idea from the same blade escalation process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gStI9ysPrhs
They put the new battery into the other iphones. +6-7 hours battery life over prev. generation.
No one would buy it (by Apple standards) because no one is asking for an over half pound phone. I bet a 17 Pro with a flat back that was all battery would approach a pound.
You can do that easily. You just have to give more money to apple to buy the case and attachable battery pack.
This is not true. None of the Apple cases (or third party cases) give a flush finish to the entire phone. They just add a new, bigger, larger bump below the camera bump which lets the phone basically lie flat. It does not make it easier to smoothly fit into a pocket or anything like that, and the phone is still wobbly while placed face-up on a surface.
Note that hidden front cameras have been available for a while - for example, the Samsung Z Fold 3 (2021). There are some engineering tradeoffs involved with light transmission and image quality that maybe Apple doesn't find favorable.
Interestingly Chinese manufacturers seem to be the main adopters of this tech. For example, the article below has Samsung, Xiaomi, ZTE, Oppo, Vivo (actually, this may just be due to there being many more large Chinese phone manufacturers in general.) https://www.smartprix.com/bytes/under-display-camera-phones/
Samsung is not Chinese.
Samsung is Korean.
Basically nobody cares about front camera performance since its never stellar and always over-ironed digital meh, especially compared to look of display that's constantly in-your-face. The photos taken with it are never taken for highest picture quality, rather just catching a person being somewhere.
The motivations of Apple to keep things as they are for so long, despite strong criticism from all over is one of business mysteries. A little middle finger to its user one may say, not big enough to stir things too much, just a bit.
> The motivations of Apple to keep things as they are for so long, despite strong criticism from all over
The only relevant criticism is their sales figures and revenue numbers. Everything else is just noise.
At some point you run into physics limitations with the camera though. Cameras are a weird bit of tech. In almost all other areas of tech, as we get more advanced, things get smaller - the opposite is true of camera sensors, they get better the larger they are. More light, less noise, better/more pleasing bokeh, etc. Same is true for lenses as well, and as the sensors get bigger, the lenses also must get bigger.
I love the idea behind the pro phone and going all out on cameras, but practically I want the air more. I wish it had an ultrawide, but it is what it is - I have and frequently carry around an actual camera with me most places I go where I'd want to take photos.
We had flush cameras the last time in the iPhone SE 2016. That camera was good enough for my modest needs. It's just that Apple has a different opinion.
You’re both unusual and unprofitable.
Unless you're a pro photographer who really cares about the camera improvements in the last couple of years?
People who routinely take photos in social situations. Camera phones don't have features that appeal to professionals, they do things that appeal to casual photographers.
Seconded.
Pictures of my dog are the main reason I upgraded from a 13 mini to a 16 Pro.
The difference was noticeable and I wouldn't go back.
My wife really likes the cameras on the Pro. The macro for insects and flowers and things mostly - which are useful for her work.
Pro photographer are probably the only one that do not care about this, as they have another option (their very expensive and capable pro camera).
Everyone else takes photos with their phone and yes, everyone wants to take better photos
Pro photographers aren't professionals because they have expensive cameras, it's because they get paid to deliver professional results. A phone camera can be the most usable camera for a result because it's smaller and fits in more places.
Though the camera isn't even the most important equipment, that's lenses/lighting (plus stabilizers, studio backdrops, etc.)
A pro photographer is unlikely to care about their phone camera. Or at least those that are also hobby photographers and bring a camera regularly.
They say the best camera is the one you have with you, and your phone is usually with you. In any case, some professional photographers actually prefer shooting on their phone even for planned, high-profile shoots—perhaps they like its convenience, or that its unassuming nature puts subjects at ease. Or perhaps they find it creatively freeing to be burdened down by only minimal gear.
For example: https://www.gadgetmatch.com/time-covers-shot-iphones/
Yeah, idk. That seems like an awful idea to me. I’m not sure why she would shoot with an iPhone for such a job unless she got paid by Apple. Some practical reasons:
- Such an important moment is something you often wanna blow up in a large/hi-res print.
- An ultrawide lens is suboptimal for portraits and usually makes the face look puffy from the perspective.
- Unless you know the exact color & aesthetic for the cover you want to preserve the raw capture for changes in post to match the vibe.
While I can certainly appreciate the casual and intimate vibe she’s going for, as a pro she could have brought any decent camera with a portrait lens and keeping the shoots equally short without compromising quality and adding risk for the poor layout person who has to work with it later.
I consider myself a hobby photographer, and I love having a phone camera. I can then have the tele glass on for entire hike/session, and do landscapes on the phone. Currently, 2 weeks in, I didn't even touch the landscape glass in it's case.
Anyone who has a good desktop monitor to watch photos on?
> novel approach to camera optics that can completely flatten them into the phone - front camera hidden behind the screen removing the island or inset - dramatically better battery tech density leading to like week long usage
The thing you are looking for is meta lenses, not the company. They could cover the entire back-face of the phone and provide some pretty incredible capabilities. We are not there yet, but I'd expect to see them in the next 20 years.
While we're at it, here's my smartphone wishlist:
- Novel radios that enable true Starlink connection in your pocket for gigabit internet globally
- multi-spectrum imaging for spectroscopy and FLIR-like cameras to get temperature info in images
- Light field camera system for true 3D imaging and synthetic refocusing
- Air quality sensor that can also act as breath analyzer
I, also, would like a Star Trek tricorder.
I was going to come in with a set of reasons why these wouldn't sell, but... I think they could! Air quality fits neatly into Apple's health push, though I could see them making that a Watch feature rather than a phone feature (since your phone lives in your pocket, and quality sensors need time for the readings to stabilize). 3D imaging and synthetic refocusing both have a wow factor that would be easy to get people excited about. The only one I'm unsure of is multi-spectrum imaging; while I suspect pretty much anyone on this forum would jump at that, I don't have a good idea of whether the general population would get excited about temperature data. At the very least, it'd be handy for some kitchen tasks where you need a surface temperature.
The Google Pixel phones have a temperature sensor (1x1 though, not a full camera). I use it a couple times a month...
We also have a Seek phone attachment camera. It's cool but again, don't use it in daily life that much.
> Novel radios that enable true Starlink connection in your pocket for gigabit internet globally
Satellite comms gets very close to face melting tech quite quickly, so I would prefer not to have that in a mobile device....
I would like a light field camera. I've seen some research about using and array of 1mm2 cameras (basically the smallest omnivision module) and one decent module to make a synthetic high res camera. Takes a huge amount of GPU power to get not very interesting results though.
Man, the Oneplus 8 I believe had an 'xray' camera that was super cool, until people realized you could use it to 'see through clothes', and so it was disabled. I have to imagine cool camera tech is being held back to some degree by that still today.
> - multi-spectrum imaging for spectroscopy and FLIR-like cameras to get temperature info in images
Restricted by ITAR. You can buy lowres attachments for it on Aliexpress though.
Why do you need a gigabit connectivity on the phone? Aside question: can you tell the difference between 4K and 8K video on the phone without actually checking?
I just want one that will not break when dropped, run all day, and actually be fast on the 5G we've paid for over and over again.
Also, expand existing capabilities for NFC/RFID/Sub-Ghz/Infrared and add new. I want to use my phone to control my TV, door, office badge, etc.
I want a phone that fits in my hand. Will have to leave the iPhone world in a few years when the 13 mini dies, but from what I can tell android is just as bad.
Took the plunge from an SE 2020 to a 16, and it is noticeable how it is hard to hold in one hand. I could see a world were a foldable iphone would mean a narrower device.
I got a 16 (mostly because of the USB-C) and returned it before the 30day return period was over. It was a noticeable downgrade compared to my SE 2022.
Currently trying to get a solid postmarketOS setup so I can switch back to Linux before the SE goes out of support. Apple really doesn't offer an upgrade path from this device.
My hope is that when the mini is end of auooort that I’ll just stop carrying a phone and will end up not wasting so much time on the internet. It could be a good thing!
I am thinking of trying one of the vertically folding phones with a keyboard case. It reminds me of a BlackBerry. The keyboard means the small square outer screen is a lot more usable by itself.
same.
I'd go back to feature phones if not for BankID and the NFC payment thing.
My phone has replaced my wallet, except I have to keep it charged and it's bulkier.. maybe I just go back to a wallet.
What about a watch for those things?
There is a lot to fix on mobile phones:
- Batteries that charge fast. Batteries that can support 2-3 days of use. Lighter batteries.
- Thinner camera.
- Better screens outdoor.
- No overheating.
- Better software, or a lower bar: fix the bugs.
- Satellite connectivity.
just few things on the top of my head and things that will interest me and justify a new purchase.
iPhones have had iMessage over satellite since I think the 15? I've used it when camping. It's pretty neat!
Features I want: ask siri for the things I look up and it works. "When did the baby fall asleep" instead of opening Nanit. "How many more intervals in this workout" instead of opening TrainerRoad. "What is my next meeting" instead of opening Outlook. This was the promise of the new Siri and it just has yet to really come true.
What needs to be better about screens outdoor? iPhones have had nicely readable screens in bright sunlight for a long time now, including compatibility with sunglasses. Though it would be nice to see this in all other phones too.
Other than that I agree. Especially camera bumps are annoying to me, I would prefer a phone thick enough to make the bump disappear, that would then automatically solve the battery life issue as well.
> Batteries that charge fast. Batteries that can support 2-3 days of use. Lighter batteries.
Battery chemistry isn't there yet. Frankly, we are lucky enough phones don't set themselves ablaze every day - it only takes minuscule errors and you get a Galaxy Note.
> Thinner camera.
Hard to beat physics and if you ask me, "AI" slop is already being overused on cameras to hide the fact that good picture quality requires sensor area and distance for the optics.
> Satellite connectivity.
We're already beginning to see that with Starlink LTE.
You can see the logical conclusion to this phenomenon with vacuum cleaners. Pointless little buttons and switches that don't do much, labels and fancy names for things that any vacuum can do, and aesthetics that prioritize a futuristic form over function.
> There's not much left to "fix" on mobile phones, and no real important features to add.
I'm happy with my iPhone, but it still has a week or so shorter battery life than even a relatively cheap Nokia phone and with all that available space I know something it could be used for.
3d holographic displays, IR keyboards, powerful local llm (so more powerful), Silent-Speech Interface (SSI), more powerful cameras (better than mirrorless cameras, 3d, multi focal length in one image etc).
Oh, there's a LOT that can be improved.
3d UIs don't work, every attempt has failed to reach mass adoption
IR keyboards lack haptic feedback
Aside from enhancedprivacy, a desire to drain your battery, a lack of recurring revenue for local phone LLMs, and functioning when network is inaccessible, what would a local LLM do that a network-enabled feature couldn't?
first two features are gimmicks
I predict people will want an ultra-thin phone, even if it’s just for weight reasons.
We’ll see what the sales numbers are like.
I don't have the impression people care about the weight of phones. Premium phones have metal and glass cases, and in the non-premium market the thing that matters is price.
What matters to me is how comfortable it is to hold and use with one hand. Large and thin phones tend to be bad in that aspect.
> no real important features to add
Niche, but (true) satellite communication. If i understand correctly what we have in the pixel 9/10 is not nearly as useful as having a garmin, never mind the fact that it works basically in europe and US only
If you paid any attention to Chinese phone makers, you wouldn't be writing such comments.
It is nice to know that at least some companies are still trying hard to innovate.
the thin phone is supposedly first step toward the iPhold foldable. they will probably slam 2 iphone air sandwiched together for the fold so this is the first step i guess
Here's my hot take: A small metal loop for tying a wrist strap to.
All other cameras have wrist straps as a safety feature. From flimsy ribbons on the smallest (smartphone-sized) to padded leather on the largest. They were common on feature phones too. But smartphone makers want people to drop their phones, so people would have to buy new ones, I suppose.
You could get a case with a wrist loop, you say? Not on any of Apple's cases, anyway.
Why not put the loop on the case?
iPhone could always use a camera that's not embarrassingly worse than every Samsung and Pixel phone's camera
There is ample room to extend, but it costs money or the designers are in a bubble or they are afraid to innovate. The worst is that they now copied Pixel's ugly island :DDDDD. Oh dear god. At least it doesn’t look like some brutalist artist’s fever dream, just like we've seen it on the Pixel phones.
I agree with you, you're still going to put it in a fat case to protect the camera.
Personally, I think thin is just "omg look at my engineering". blah blah.
I found the (expensive!) bullstrap case to be helpful - thin and slippery enough to slide out of a pocket easily, well engineered to protect the camera.
But really, I think the iphone 13 mini was the most useful/practical application of apple's engineering.
I think a mini-sized 3-camera bulge phone would be great.
Never once used a case in 12+ yrs of iphone ownership and only cracked a screen once. Think there are a lot of people out there like me. Many people are way too anal about an every day utilitarian device.
For me, i use a case because the damn phones are slippery as hell.
Yeah I'll never understand how anyone can use an iPhone without it being in a case, it's just not practical or comfortable to hold without a case adding grip.
Well, I'm in the exact opposite category - I don't get why people use cases.
Surely its obvious - grip and protection. Fairly well established that they're slippy, and dropping them means gouges being taken out of the frame, or if you're really unlucky, cracked glass.
Pixel 9 is so extremely slippery that one can't help but think they designed it to need a case. I never bought a case prior to Pixel 9 but the thing is like a wet bar of soap.
Yeah when my last phone case broke I tried carrying it nude and that was what immediately struck me. So I bought some adhesive rubber knurl stickers for the edges but they wouldn't stay on because my Pixel 7 has a curved edge - would probably work well on a phone with a flat edge.
I stuck on a MagSafe metal sticker thing on the back and that little bit of greebling makes me feel a bit better holding it.
My nexus 4 had rubberized sides and it felt so nice in the hand. Been downhill ever since.
Same here. Silicon cases or those made from the material that looks like pressed leather dust were always a life saver for me
How often do you drop your phone on the ground? For me it’s probably once a week.
Pre-kids maybe twice a year. Post-kids maybe twice a month.
The last phone I dropped was an iPhone 3G. People wonder why I don’t like to use a case.
I'd say approximately once a year. I have been using a case with my current one (a 15 Pro), but didn't with any of my previous ones, back to the iPhone 3G. I've broken one screen.
that is wild. are you just very clumsy? i drop mine maybe once a year.
> that is wild. are you just very clumsy? i drop mine maybe once a year.
"Wild" seems like a stretch. I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to believe that some people drop their phones occasionally, and it's a reasonable concern when it's likely to be with you everywhere you go.
Hearing someone drops their phone on average 50 times more often than i do i find wild. Good points in the other comments though as I have never used cases on phones before so i'm likely subconsciously more careful with them. Also typically in slim fit jeans pockets which are nearly impossible to accidentally drop out of.
Once I was getting off my jeans to do the Royal Squat and they decided to barf my phone. It fell like from 30 cm high, hit the ground exactly on the corner. Screen cracked edge to edge.
My SE is so hilariously slippery it falls off of flat surfaces
Those reasons do seem likely to lend themselves toward infrequent droppage.
> Hearing someone drops their phone on average 50 times more often than i do i find wild
;) wait till you hear someone's completely incomprehensible ADHD story
Not sure. I rarely fall when climbing rocks, so I’m not a total butterfingers. I often take out my phone to use as a flashlight, angle mirror etc and leave it balanced precarious places. Never had a phone break in probably hundreds of ground falls (always using a case). Since it’s never broken, I don’t expend effort to prevent it from falling.
Edit: sibling comment is correct, sketchy pockets of athletic shorts are a major offender. Actually it bothers me way more when my car keys fall out of those.
This is a characteristic mostly of the clothes people wear. I wear athletic shorts often and my phone slides out of those pockets all the time.
It sounds crazy, but it turns out the finish on the phone makes a huge difference.
I never used a case until I got a Galaxy S9; that phone was like a greased eel. Went from dropping my phone zero times in 8 years to 5 times in one week.
Once a year seems a lot more wild. I drop my phone at least once on most days.
I'm the same way but that makes the bulge even more annoying. They're designing it to put a case on it.
The thickness should be from the front to the back of the camera lens, not to the thinnest point they can find.
The case is part of the utilitarianism. I need to attach my phone to a bike mount. I use a Peak Design case that has a locking attachment point in the centre to securely fasten the phone onto the handlebars.
I would gladly ditch the case if Apple had a strong mounting system integrated into the phone (MagSafe has nowhere near the resistance to shear forces sufficient to hold a phone over bumps on a bike.)
I suppose I am looking for the phone equivalent of a camera thumbscrew mount. If Apple iterated on MagSafe to include an actual mechanical fixture as part of the attachment, I would buy that phone right away so I can avoid using these crappy pieces of rubber/plastic that degrade so much more quickly in appearance than the phone frame rails.
Same, I get random “raw dogging it” comments from strangers much more often than I drop my phone even since having kids. Ironically via raw dogging it.
Same. Cases are like putting shoes on a dog. You can do that, but it looks dumb and the dog will probably be fine without them.
Unless you live in somewhere like Phoenix, Arizona. While look dumb you probably don't want your dog to burn its paws.
I bought a new pixel, bought a case that had slow shipping. Only a week, what could go wrong? I dropped it flat on the screen on a tile floor.
Cases are dirt cheap, if you're paying over $30 for one you're probably overpaying. The expected value of a screen repair, not only the cost but your time makes it a no-brainer.
I think you might be an outlier. My own anecdote is that literally everyone I know who doesn't use a case (albeit a small number of people) has cracked their phone at some point while I've known them.
Same here, ditched cases a few years ago and never been happier. It’s a tool, not an heirloom.
I think a lot of people just drop stuff more than you do.
I definitely drop stuff more than GP does. It sucks.
My phone case has saved my phone many times.
Heck, my bike helmet has saved my head at least 3 times.
> My phone case has saved my phone many times.
Survivorship bias /s How do you know it wouldn't have survived without case? I drop my phone on nearly daily basis and since 2007 only cracked one iPhone screen.
Very true, actually, you're right! But given that my screen has cracked once while I was using a case, I can't imagine it would be better without a case.
I did do cosmetic damage to the non-screen parts of some phones while not using a case, though.
I'm convinced that "area" where screen breaks without a case, but doesn't break with a case is very narrow. In my mind, the main reasons to have a case: personalize, rugged cases for appropriate environment (car shops, construction sites), improve grip in certain "phone shape" + hand size combinations.
> I did do cosmetic damage to the non-screen parts of some phones while not using a case, though.
I don't care about those for various reasons.
I wonder if some of this is also a generational thing? I'm in my mid-late-40s and grew up in a world where electronics were pretty fragile (and water basically was a death sentence). Heck, even getting DOA hardware wasn't so uncommon as to be surprising when it happened.
The idea of letting my phone drop unprotected (or getting it wet like I see some people do) is horrible.
You did forget one big use case for cases: money laundering. There's no way all the physical stores and kiosks that only sell cases are actually making money...
Well, I'm in my mid-30s, if it helps. I remember my first 5 phones would split into multiple pieces with sim always being ejected when dropped. They still would work after put back together, tho.
It's really more "I got extended warranty, and I'm not afraid to use". I live in LA, so I'm never too far from the nearest store I can replace mine. All data important backed up. Dropping a phone for me will result at most in a minor-to-medium annoyance.
I only fear of getting the phone too wet because battery disconnect is practically impossible today.
Same, and I've never had to replace a phone or screen once... I wouldn't need two hands to count the number of times I've even had a scare.
People need to get a grip. ;)
> you're still going to put it in a fat case to protect the camera.
But a thinner phone still means the end result is thinner in a case.
I didn't understand the appeal of thin phones until I used them in cases.
Average thickness phone + case = bulky phone.
Thin phone + case = normal thickness phone.
That's what makes them great. It's normal thickness with all the protection.
Yeah, super thin phones that require bulky cases have never made sense to me. Why not make tough phones that don't require a case?
Because if the case gets damaged you can easily replace it.
People would still put a case on a bulky phone to protect resale or trade in value.
A super thin phone doesn't require a super bulky case, it requires just as much case as a person would normally use, resulting in a smaller overall profile.
I'd probably still go pro because I care more about the camera than the size.
They're sort of doing that with Ceramic Shield, and the new bumper case for the Air.
I don’t get the idea of putting glass on the back of this phone. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just have metal there so there are less things to crack?
Metal interferes with wireless charging.
Another alternative is hard plastic, but it doesn't "feel premium"
I think the reality is that your phone will always encounter something that can damage it (unless it's made out of diamond), and a case lets you easily replace the damaged part.
Just subjectively, I remember having a super scratched iPod and it just felt kind of ratty every time you looked at it. Meanwhile, a phone in a leather case gets kind of a patina that improves with age. It is kind of sad though, I got a really pretty blue iPhone and you wouldn't even know it because it's completely covered by a case.
I'd rather see phones that aren't perfectly flat but instead have proper built-in mounting things. Give me some screw holes to attach a set of 4 bumpers to the corners, and a camera mount thread hole in the bottom.
Honestly, it sounds really compelling to me. I do a lot of stuff outside - search and rescue, climbing, etc, and I need a rugged case for that, but having a thin, light phone when I'm at home or doing something with less chance to damage the phone is pretty nice, so thin phone + case is the best of both worlds.
> I agree with you, you're still going to put it in a fat case to protect the camera.
The Apple cases aren't flat on the back. They have a rim around the camera bump (and they create a rim around the front of the phone, too). The rear rim is slightly taller than the lens bezels (not sure if I used the right word there), so they don't touch the surface the phone rests on. I place my phone+case on the desk face-down because the camera bump and the wobble it creates when resting the phone back down triggers some minor irritation for me. The slight rim around the front of the phone keeps the screen from touching the surface. All of this would be nicer if the phone were flat across the back.
The metal case and toughened glass mean I don't really need the case most the time. I once dropped an older model onto a concrete floor such that it landed on a corner, shattering the screen, so I'm more risk averse with them now.
I've only broken the iPhone camera once in more than a decade of using iPhones. And that's when I was in IKEA and a box of unassembled furniture fell onto it.
If you really want protection, the screen is still more fragile than the camera.
You escaped the infinite IKEA?
iPhone 13 mini pro was the best phone they ever made.
There was never a "Pro" version of it. I have the Mini (13). I plan to ride it into the sunset.
I'm going with the iPhone 5.
I’d go with the 5S - the 5 with the first 64-bit phone CPU and some other improvements (especially TouchID). In black, of course. (I think I still have one somewhere.)
I'm going to preorder one because I want a light phone and a large screen. This will be the lightest iPhone in years while also having a bigger screen than most. I dropped from the Pro Max to the Pro last year because I was tired of how much it hurt when I dropped my phone on my face.
I don't have much call for most of the camera system, and my battery life on my Pro is just fine. I have plenty of chargers typically, and for emergencies or times I know I'm going to be out I could potentially get the battery pack.
I basically never use cases on my iPhone, and at most will maybe use an ultra-thin one or some sort of structure adhered to the plateau just to make it flat across so as to not rock on a table.
> I dropped from the Pro Max to the Pro last year because I was tired of how much it hurt when I dropped my phone on my face.
Now this, good people, is a real use case. If it seems like an edge case to you, I guarantee Apple’s design and product people know of — and optimize for — use cases much more rare.
But apparently they don't engineer for smaller hands, one hand usage or fits comfortably in a pocket when you're running
I'd rather optimize my $20 running shorts around my $1000 phone than the other way around tbh. No phone is comfortable in the pocket when running though, I used to use an arm strap and more recently just take the watch.
I carry two phones on me and if I run with just my SE it is comfortable enough to run with
But its not about optimisation it's about freedom. I don't enjoy having to baby around a lumbering 6 inch phone. I want my phone to optimise around me being able to not worrying about a brick sagging in my shorts.
The horizontal rear waistband zipper pocket on Patagonia Strider Pro running shorts genuinely makes my phone not noticeable at all during runs, unlike any other shorts I’ve tried. My experience is limited to smaller phones (6S, 12 Mini) without any cases, though.
They did but no one bought that phone.
> no one
Funny way of spelling "millions of people"
It wasn't enough for Apple's standards and manufacturing optimization. But yes people bought them.
It also hurts when I drop the iPad mini on my face. In fact, I was considering getting a Pro Max to replace both a iPhone Pro and iPad mini combo but figured it might too big of a compromise.
I wonder if anyone has successfully gone down this path.
Maybe it's just me but I do semi-regularly have my phone slip out of my hand and hit me in the face while in bed, haha.
Oh for real. It sounds stupid, but I’ve done stupider things. And I’ve done them again and again. Any good design needs to account for dumb monkeys :)
>> I dropped from the Pro Max to the Pro last year because I was tired of how much it hurt when I dropped my phone on my face.
I never had this issue with my phone but it was a big reason for moving from an iPad to a Kindle for reading in bed... Dropping an iPad on my face (or even chest) == ouch.
I use an old iPod Touch to read in bed, it doesn't hurt at all! Shame they stopped selling them, and it has stopped getting OS updates.
I never dropped a phone on my face. How does that even happen?
Laying in bed/couch with the phone over your face and arms outstretched. Eventually your arms get tired or a muscle twitches and you drop the phone on your face.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/text-in-bed-drop-phone-on-fac...
I read or do a crossword in bed as part of my go to sleep ritual. Sometimes it slips out my hand though usually it just hits my chin or chest. I can easily see how it falls on someone's face though.
It's a weird cyclical thing.
Samsung galaxy s2 was a super small super thin phone, 15 years ago almost, which still had user replaceable battery, microsd, 3.5mm, gps, and everything most people would expect smartphone to have.
We then spent a decade making phones 0.2" bigger each generation as if that's an advancement - I.e. As if we couldn't have made them big in the first place (all the while removing physical features).
Then we started making them thin again, as if we couldn't have made them thin before.
It makes me think of cars - VW golf used to be a small car, then it kept growing... So they released Polo... Which kept growing so they made lupo... But each year my entire life they have ads like "6 inches bigger than before" or "10cm more legroom than competition", as if there haven't been small and large cars before.
Grumble Grumble, seen it all before, kids get off my lawn :-)
I agree to an extent. Most phones back then had no water protection. They also didn't last long so most people carried extra batteries which sucks. Honestly, I'd welcome the whole non replaceable battery if I could completely submerge my phone in water. Maybe when they get rid of the charging port.
You can submerge recent iPhones completely in water for few years now. Every year I make some quite fun and surprisingly looking underwater pictures with mine, that's just fine afterwards given I'm still able to write this comment on it.
Reminds me of the fun times of dropping the phone and having the phone go to one side, battery to the other and back cover to a third place.
Pseudo-scientifically, it always seemed that worked to dissipate impact kinetic energy - I dropped my s2 and s5 a million times and picked up the parts with no damage. The more modern phones don't fall apart, they just crack :-(
Easy mid-way product realization from research they had to do for folding phones.
Yeah makes sense to do so when the R&D is practically already paid for.
It's about the size and even more importantly the weight. I like small, light phones (I currently have the iphone 13 mini). I want something small that I can slip into my pocket and it's not this brick bouncing around as take a walk.
Although, I'm not a big phone user though, mainly use it when I'm outside of the house. In the house, I'll just use my laptop.
I'm also pretty happy with my iPhone 13 mini and loathing having to upgrade to something much larger.
For reference, the 13 mini has a 5.4" screen, and the new-gen iPhones are 6.3", 6.5", and 6.8". Pixel 10 is 6.3" as well.
iPhone 5 was the most perfect size ever and was about 0.3" shorter than the 13 mini, though it had a much smaller screen due to the bezel: https://www.gsmarena.com/size-compare-3d.php3?idPhone1=5685&...
Exactly in the same boat.
Apple offering is underwhelming to say the least and way too expensive for my use case.
I want to go Android anyway, I'm too disillusioned with Apple currently, I'm tired of dealing with their predatory behavior. But there aren't a lot of decent options there as well but at least you can get it much cheaper, so that's something, I guess.
Previously Apple was the provider of hardware which made the right compromise to allow specific/focused use case, they called it "taste" in a sea of nonsense with bullshit "features". But now it feels like Apple has joined in on the nonsense and is actually leading the pack; which is why the price feels bad. If you are going to make the same crap as everyone else with the same set of bad compromises, I'm not going to overpay for it.
I think this is why Apple "AI" got so much backlash. If they didn't make it or at least market it as heavily as they, did it would have been fine, but it was just the same crap as everyone else, just worse and more expensive. They could have released the exact same phone, just shaving a 100 dollar and have been acclaimed and made more money that way I believe.
Me too, will probably keep the 13 mini for like a decade
It's 17% heavier than the iphone 13 mini.
Source: https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-13-mi...
With a much bigger screen and better battery life.
But lighter than any iPhone since except maybe an SE.
No mention of the actual weight here but a quick search says 165 grams. Not as light as I expected.
Even more annoyingly, the bump is non-uniform with lens extruding even further from the entire bump. I have been annoyed by this design ever since they started with it. The last phone the design of which brought joy for me was my OnePlus 3T - thin and light. It also had the camera bump though which I would gladly sacrifice even if it meant a lower quality camera. On the other hand, I suppose they could just insert a thicker battery and make the whole phone a bit thicker but remove the bump.
> Can someone that is actually interested in this explain the appeal?
It’s light and the thinness is just fun. I’m not putting a case on it. And I really don’t understand why a phone needs to sit flat on a table—if anything, the angle is a plus.
It’s only 12 grams lighter than my iPhone XS. And it’s 20 grams heavier than my Pixel 4a. For a product called “air”, It doesn’t even succeed at being light-weight.
Of course, the iPhone 5 weighed significantly less than either of those! The iPhone Air has a larger screen than all three of those. I don't see what your comparison has to do with anything. The Air is a light phone relative to its screen size. It is also an incredibly thin phone.
I'm probably not getting one, but I don't see the point of comparing it to physically smaller phones.
17 Air - 2025 - 156.2mm x 74.7mm x 5.64mm, 165g
Sony Xperia Z2 - 2014 - 172mm x 266mm x 6.4 mm - 439g
Sony made nearly equally thin but lighter devices 11 years ago.
> Sony Xperia Z2 - 2014 - 172mm x 266mm x 6.4 mm - 439g
Again, not nearly the same screen size, so weight is irrelevant. But also, 439g? Wow! If that number wasn’t completely wrong, that would be impressive.
6.4mm is nowhere near as thin as 5.6mm, but I’m actually seeing 8.2mm for thickness on reliable websites, not 6.4mm: https://m.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_z2-6144.php
Did an LLM hallucinate those specs that you quoted? I honestly don’t know how the thickness and weight you quoted could be that far off if you did the research yourself.
But, even if you were right, which you don’t seem to be, it’s all moot. No one is cross-shopping a 2014 phone to a 2025 phone. But even if they were, the real numbers speak for themselves.
It's not wrong. I own 2 and we haven't caught up. These were 3G compatible as well.
At least for me something so thin feels better with a bit of heft. And if you read the article the idea was to use any space saved for the battery. Seems pretty slick
Higher density makes objects feel a lot more premium than their less dense counterparts.
Flat doesn't seem best to you? Next best for me would be a symmetrical bump. But the asymmetrical bump (I think) all iPhones have seems the worst of all alternatives. This results in that bad restaurant table wobble feeling.
The Air and 17 Pro have symmetrical bumps.
The lenses aren't symmetrical though. These phones are still going to be super wobbly.
That said, it looks like the clear case for the air has a plastic ridge to protect the lens and keep the phone from wobbling
> if anything, the angle is a plus
Right. I am sure flatness would have Revolutionary™ had Apple decided to make it rather flat (of course with the "First Time Again In An iPhone™" tag).
I currently have a 14 pro. I use a MagSafe wallet with it (holds three cards). This allows me a not crazy, but fairly uniform, thick single object I have to grab when I leave the…anywhere. While this might not work for everyone, it works great for me.
I’m potentially considering the air because wasted z-axis space the camera bump creates, I’d use with a MagSafe wallet again, so it wouldn’t be wasted for me. I like that the built in battery is likely sufficient for a day of my use, but can be easily extended with the MagSafe battery on days where I know I’ll be using more juice, e.g. when traveling. None of these things are unique to the air; instead the overall thickness which results from my usage is the differentiator, from which I think I might derive value.
I'm not an apple user, not into their design choices... but if i had a choice, i'd much prefer a phone as thick as the camera with a 3x the battery capacity.
I'd even go with a millimeter or two thicker to have the backplate attached by screws and the battery easily user replacable after a few years.
Several brands have released an ultra thin version of their phone, followed by a foldable version of their phone. One phone depth is good for just about everyone, but you can't double that up, you'd get a phone that's too bulky for modern tastes.
It stands to reason the iFold/iPaper/iSheet/whatever Apple will call it is drawing closer now that Samsung and several Chinese brands have pretty much solved the design for Apple.
Bearing in mind I haven't looked at specs yet...
I be been struggling with the 14 pro's weight. So that would mainly be my interest here.
Also almost certainly less likely to get obsoleted by some AI feature given the higher end GPU cores.
I bought a 14 Pro when it came out and returned it for a 13 mini because it was too heavy.
They switched the frame from stainless steel to titanium the next year which made the Pro phones noticeably lighter. And now this year the Pros are aluminum like the non-Pros have been for years, which is also pretty light.
The 3 big camera sensors certainly don't help with the weight either, but the good news is they did seem to recognize they were getting to heavy with the 14 Pro.
Sadly the 17 pro is the same exact weight as the 14 pro.
Yeah, the 13pro is 204g and in my opinion pretty uncomfortable to one-hand. The 17pro according to the website is 206g :\
Damn, I didn't realize they worked their way back up.
iPhone status symbol without having to haul around a huge bulky phone.
Most users probably use/need 10% of what a max pro iPhone offers, but they want 100% of the max pro status.
Now they can keep the status without needing to carry a chonker.
The idea of an iPhone still as a status symbol in 2025 seems strange to me. I understood it in 2008. They are so commonplace and also not really that expensive where it is a financial flex like some watch that cost 10k+ or something.
“Sixty-three percent of adults said they would cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense exclusively using cash or its equivalent, unchanged from 2022 and 2023 but down from a high of 68 percent in 2021.”
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
$999 is a lot of money.
Hardly anyone in the US pays full price for the iPhone up front. They either use 0% carrier financing - usually with offsetting credits - or through Apple.
I don’t understand what that survey question is supposed to be indicating. I have lots of disposable income, and by default I spend using a credit card.
US net worth at the 25th percentile is >$20k, it’s not the case that 32% of people literally don’t have the wealth to afford a $400 expense.
net worth isn't cash flow. the point of that question is that many Americans actually can't just pay off an unexpected $400 charge.
Do you have the question wording? I suspect it’s not measuring what this discussion assumes.
From https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2024-suppl... :
A and c count as "cash or cash equivalents".Median American has $8k in a checking acct.
Median American household not person, but yes.
Net worth is a bad comparison. It’s easy for people to have $20k in assets but very little cash on hand.
> $999 is a lot of money.
Which almost no one pays up front or at all in the US with the carrier deals and trade ins.
There sure are a lot of comments in this thread pulling out all sorts of random and arbitrary statistics that have no connection with what is actually being discussed here. I’m finding that very strange, frankly.
You must be new here.
Standard HN bikeshedding.
Installments?
Not when you will buy the phone on credit which many people interpret as getting it for free.
Or those god-forsaken monthly payment plans that exclusively exist to get people who don't know how to budget racking up more debt
0% financing on Apple card, 3-8% annual inflation the last 4 years, you'd be dumb not to take it
The people monthly payment plans target are not able to afford the thing because they bought 30 other things on monthly payment plans in the past year and can't keep track of all the monthly payments they're owing until it's too late. That's the intent and why they're so popular now. It's why DoorDash is getting in on the action, so people will buy a Taco Bell delivery with a tempting price tag of only $4 at the time of purchase, multiple times a week for months until you owe hundreds of dollars.
Regardless of who they target, I'm taking free financing any day of the week. It's like credit cards which I've received huge value from, and I've never carried a balance in over 30 years of use.
They are offering 0% when treasuries are yielding 4%, of course I’m going to take it.
Like many other things, these services work well _if you already have the money and don’t actually need it_
A payment plan for a phone makes perfect sense if the phone is capital equipment that makes you money.
You can explain it to them and they don't care. I happen to know more than a few.
> They are so commonplace and also not really that expensive where it is a financial flex like some watch that cost 10k+ or something.
I definitely agree about them being just about the most banal stupid toy you could spend the money on, but it's still a lot of money to a lot of people despite the cost of basic necessities making it not the huge amount that it used to be. I cringe at paying over $450, considering that every new model of phone since like 2015 hasn't really done anything worth significantly more money.
It's just a proxy for people to complain about the price. People will complain about a few hundred dollars in a phone price differences, even though it will be the one product they use more than anything else they own. And then not blink spending a couple extra grand on some car features/performance they use rarely or spend a thousand dollars a year on lattes.
I smile every time I get to drive my car. Hate the phone every other time I pick it up.
I used to find driving quite pleasant, except when everyone else was doing it.
I like my car and my phone. I guess I am particular about what I buy, and I don't buy what I don't need or wont like.
I think it's -mostly- an age thing, and you simply matured out of it. For the most part.
I say that because I feel similarly, but my out of college coworkers rib me for not having an iPhone. One even commented he'd probably never text me in real life, to which I of course replied that I'd never want him to text me in real life.
Further, in the US, non-iPhone have terrible resale value, so the monthly cost of iPhone can be cheaper
Part of the resale value is the better long-term support Apple provides.
They are between 1000 to 1500 USD over here in EU. Pretty much only very well off people are buying current gen iPhones. Many people have older models. We also don't have any Apple lock-in culture, so there is much less incentive to go out of your way to get iPhone specifically.
You're in the US.
Is iPhone still viewed as a status symbol?
Genuine question - maybe I'm too in my own bubble but it seems like iPhone just completely dominates the market and is viewed as the "default" phone, which to me implies status quo, not luxury.
> maybe I'm too in my own bubble
Is it a green bubble or a blue bubble? :)
The Pro is still seen by some as a "flex" by some, visibly having all three lenses. The Air is likely just a more visible flex, thus it will probably sell well.
I'm an Australian in my 40's almost everyone in my immediate circle (family, friends, work-peers) has an Android, at least in my world iPhone is a minority.
I grew up with Nokia phones all I want out of my phone is something cheap and rugged with a decent battery life.
> I'm an Australian in my 40's almost everyone in my immediate circle (family, friends, work-peers) has an Android, at least in my world iPhone is a minority.
It's very particular to your group I think as I am in the same country, similar age, and yet it's the complete opposite for me.
But none of us care because it's not the US and nobody is using some phone exclusive messaging service enough to care about what phone anyone else is using.
You are in a bubble: the anglosphere. In most of the world, the iPhone does not dominate the market.
Japan, Taiwan and the Nordic countries have higher iPhone market share than the Anglosphere IIRC.
Yeah but not because people can't afford it.
Uh? I live in a first world country (Spain) and the minimum wage is lower than the base iPhone Air price.
Of course a lot of people can not afford it.
There are many things that are expensive that are nevertheless not particularly seen as “status symbols”, in the sense of commonly used to publicly display one’s status/wealth/whatever.
Well, I can tell you that in my country, a significant portion of the population sees it as a status symbol.
I replaced my old iPhone XR with a brand new 16 this year, not because anything was wrong with it (even the battery was OK), but I wanted to see what the changes brought.
I was quite surprised that other than the much better battery, USB-C, and much better camera, and sometimes faster speed, the old one was holding up quite well.
You can get an old iPhone XR for 100 EURish, in decent condition. I really have no idea what model year iPhone's others have.
USA minimum wage isn't much higher than iPhone Air price.
$7.25/hour = $1,160/month for 8 hours of daily work, monday to friday.
iPhone Air costs $1000 according to https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare
Americans don't earn the minimum wage. You're talking about less than 1/2 of 1% of the working population. It's a nearly worthless metric (other than as a political reference to how long it has been since the minimum wage has been increased and how far behind the median it is).
it’s just another of the many many comments in this thread where people throw out statistics to make a point, but those statistics are typically detached from reality or not even focused on the main topic of the conversation.
That's precisely why people need a phone focused on design and engineering to stand out.
> Is iPhone still viewed as a status symbol?
In wealthy circles, no. Anywhere else, yes, it’s a thousand-dollar device.
I mean literally half the people I know under the age of 25 have iPhones in my country. How can it be a status symbol when it’s the default phone for most people?
In the end it's the same thing, but in many countries where iPhones are popular, it's more of the "anti status symbol" effect happening. An iPhone is not a status symbol anymore per se, however NOT having one is the thing that gives you a "lower" status.
There’s status in not being one of the android paupers.
Yes, only by people who own an iPhone. It's a special kind of bubble.
I bought a new iPhone 13 for $200 a few months ago and I love it. It does everything I need by far. Newer iPhones take better pictures, yes, but the 13 is still no slouch in that regard.
I have my iPhone 13 Pro Max for 4 years now and the only problem I really have is storage and the battery.
I'm debating if I just replace the battery and let this run another year... since the iPhone X I haven't seen any major upgrades still that feel like they'll matter in my day-to-day life.
A flip would be different...
I'm still rocking a four year-old Note 20 Ultra. I bought it new the week after they announced the Note 21 Ultra when it was clear they were dropping expandable storage. So it's five year-old tech and I can't see any compelling reason to upgrade. It still looks practically new despite never using a case and dropping it dozens of times. It runs all the apps I use quite fast and there's nothing slow about it.
I keep looking at new flagship launches and I keep not seeing any new capability, feature or performance that would make a noticeable difference to me. I replaced the battery myself last year and generally keep the OS clean, not letting app cruft accrue. I'm not a luddite nor am I price sensitive. I remain ready and willing to buy a high-end flagship phone the moment it does anything new I actually care about. It still gets regular security updates even though a couple years ago Samsung stopped updating it to their latest customized version of Android. And despite looking, I still haven't seen any new Android OS or Samsung One UI feature that would matter to me. Bottom line: I don't think it's you or me, I think it's that phones are mature tech and unless you have a specific use case or it breaks, there's just not much reason to upgrade.
I haven't felt compelled to give up my S23 Ultra. The 10X lens is just too useful, and I enjoy the way they did the S-Pen. My previous S21 Ultra is still in use and still going strong.
Definitely replace the battery, it will make a huge difference in your everyday use.
can't you get 1tb?
where from ?
> haul around a huge bulky phone
> chonker
Can't see the specs for the iPhone Air but it looks much larger than my SE 2022. I wish they would bring that form factor back. Obviously not as powerful as bigger iPhones so not useful for posing purposes.
I think you're making up a non existent issue.
On the other hand, the cameras on plateaus are real issues because they don't lay normally and the cameras are very easy to scratch.
So I don't get this. Yes, my N=1 experience, but: I don't put my phone in a case, and only use a screen protector. I have a Pixel 8 (arguably one of the more notoriously ridiculous camera bumps), but have of course had other phones with camera bumps before this. I am generally careful with my phone, but of course I've dropped it, knocked it off a table onto the floor, etc. But I've never ever scratched the camera. Have I just been lucky, or are they harder to scratch than one would expect?
Is there, in your experience, a group of people that consider a phone a substantial status symbol?
(Edit: Should have refreshed I see. Feel free to ignore.)
It doesn’t always have to be status. Apple is very good at withholding features from low end models to ensure everyone has that one thing they want that makes them go for the pro variant.
No one could tell the difference between the Max Pro and the cheaper Plus model in the previous years or even the SE.
The reason for the Max Pro is the larger screen and better battery life
Since when are iPhones status symbols?
Even the very poor all seem to have new-ish iPhones.
Also not sure what you're on about with "huge bulky phone".
Is it a status symbol when more than half of the people in all the cities around you in your country have an iPhone?
iPhone hasnt been a status symbol in many years. Its as mainstream as a Toyota Corolla.
Umm most people buy them for the hardware. On paper my 16e sounds really good but is crap compared to the 17 pros cameras plus photonic engine. Apple gimps software in non pros. I don't take alot of pics so I don't really care for the pro. Id rather get an old DSLR.
If you just want a camera get a mirrorless. They're smaller than DSLRs and easier to adapt lenses to. If you don't care about lenses Fujifilm cameras are probably the most fun to use.
(But if you use it rarely it's better to just rent one, and then you can get a really nice one.)
Optics is not going to be "solved" by anything but some fascinating kind of metamaterial.
Taking a peek at the research: “While flat-optics cameras have transitioned from theoretical concepts to high-fidelity laboratory prototypes, significant interdisciplinary R&D—spanning nanofabrication, materials science, computational imaging, and systems integration—is required to realize commercial flat camera modules for next-generation smartphones.
Recent breakthroughs have produced multilayer metalenses only ~0.5 mm thick that can focus unpolarized broadband light across several discrete wavelengths.
Dual-Pixel Coded Aperture (CADS): End-to-end learned amplitude masks on dual-pixel sensors have shown >1.5 dB PSNR gains in all-in-focus images and 5–6% depth accuracy improvements in DSLR, endoscope, and dermoscope prototypes.
Color-Coded Aperture Imaging: Single-lens, single-frame depth sensing via color-coded apertures has been demonstrated on DSLR and preliminary smartphone modules with depth map extraction sufficient for basic AR and portrait modes.”
Glad to hear the research has caught up with this... checks notes... nearly 20-year-old paper from MIT: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1457515.1409087
iPhone 4S has camera without bump and makes perfect photos. I don't understand why they are doing that ugly design.
I tried iphone 16 pro max and cameras are just amazing.
GRIN and micromachined Fresnel lenses are both flat. I wouldn’t be surprised if apple is working at least on the latter
In the far future the camera will dictate the physical dimensions of the device and the display will be entirely virtual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_and_Bubble
There's nowhere to go with phones than thinner if you aren't doing folding. Thinness has practical value but past a certain point, probably not very much.
Marketing will create hype and desire and the feeling of exclusiveness. Those will lead to sales.
Not every big change is an actual innovation. A lot if just engineering sales via these methods, which aren't very different than fashion, jewelry, or luxury cars.
I might get one because I'm always a bit forced to follow the curve and can't afford to look 'backwards' or 'old fashioned' to stakeholders in the workplace, people in my life, etc who's good side I need to stay on who believe in the above dynamic.
> there is nowhere to go with phones than thinner
Umm, smaller? We don't need thinner, we need smaller.
Didn't Apple cancel its smaller phones because of lack of sales?
I'm told that was the reason, which is a shame because I would continue to buy the "mini" version if they kept making them. Sadly the only dimension Apple seems interested in reducing is the thickness.
In absolute terms they sold plenty of Mini phones, around 12 million per year.
Proportionally though that was only 3% of their sales.
Because China.
Ben Thompson (Stratechery) has been documenting for almost a decade that the biggest driver of new phone sales in China is a new form factor.
I’m sure that might be the same in other markets where an iPhone is a status symbol. It’s definitely not one in the US where 60% of phone buyers have iPhones.
> I’m sure that might be the same in other markets where an iPhone is a status symbol. It’s definitely not one in the US where 60% of phone buyers have iPhones.
It can still be a status symbol to have the newest phone. That’s imo the only reason for changing camera alignments between generations. So people (who know & care) can see that you have the newest model.
They changed the camera alignment purportedly so it would be at a distance to take better video for the Vision Pro.
But how is it a status symbol in the US is $25 a month between the SE and the iPhone 17 Pro Max?
On the other hand, the iPhone Air is eSIM-only, and carriers in China generally don't support eSIM (with one exception apparently [0]).
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/09/iphone-air-esim-china-u...
Apple basically forced US carriers to get their act together when they shipped the iPhone 14 series as eSIM-only domestically. Sounds like the rest of the world is about to get kicked into gear.
I’m surprised the Australian iPhone 17 still isn’t esim only considering all the carriers support it already.
The major carriers perhaps, but support among the MVNOs isn't universal. Number sharing support for smart watch usage is almost non-existent among the MVNOs in Australia.
Eg. ALDI (yes, the German supermarket chain run a MVNO in Australia), have been saying esim support in the future since 2021.
In the US, the overlap between people who would buy the latest iPhones and the people who use MVNOs I would suspect is practically non existent.
The MVNOs here mostly market older, cheaper iPhones.
China Unicom was also the launch carrier for iPhone when it came out in 2007-8. It was the only carrier to support GMS channels similar to the ones in the west (China Mobile didn't, these days Apple supports chinese cell phone channels on both carriers with the same chip).
This phone has the highest screen area to weight ratio except for the Galaxy S25 Edge.
And this is good or matters to customers because?
There’s no rational answer to this.
They want thin phones for the same reason they like fast cars. The same reason that ice cream tastes good.
Why do (some) people like jazz music?
Phones are the leading cause of RSI.
The Osborne 1 weighed ~25 pounds. I'm glad computer makers have put in the work to make computers faster and lighter over time.
Easier to drop in the toilet?
That's a great piece of marketing straight out of Apple's Big Number Book of Important Numbers, but _who the fuck cares_ ?
Aside from a tiny amount of nerds needing post hoc rationalisation as to why they blew $1500 on a gimmick, absolutely nobody will go looking for a phone and consider grams/mm² as an important measure.
The thinness makes it easier to grip around the phone laterally. Think of it like having a slightly smaller basketball, which more people would be able to palm. Easier for holding, easier for one-handed typing.
The thinness would make it harder to grip laterally. It's less surface area to grab on to.
That may be the impact for some people, but for others, who can now get another metacarpal around to the other side of the phone, it will be easier.
I do hope that the metal they are using is on the grippier side (like the black 16 Pros, as opposed to the 16s)
I feel like I must be one of these people because even a regular iPhone from the past 5 years is way too thin to comfortably hold. When something is much wider than it is thick, not aligning it perfectly in your hand puts pressure on it diagonally and sends it spiraling to the ground.
I noticed in one of their videos, where the subject is picking up the Air off a table, it looks like it could be hard for a wide-fingered person to pick up.
The good thing about the bump is that it should make it easier to pick up the phone from a desk.
The size and weight of the phone does look tempting, but its battery life is a deal breaker for me. I'm pretty sure there's no way its built-in speakers could possibly match those in the Pro models, which is also very important to me.
>"Thin on its own I get but thin with a giant bump 100% defeats the whole point for me. Seems clear at this point there is little hope of them engineering their way into thin cameras."
I have this recurring vision of what could have been if we never lost Steve before the industry went whole hog in on the camera bump fad. It goes something like this:
SCENE: Steve Jobs' office on the eve of the iPhone 7 release
"Hey Steve here's the new prototype for iPhone 7, we think you're going to love it!"
Steve picks up the phone, fumbles it around for a moment, flips it over, and runs his index finger over the camera bump
"You're fired. Now, you" points to another engineer "Get rid of the bump."
And just like that, we were saved from this nightmare. Alas, the world is shit now and no one cares about anything anymore. But I can say without question he would have never allowed it.
A wing shaped iPhone could’ve allowed for a larger battery. Similar to how the original MacBook Air was so thin. The wedge
A wedge is such a natural solution. It tilts the screen forward slightly when it's flat, it could have sexy curved edges like the very first iPhone, it would match the aesthetics of the Air, and it would stand out compared to Android phones.
The main issue is weight distribution, although current designs are slightly top heavy anyway.
A less obvious issue is that people would tend to hold the screen vertically while taking photos, which would distort the visual plane of the lenses at the back.
I'm sure both of those could be solved, and a wedge would create something original, instead of the nth iteration of the same ugly wart aesthetic.
And when it's obsolete, you could use it as a doorstop.
> stand out compared to Android phones.
You meant to say "14 years old Android phones", right? chuckles
https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_razr_xt910-pictures-4273.p...
More like an elongated drop. Like a wing of an airplane. You know.. Air
I’d rather have the world with nice cameras on my phone than the one where the back is flat for aesthetic design reasons.
Give me an iphone with a nice camera and a flat back, fill the extra space with battery, and it probably becomes a day 1 purchase for me.
That would come close to doubling the thickness and weight of the phone.
I’m sure some people would buy a 16mm thick, 400g phone but I doubt it’s the majority.
I think we'd need to see some sales figures for cases. The case I use on my 13 Pro (casetify) adds enough size that the bump is barely an issue -- there is maybe a 1mm edge around the actual camera bump. It's very nearly the ideal. I don't know how common this size case is, though -- common enough that a mainstream case company sells it, I guess.
I'll concede the point on the weight, although I bet it'd be more like 350g.
I doubt Apple would add drop-friendly materials in such an expansion of the phone so most people would be putting a case on top of the iPhone Brick, making it even thicker and heavier.
>I’d rather have the world with nice cameras on my phone than the one where the back is flat for aesthetic design reasons.
The argument is that you shouldn't need to pick one or the other. They got us used to the bump because it is cheaper and simpler for them to build. The same with literally everything now. No more striving for excellence, it's just "what can we normalize and force people to put up with so we don't have to fix the problem".
Right, iPhone engineers are just lazy. That is a much better explanation than them having to juggle tradeoffs between camera performance, weight, and feel in the hand.
It isn’t a problem. That’s why it isn’t “fixed.”
The cheaper option for Apple would be to use smaller camera sensors with worse performance because that would reduce the depth needed for the sensor + lens.
The cameras are getting bigger because a decent segment of the customers want better performing cameras on their phone.
Either the whole phone would have to get thicker and heavier to accommodate, or you end up with a camera bump. And yes, some people would want that brick phone, but Apple seems to think it isn't a large market segment and the money they print from iPhone sales seems to point to them being decent at gauging that market.
Yep. The cameras keep me upgrading every other year, otherwise I'd probably wait 3-4 years at least.
Just take the existing phone and fill in the space. Voila, same camera quality, no bump.
And heavier and harder to use.
Not if you fill it with helium!
Firing people willy-nilly as an admirable quality is a totally insane thing to look up to.
Jobs's "design horse-sense" was also strongly against the screen size you take for granted as well.
Maybe its time to put away these weird hagiographies.
Presumably the firing would be due to clear lack of judgement.
Would it? Its just a hump. Where's this person's manager? What about the industrial design stage (where are the Ivy's who would massage that hump?)
The idea that you're hiring talented people and just firing them like this is not only obscenely anti-worker, its anti-social and a wonderful example of how we worship the worst people. This is someone with a pedigree, able to land an apple job, pass the interviews, work with a team, has mortgage/family/whatever, etc but he upset a sultan sitting on his silk pillow and now must be thrown out on the streets?
Oh and Apple's entire existance hinges on "HP and IBM were too full of fire-happy, stodgy, powerful men who wouldnt let youngin's with ideas flourish" then now Jobs becomes the HP/IBM he and Woz have decried all their careers? What a great way to send your talent off to competitors, scare your existing staff to never take chances, depressing hiring, build a toxic workplace, and send all these people to a startup where they might eat your lunch.
What's anti-worker here? A works for B while both A and B want it. The moment one of them doesn't want to anymore for any reason whatsoever, they close this agreement. What's the problem with that?
> Pedigree...streets
If that pedigree is such a high horse.. I'm sure they'd have no problem joining the company next door.
>This is someone with a pedigree, able to land an apple job, pass the interviews, work with a team, has mortgage/family/whatever, etc but he upset a sultan sitting on his silk pillow and now must be thrown out on the streets?
Rather, it would be about their values and vision not aligning with those of the company. The job shouldn't have happened to begin with.
Not that I like this kind of company mind you, but I do understand and see the appeal. The comparisons with a cult that are often drawn have a logic to them. But this whole scenario is also an exaggeration. Somewhat.
And yet Jobs set up Apple to become a trillion dollar company and HP is been relegated to the dustbin. Hell, all apples competition just copies apple these days for the most part.
Apple doesn't randomly fire people. In fact it's quite difficult to get fired for low performance from FAANG because they'd rather just lower your pay until you leave.
Lighter == better, thinner == cooler. Phones are essentially identical these days anyways, and choosing one over another is based on ever-minimizing differences. Now that you can't even install third-party apps easily on Android, this is more true than ever.
"Now"? Are you referring to the future developer signing requirements that won't begin until 2027 globally? It's trivially easy to sideload on Android right now:
1. Flip one switch in settings to enable sideloading
2. Download and open an APK
3. Flip one more switch (which you get automatically redirected to and it's highlighted at least on Samsung phones) the first time installing from whichever app source (Chrome/FDroid/etc).
4. Click install
Other than step 1, the user is led through the process via prompts, and step 3 only has to be done once per source. i.e. the first time you install from FDroid, after that you just click install without any nags or scare screens.
As far as I remember the "enable sideloading" switch in settings has always been a thing, and the per source setting was added at least 5+ years ago.
Yes, I meant that upcoming change. I suppose I could’ve said “now that the decision has been made to…”, as if that’s somehow better.
Well even then it will be better than iOS which makes the user jump through absurd hoops like having to re-sign every 7 days plus another MacOS device (other than in Europe, but even there Apple still requires approval at the individual app level vs a developer account).
Nope! I’ve never had to sign anything every seven days as a user. This is a weird and completely unfounded lie.
Third-party apps were the only thing that kept me in the Android ecosystem. With that going away there's no point anymore, I already own a MBP anyway, so the "choice" is even easier.
It's also not actually that much more lightweight, compared to the 6.1" iPhones.
People who have held it have said the slightly lesser weight and the slightly lesser depth combine to make it feel like a much bigger difference.
I largely agree, but when we hold phones it is generally by the side without the camera. That means that this phone will feel smaller in the hand, which could be a very effective marketing gimmick to upsell people from the base iPhone.
What if there was a phone that was completely weightless and didn't take up any space at all
Some people will like the way it looks, have money, and don't care as much about overall performance/utility. Much in the same way a Rolex and Timex both tell time.
They’ve shrunk the phone so much that the bump is the computer + optics, strapped to a screen and battery.
The Air and Pro are essentially the same with a different skin. It’s a big deal imo as the phone itself is practically modular. It’s pretty brilliant as they can make the computer part in China and Taiwan and probably ship that unit to various locales for different form factors.
I liked the older thinner phones for the pocket-ability. Less of an issue with jeans but more so with lighter shorts or suits etc
It's more about physics than hope. There's not much you can do with lenses miniaturization after a certain point (which we already reached). The result is more and more computational stuff, which Apple does somewhat gracefully, but still in a way that sets the iPhone photos apart from a camera, and not in a good way.
It exists because it is likely the first volley in a push to a foldable phone. It's the same thickness as one half of the foldable phones on the market.
I am personally interested because I have found iPhones to be offensively bulky for... 10+ years, and this has the potential to feel differently.
> Can someone that is actually interested in this explain the appeal?
It looks really cool
Yeah, it has a bump. Thicker phones have a bump too. It's still less volume in your pocket.
Also, it looks really cool.
total phone volume is what determines how well the phone fits in your pocket. especially on women's pants with small pockets. a thin phone with a bump will fit better than a thicker phone.
the argument that the bump defeats the purpose of a thin phone is only true if you're trying to squeeze it through a narrow gap in a rigid object.
It still takes up less room in your pocket.
width and height wise it's actually larger than the Pro though.
True, a quarter inch longer and eighth inch wider. Smaller both ways than the Max, at least.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/09/all-of-the-iphone-17-model...
It's interesting how this isn't the obvious conclusion and allure. Is there some fanny pack trend I'm missing out on!?
It should be a trend. I've been wearing a crossbody small bag (I guess you could call it a fanny pack, technically) for a long time now and ever since I've gotten a smartwatch I rarely need to take my phone out, so it lives in the bag instead of a bulge in my pants pocket. I wear the bag in the front so when I do need my phone it's just as quick to pull out of the bag as my pants pocket.
Unironically there are bags that I used to associate with drug dealers that are becoming common: https://www.jdsports.co.uk/men/mens-accessories/bags-and-gym...
I wouldn't be surprised if discomfort from having a bulky phone in your pocket drives this.
I am also guilty of buying a bag (not this kind) for my phone because it's so much more comfortable (and makes my trousers last longer) to not have my phone in my pocket.
you jest but…you may be under a rock. :)
https://www.gq.com/story/best-fanny-packs
https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/covid-times-h...
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/run/fanny-packs-s...
This was my first thought. My iPhone 15 Pro is fine and hopefully has much more life left in it, and I've gotten used to the size in general over the years, but I like to wear pants that are reasonably fitted and the "pocket bulge" outline of the phone still annoys me if I'm trying to deliberately look nice.
I'd believe this is an area where even a few millimeters of thickness makes a real difference in how much the phone in pocket stands out despite the overall footprint being larger? Will be curious to read once people get their hands on the things.
If it fits in the first place...
I'm interested in it. I have an iPhone 11 and have been looking to update. I don't use a case. It looks pretty cool, I guess? Do you need more of a reason than that to have anything more than an iPhone 11, heh?
They sacrificed size for battery life, just like with the mini models, just in another dimension. Since the minis were cancelled I expect this model to undergo the same fate. Maybe it's just an experiment? Call it an A-B test.
It weighs a lot less. My pinky hurts and 99% of my photos are selfies, so I’d rather have less mass than more camera; I’ll rent a Leica if I want truly excellent photographs. Also my purse is hella full all the time so every less millimeter of phone makes it easier to get stuff out of the pockets, get phone out of purse, etc. Also it’ll fit with less bulge into my side-thigh pockets and pull less on the waistband, which is handy for my skirts and leggings and undershorts that all that have that.
Perhaps being thinner allows for people to put their phone into an external case, the combined size which is approximately the bulk of the current generation.
No problem, the next iteration is a phone without a camera. And they will tell us that no one wants a camera oh his phone. And then they sell bluetooth cameras as extra.
I don’t get it either. They’re more difficult to hold.
it is the precipice of stupidity. making an ugly, mis-shaped phone and calling it thinner than ever. its fugly. just make the guts thinner and use the extra space for more battery. thats what everyone wants. but apple wont do it because they arent brave anymore. they arent brave enough to stick out
Almost every statement with “every” in it is false. No it’s not what everyone wants and I’m quite sure this phone will sell.
It probably fits better in the front pocket of one’s trousers. And if so, that’s great news.
making it thinner than the camera save us a ton o money on battery materials!
signed, apple CFO
Easy. Top part is not where people holding their phones.
I literally almost got an injury from using my iPhone 12 Pro Max while laying on the side on the bed for the last few years -- it's too heavy. I had to do various therapies to stop feeling pain. It's almost 230g and I also have an Urban Armor Gear case that adds a little bit.
iPhone Air is at 165g. I'll get ~72% of the weight and be able to comfortably use the device without getting tired.
Sample size of one and all that apply, of course.
Honestly with rumors of a folding iPhone coming out in 1-2 years it makes me wonder if the primary drive is to experiment with thinner production hardware so that a folding phone isn’t super thick.
You don’t hold the camera bump…
Same question here. Why would I buy this instead of folding phones that provide a tablet-like screen on demand?
This is likely a prototype for their folding phone, which are essentially just two ultra-thin phones stuck together.
Isn't it the hinge, the folding oled screen and general durability of moving parts that are the hard parts of a foldable? This has none of those.
I hope you're right, but this likely means having to wait another generation to see a folding iphone
Stop bringing up the folding phone in different threads. Very few people want that.
> Very few people want that
Do you have any evidence behind it? I personally would love it, price is the biggest blocker tbh.
> Do you have any evidence behind it?
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Holy shit you weren't kidding: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
And now I wonder whether that’s genuine or not. I can imagine someone being truly excited about a folding phone (I have a friend like that), but of course I can imagine someone doing that to promote something. A folding phone, maybe.
lmao, incredible
The iPhone air is half the price isn’t it? But yeah, if you want a foldable the Air isn’t one.
Aren’t you glad they have not called it something like Thin™ or True Thin™ or some shit?
I think they are appealing to the Razor crowd /s
Hey, that was me at one time! But the iPhone’s technology advantages put me in the road to bigger and thicker phones.
I have an iPhone 13 mini, just replaced the battery. If you want my money, give me an iPhone 17 mini with small width and height, I don't care about it being thinner like the Air. Also, no AI ruining the image quality of the expensive camera. I saw examples of a consumer-grade digital camera vs an iPhone 16 and the latter introduced "hotdog skin" effect and other effects that made the photos look over-processed.
Also still rocking a 13 mini. There are dozens of us! Dozens!
(Also to those who say not enough people wanted a mini phone to be worth producing: I submit the case of Prego chunky pasta sauce. Not many people want a chunky pasta sauce, but you sell a whole lot more pasta sauce in total if you sell both regular and chunky pasta sauce. Malcolm Gladwell has a TED talk about this.)
My pet theory about why the Minis sold poorly is that the 12 Mini was released just a few months after the SE 2; I suspect a lot of the would-be Mini purchasers had just bought an SE 2 instead (not knowing the Mini was just around the corner), and are also not a demographic interested in upgrading their phone every year.
Didn't the SE models sell notoriously bad as well?
There are always a bunch of us who wants a smaller phone, but the sales number indicates that we are the minority.
To some extend I also think it explains the increasingly thin phones. With the increases in screen size, they need to make the phones thinner, otherwise it would feel like a brick in your pocket.
No. Even the 2022—which was intentionally nerfed—sold 15-20 million and ranked in the top ten best-selling phones.
Wasn't eight of the ten best selling phones iPhones? It was even beaten by the iPhone 14 line up, which was only for sale in four out of the twelve months, while the SE was available for all twelve.
You're right that it was good sales figures for a smartphone, but not great for an iPhone.
The SE3 has bad selling because it is exactly the same SE2 with upgrade SOC. People buying SE phone mostly don't care about SOC performance.
I always point out that the minis were a billion dollar product. Most companies would DIE for a billion dollar product.
Apple is like CBS in that regard - shows with viewers that other networks would kill for get canceled at CBS because they expect more. Apple doesn’t get as much ROI on phones that sell in the low ten millions or low single digit percentage of the market. But I do think they could put those phones on a slow refresh cycle and teach e.g. Mini or Plus users to wait for the next release and stack that market together over a few years to be worthwhile to them.
My theory is rather about battery life:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44588733
My pet theory is that having to charge the phone twice a day was a deal breaker. We wanted small, not "impossibly thin" and always dead.
Agree, and as an ex-mini user, I wish this was the world we lived in.
I presume the problem is that iPhones are a lot more expensive to produce than tomato sauce, and it's a lot more difficult to get rid of the ones that people don't buy.
I would go for a chunky iPhone.
I'm trying to hang on to my 13 mini until next year, when hopefully Apple will have figured out Apple Intelligence and upgrade the phone hardware to run it. But I'm worried my 13 mini won't make it that long. It's starting to struggle with even basic apps and lags just reading news articles. Battery is still at over 80% though
My 13 mini works great. Just got a replacement on Swappa after dropping mine in a lake.
What’s lagging for you? I haven’t noticed anything even remotely slow on this phone.
Safari sometimes lags terribly, otherwise it's ok.
Adblocker might help you there. It's great that Safari on iOS supports extensions.
> It's starting to struggle with even basic apps and lags just reading news articles
Not my experience, but I tend to blame the web rather than my phone when things get laggy. I estimate that my 13 is about in the middle of its life, barring unexpected rapid deceleration events.
My battery is at 80% after 2 years. Mine is still on AppleCare+. I always do express replacement so I get a « new » one. Hopefully my battery reach 79% soon.
Speaking of dozens. I’m on a 12 Mini and will be hard pressed to give it up. I also replaced the battery recently and am still quite pleased with its performance!
I kept seeing people mention the 13 mini but I always thought the 12 mini was the last mini. Just looked it up and I see why now, seems like the 13 mini is barely different from the 12 mini.
I had the 13 mini and now the 12 mini and the 13 mini was noticeably better - battery life, camera, screen brightness (big difference when using phone on a bike for navigation)
They added just enough battery capacity to make it thru the day. Thats about it.
That's enough of an improvement, tbh
The CPU in the 13 Mini is something like 20-30% more power efficient, making it much more viable given the small battery capacity of the phone.
Iphone 13 mini has a bigger battery. This is quite relevant, because the Iphone 12 mini battery life is quite bad.
I’m one of the dozens on an iPhone 13 mini waiting for the next mini release. Before that I was on the iPhone 8
Apple could easily keep a "mini" around as the lightweight option for folks who don't want a pocket tablet
Hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in design, engineering and manufacturing is not easily.
just gave up mine last month.
Unfortunately both the 12 Mini and the 13 Mini did terrible numbers sales-wise. People say they want small phones but not enough of them actually buy them when they are available. :(
“An iPhone mini would sell like hotcakes” is a HN meme at this point.
do people seriously not remember that an iPhone mini used to exist, and definitely did not sell like hotcakes?
Well hotcakes aren’t that in-demand but there’s a market for it, so the iPhone mini definitely sold like hotcakes
we remember that there was a phone released with a name "mini" which was just as large as an iPhone 6: which many people considered to be a large phone; and those who didn't were perfectly serviced by the same sized SE from 2020- which was the size of an iPhone 6...
https://imgur.com/a/iphone-mini-vs-iphone-5-vs-iphone-6-case...
I genuinely don't think I've seen that sentiment? "I really want a smaller phones, these gigantic bricks are too big" is a common sentiment but I don't think anyone disputes the sales figures of the mini
But the sentiment is implied.
By expressing disappointment with the absence of a mini on every single new iPhone announcement, you’re basically ignoring the fact that Apple and other phone makers understand that small form factor phones are dead as a mainstream product.
Small phones are dead as a mainstream product, sure.
Screenreaders are also dead as a mainstream product.
Phones with a German language setting are dead as a mainstream product.
However, there are various people with severe disabilities like being blind, being german, and having small hands, so we should produce phones that are appropriate for all of those groups, and yet only the former two are serviced (even though there are more people with small hands than there are germans).
Sent from an iPhone mini, which is already about an inch too big for my hands.
You know what I mean, but I will expand.
No phone company is releasing a flagship SFF phone because there simply is no mainstream consumer demand for one. In fact, demand has been dead for many years now.
Good for you that you have a iPhone mini, but I would wager you won’t be seeing a new mini model anytime soon. Unless of course mainstream consumer demands shift, at which point HN dreams will become reality once more.
What is for certain is that complaining about this on every phone-related HN thread will not help change anything.
You're literally making that up. Small form factor phones are not dead as a mainstream product. They never have been.
Whatever you like.
The iPhone SE 2022 was in the top ten smartphones of the year by sales figures. It may not be as astronomical as flagship phones, but it's simply a lie to say it's "dead" as a "mainstream" product.
The iPhone SE 2022 was not a small or Mini phone / it had the same larger display as the iPhone 6.
Which is smaller than the display of an iPhone 13 mini (4.7" vs. 5.3")
It sold like hotcakes for the people who wanted them at least
gluten free hotcakes
People don't buy phones every year. People don't want to pay 95% price for 80% of performance / features.
Smaller phones as an idea isn't the problem here. Companies just don't want to make equivalent smaller phones. Making a new phone every single year is a stupid trend that causes min-max effects. A good small phone will eat into profits that's harder to make up in a yearly cycle. People will not buy nerfed smaller phones which is a positive feedback cycle.
> People don't want to pay 95% price for 80% of performance / features.
I want to believe this too but you have to look at iPhone sales numbers
exactly. it's a fashion issue. as in literal fashion.
The problem is that the people who want small phones also don't like buying new phones.
Also last I checked the "mini" phones weren't particularly mini, phones just got bigger.
True, also mini phones are usually of an incredible value, you can buy them very cheap. Because, surprise, actually not everyone wants them. And they are seen as crippled gimp phones. E.g. a child had this phone, then pressed their parents to buy them a normal phone. That’s how I ended up having my mini, for basically bananas. Was upgrading from SE1, so it was still a bigger phone. Yet, I’m not willing to go back, modern iPhone is still better than an obsolete one. Almost. Some bugs aren’t there in the old one.
Just checked and if I want an unscratched iPhone 13 Mini I'll be paying about $600 in Sweden. (That's for the places that have it, everywhere seems to be sold out that's cheaper).
That's for a used, 4 year old phone...
For a device that's "cheap to pick up", it's holding it's value more than any other iPhone.
I’m not very sure about the unscratched one, but I remember researching this a couple of months back, in Ukraine. And there were tens of good options (nice condition), for below $200 or $300. Which I consider a pretty decent value. I have no idea whether the war affects this, but pre war this situation was the same, more or so. Maybe that’s because the internal market is quite huge (40 M population pre-war, perhaps 30 M now), plus the country is literally the biggest in Europe. As compared to relatively small(er) Sweden, population of 10 M if I’m correct. I guess there might be cultural aspect as well. More wealthy countries and their societies (like Sweden) might actually be much less obsessed with things like newer iPhones. While they are wildly popular in Ukraine (pre-war). They may be even more popular these days, since we had very massive electricity blackouts just a year ago. And for many people their smartphones is the way to stay connected, and to check in with their loved ones. Plus, the ‘what if I’d be killed tomorrow?’ factor, I see people’s attitude is a bit different because of this either. I know at least one local friend, who said just recently he thinks of updating his 15 Pro Max (which he bought after the realease of the 16 models, saying they’re mostly the same) for the Air. He’s just a middle class guy, nothing too impressive. Other folks I know, they’re wealthy, and it looks like they won’t even think twice, and more likely to upgrade. I bet their logic is a mix of YOLO, plus they’re constantly invest into military equipment and drones for the army, so that $1K for themselves look a minute amount compared to that. All that creates pretty good market conditions for the used phones, so the folks like me could get something of a value for cheap, because others upgraded for no real reason. Personally, I see little difference after the 12th models.
After my iPhone 6 stopped getting updates I got the SE3, criteria was smallest feature phone without tonnes of shovelware and spyware pre-installed. It is still top of the list in 2025 though I will probably get another 5 years from this one.
The problem is the lack of choice
That's because everybody wants to show off.
And Instagram (or any other "fake universe" which pushes video-quality as a minimal requirement) algos, favor content made with a newer/better/bigger (thus more expensive) phone.
How come there's close-to-0 improvements about audio quality (both recording and listening) with respect to visual technologies?
Make the audio counterpart of Instagram/Tiktok and I'll chime in right away.
But pop-people (and markets) are mostly interested in visuals at the moment.
And for audio-sensitive people like me, it's almost a blessing.
“Terrible numbers sales-wise” is a bit of a distortion when talking about iPhones - the number that went around in 2022 was the 13 accounted for 3% of iPhone sales in 2021, which indeed sounds terrible - except Apple sold somewhere around a quarter billion iPhones that year, which means ~7.5 million iPhone 13 minis in 2021 alone. Those are numbers that anyone else would kill for. That’s just about the entire population of New York City buying an iPhone. There’s 35 states with fewer people than that. Ford sold fewer F-150s in the last decade than Apple sold iPhone 13 Minis in 2021 alone.
3% of sales means a sub-par experience for those users. Every app developer will say “oh yeah let’s test on the pro and normal sizes. Mini might break but that’s ok.”
As an iPhone Mini owner, I have not experienced any poor or broken UX in apps, but ofc I am n=1.
Make it n=2.
n=3
n++
n=4
n=5
n=6
n=7
+=1
UX cannot possibly be why Apple axed the mini since they have scalable layout APIs that did work on it. Even video-heavy social media and games worked in it just fine. It’s really just business—they make more sales out of bigger phones, so bigger phones it is.
This is false. The mini logical screen resolution still exists as the Display Zoom resolution of the Pro Max and the Pro. Developers would still need to test for those resolutions even if the mini never existed.
The simulator gives you a lot of screen resolution choices, but sometimes, you need to run on-device (like for Bluetooth).
I have an old original SE, that I used to use for low-end testing, but it tops out at iOS15.
Currently, my Mini13 is my low-end test, but I’ll probably need to get a new phone, sooner or later (“later” works for me).
Never had that experience, and I’m willing to risk it going forward, too.
I have a mini and I love it. I will not get rid of it until I have to, or can get another mini.
Each of those models sold at least 6 million units, about the same as the Xbox One in its first year, which was a “huge success”…
It's sad that if something sells "only" 6 million units, we cannot make it for those who want it.
... was the Xbox One a "huge success" ?
no
The problem is simply that the small form factor doesn't allow a big battery. So the iPhone 12/13 mini simply have a bad battery life compared to the bigger iPhones.
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for bigger smart phones.
This does not make sense when we are discussing an iPhone Air, right?
I was extremely interested in a small phone back when the 12 Mini came out, but I didn't dare to buy it without seeing how it feels. This was during the height of the COVID lockdowns, so I couldn't go to a store and feel it in person. Ended up buying the regular iPhone 12, since that seemed like the safer choice to buy blind.
When it was time for another phone upgrade in the iPhone 15 era (because phones really don't change enough anymore to warrant more frequent upgrades than that), there was no mini option anymore. I wonder if others were like me. The Mini came out at a time where people were hesitant to try a new form factor because they couldn't try it in stores.
I think what happened here is that the target audience are people that do not feel pressure to upgrade to the latest mini every year. They do not look to have the lastest-shiniest-ohlookAI-snapdraxxon22pro phone. Just a phone that is a bit cheaper but gets the job done.
Why would you go from 12 mini to 13 mini, or to the concurrently released SEs if your phone still works?
I am also still holding on to my 13 mini. I would not have upgraded to the 14, 15 or 16mini even if they existed. I will upgrade at some point, and that point is when it either dies, or important apps stop working on the last iOS version supported by the hardware.
I do wonder if more people would buy a smaller phone if it had the same cameras and features as the pro? Time will tell if thinner sells better than shorter and less girthy.
I for one hate how even the 17 pro is creeping up in size compared to the 15 pro.
People want to buy small phones like they want to pay for Firefox.
A few people say it very loudly and nobody else does.
I was one of those people who bought an iphone 13 mini. When someone sees it, their first question is, "what phone is that?", unless they too own an iPhone 13 mini or owned a small iPhone before that.
People do think that being able to use the phone with just one hand is cool, but most people, even small-handed people, like to have a big screen to watch stuff on.
I like your analogy because you can't give money specifically for Firefox.
This meme needs to die. Normal-sized iPhones account for tens of millions of sales per year.
The fact that Apple was absolutely schizophrenic about its non-phablet market, introducing the iPhone mini 13 and iPhone SE 2022 at the same time, is utterly irrelevant to that point.
we will never really know for sute because the minis were gimped compared to the max options that had an extra telephoto lens and better ram/storage options
That's the tradeoff with a smaller phone. You can't fit as many features. And despite cutting out so much, there still wasn't enough space for an acceptable amount of battery.
I know that the iPhone Mini users are few but vocal. Instead of a yearly refresh of the mini, they should do a run every 5 years or so. Make a bunch, sell out of inventory by year 3, make a new one year 5 with updates matching the spec/price de jour.
It's like a LTR (Long term release) iPhone.
I know there are Apple Engineers lurking here, start the whisper campaign!
I’m not sure this makes sense on a purely hardware sales sense but with Apple moving toward increasing software profits by ecosystem users, it would seem to make sense to do a long release cycle phone to expand the ecosystem. The iPhone Mini might not justify manufacture on its own, but 30-40 million extra Apple One purchasers might.
I love my iPhone 12 mini, the screen has great pixel density better than the 16 or 17 even. It is compact and light, easy to put in and out of the pocket. The battery is not great and the peak luminosity could be better, but it still runs so well in 2025. I've been contemplating buying a new one since the back glass is shattered and the front is scratched, the battery is also getting worse. I don't think it's viable now to get it fixed.
So I might reluctantly grab one of the new ones.
My main phone for a year or so has been a unihertz jelly star. Kind of an extreme but it's so nice in your hand / pocket. Definitely not thin though!
I just wish Unihertz wasn't so questionable! Can't a decent company make a small phone? (And actually update the software on it? And comply with the GPL?)
I'm dying to find an answer to this. The last decent company to product sub 6 inch phone was Asus, but they stopped :(
I own a 12 mini, and I'm planning to upgrade my phone this year, it's time. If there were an iPhone 17 mini, I'd buy it, but because there isn't one, I'll probably go for the Pro to get a bigger battery. Apple knows that many folks like me would buy a cheaper mini if there were one, and not spend as much on Pro.
Apple still has 12 mini batteries in stock, and will for a while.
Might be worth trying to get the battery replaced at Apple.
Extra bonus: while it does cost money in theory, every time I've gotten Apple to replace the battery they end up breaking the screen, so I get a battery and phone replacement for free. 12 mini battery replacements _might_ be de facto free.
Just had my 12 mini battery replaced around 1 month ago, the screen survived but it was still definitely worth the money. It had degraded to around 70% capacity which was just barely preventing me from only charging overnight.
Reading this and replying on the 13 Mini. Love it so much but wouldn’t mind if it were a little lighter. If it stays the same forever, I think I’d still buy it. Great phone. P.S. I work at home, so battery life is not my biggest concern.
I've got a 12 mini and honestly it's the perfect size. Every year I hope they bring back a proper compact flagship, but instead we get thinner, not smaller
This is funny, when you think about that our demographic (people with multiple tech devices, in need of a smaller phone, able to pay more for it, etc.) should match perfectly with everyone who works internally at apple on the phones. They must have frequent discussions on this, that get agressively silenced - to keep the focus on the bigger phones :o)
The problem is simply that the small form factor doesn't allow a big battery. So the iPhone 12/13 mini simply have a bad battery life compared to the bigger iPhones.
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for bigger smart phones.
I recently found my 4S, and that thing is tiny, but I like that I can easily reach the full screen. On even the 2023SE I use my other hand when there is a button I need to hit on the top of the left side
This! small form factor yet powerful. Any OS works. What has been happening is upping the specs mean larger size, less easy to carry and hard to use with one hand.
I loved the mini and bought both the 12 and 13 mini. Also bought it for my siblings. Unfortunately after its sales Apple is very unlikely to ever make a small phone again.
I’d recommend Halide for the AI-free photography. Hiccups here and there, but getting pixels straight off the sensor is amazing.
A $60 camera app is absolutely wild.
Is it? A game costs that.
It’s not a mass market minimal functionality app. It’s a pro app and the developers need to get paid.
What is hotdog skin?
Search for "hotdog" (ctrl-f or cmd-f) in this page: https://candid9.com/phone-camera/
Strange complaint. The guy he's chosen to use for comparisons is making a totally different face in the two photos.
And his main issue with skin undertones is because he picked a photographic style he doesn't like. The camera app both asks you to pick one the first time you use it, and lets you edit it on photos after you've taken them.
I think the color on the Sony camera is a little too cold and makes them all look unrealistically unhealthy.
> The camera app both asks you to pick one the first time you use it, and lets you edit it on photos after you've taken them./
Well, that's a relief.
I had the 12 mini. Perfect size, but awful battery life due to how thin they decided to make it. Give me a mini with more than half-day battery life and I'll queue on release day.
Stop. Making. Things. Thinner.
If they just made the 12/13 mini ever so slightly thicker, it would obviate the camera bump and improve the battery life. /shrug I don't get.
And it was so fragile and slippery that its 7.4mm thickness was wasted as I had to buy a thick-ish case.
I want an extra thick model instead, let’s call it iPhone Travel (or Ultra?). Just thick enough so the cameras are no longer sticking out. Give me an all-week battery instead of an all-day one. Slim down the power usage and give a power saver mode that actually does make a difference. Let me go on a weekend trip in nature or festival without having to carry extra hardware or having to look for public charging stations.
Personally, I really like being able to use lightweight MagSafe batteries instead of having a thicker iPhone. I used to agree with you, but the tech has gotten ridiculously good the last couple of years.
With something like https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HRY02LL/A/anker-maggo-pow..., you get a magsafe battery that doubles the life of an iPhone and can be independently recharged, and is so slim that I can put it in my pocket attached to my iPhone and not notice.
The downside with these is that in scenarios where you need the extra juice, like say a guided tour all day where you'll be taking a lot of photos and putting it in your pocket, they tend to run hot and drain faster. Then you're carrying an dead extra battery. You get more mileage with a power bank + cord.
I have an Anker battery and a Peak Design case.
The wireless battery just slows the drain unless my phone is totally idle while charging. I really don't think wireless charging is very effective, at least it hasn't been with my 3yo phone and magnetic battery (even when both were new).
But that’s not like it’s an extra battery, it’s a gizmo that charges your original battery all the time, isn’t it? So technically it doesn’t make your battery bigger, but akin to keeping your phone on charge all the time. I expect it would just help you destroy that original battery, that is difficult and expensive to replace. Add some extra marketing, let them believe it’s some magical device, and kindly push them into buying a new phone when their battery dead.
I want a think iPhone with week-long battery life and the battery being easily serviceable, replaceable and ideally some unified standard one that I can buy from any decent vendor. That would be great to have. I hope we’ll come there eventually, since today phones could serve till they physically dead. If you make batteries easily serviceable, plus no software cripple with planned obsolescence.
Isnt that just a replicable battery with extra steps?
fewer steps, actually. as a user, you reach into your backpack pull out the battery pack, and put it on phone, check that it's charging, and then move on with your life. Replaceable battery, there's the extra steps of powering it off, opening up the case, taking out the old battery, putting in the new battery, closing the case, powering it on, waiting for it to boot up. So many extra steps!
You could reasonably add a howswap battery with a few minutes of charge if the screen is off, so rebooting isn't an issue.
Granted old button phones booted so fast it wasnt that different from starting. So doing that was overkill.
Is slapping the MagSafe battery on once when you buy it such an extra step it bothers you?
Yes because inductive charging has a lot of losses, they are ~75% efficient, that means that you waste 1/4 of your battery capacity, and that is power that you also pay for in your electricity bill (for how it's small).
While a phone with removable battery, like it was normal back in the days, you just buy whatever number of batteries you want, when the battery is dead you replace it, and you instantly have a 100% charged phone in a matter of 10 seconds. It's surely better than a MagSafe, than a powerbank, etc.
Oh, I remember these days. For one of my early days smartphones — Motorola MPx — I had like three or four pieces. That was great, also I charged them with a universal battery. Remember similar times with Galaxy S3 and S4.
Between having 2x battery built into the phone and 2x battery that detaches, I’d like the built in option.
I don’t want to deal with losing it. I don’t want to deal with carrying around 2 chargers/cables or charging both at the same time. I want the efficiencies of everything built together and not transmitted through casings
...then buy the non-Air version if you want a thicker phone? That's not being discontinued, you know.
I genuinely don't know what you're complaining about.
You're not going to lose it. It's attached. You don't need 2 chargers or 2 cables. It reverse charges wirelessly via the phone when it's plugged in.
It's an option. People usually want options, but you're complaining you only want things the way you want them, and not let other people have different options...?
The non-Air iPhone still is unbalanced when putting it flat on a table.
That feels like a completely different conversation.
I read the original comment like ‘we’d love to have another phone, a thinker one, that has this huge camera system, and also similarly huge battery, so there’s no bump.’
They run hot, and don’t stick to the phone as well as I’d like. No, MagSafe batteries aren’t the solution for me, and I too would buy a thicker phone with more battery life.
Apple makes thicker ones. The Air isn't replacing their other phones.
This! This right here. It bothers me how someone can be bothered at the prospect of having to keep paying Apple more and more and more. Must an anti-extreme-innovation person. I am just waiting for the day when Apple makes a travelling generator to charge that MagSafe battery and of course those special plugs (don't forget the wire™) and stands that will be proprietary and mandatory with that (if you don't want to void the warranty or risk getting sued by Apple for publicly endangering tech made by them).
Not at the prices the MagSafe batteries are
Do you carry these extra batteries? Or leave them in a hot car?
Just get the MagSafe battery, then you've got your extra-thick. It already exists.
It's not going to last you all week though. That's not going to just be thick, it's going to be a cube heavy enough to double up as a weapon.
magsafe is not even close, wireless charging has terrible efficiency. Honestly the whole idea "wireless powerbank" is ridiculous. You are in need of energy; would you like to waste extra energy as heat?
The way it is currently yes. But hardware is way more efficient now. Why not sacrifice performance and optimize a bit more in that direction? It is plenty fast already for everyday life. I don’t like that we only focus on performance and we don’t see longer battery life that we could have based on advances in battery technology + more efficient processors.
Yes. Give me the iPhone 17 Pro Ultra. It's the Pro Max, but even more battery. Heavier duty case. Like I'm put the thing in a case that makes it big and bulky already, if you give me a heavy duty enough setup that I feel safe letting it go naked, people might actually see the status symbol... instead of the dbrand sticker.
This is why I mostly stick with the Moto G models which have easily multi-day battery and cost sub $250.
I’ve had a bunch of Moto G phones, I love them. This round I decided to try their upper midrange Edge line.
I found a deal on a Moto Edge 2024 and it’s fantastic. It’s so light and compact vs the Moto G Power, and still can go two full days no problem. The camera is excellent as well, which was my only real gripe with the G phones.
It can plug into my USB-C monitor and act like a Chromebook (more or less). I play Minecraft with my kids this way.
But do you get to hear First Time in A Moto G™ when they announce something? See! That is what you are missing. That is what you pay for. That's revolutionary. Take my money Apple!
Thick is easy. Get a battery case. I used to have one that allowed for swappable samsung batteries packs that was great.
Getting flashbacks to the HTC Evo era and having a thick ass battery case lol, before that i'd have to swap battery like twice a shift.
A battery case would work too. Was just hoping for a model that is trimmed and optimized for longer trips outside the city/with absence of reliable power sources. Cut some of the performance, only efficiency cores, bigger antenna and optimize hardware aggressively for low battery usage. Maybe use some of the bigger case for repairability…
Agreed. Give me a phone thick and durable enough that I don't feel the need to add a screen protector and case to it, or strap a battery to the back to make it last.
It seems they are often peeling away useful features, which then you have to replace - yielding a worse experience often.
Small screen, thick, durable, good battery. Would pay $
But that will rob people of those multiple extremely satisfying feelings across those one or two years, before they change the iPhone, of paying more to Apple for battery packs and then another and then another… etc. You should think of that as well.
I don’t think many people would like a phone that is twice as heavy all the time. At least battery packs can be taken off.
If few people would buy it, Apple won't produce it. I think the Air will flop for this reason.
I use a battery case, it is amazing. Gives the phone some weight and 2 days battery.
Back when replaceable batteries were a thing I got this beast for my Galaxy Note 4 - https://blog.gsmarena.com/zerolemon-offers-10000mah-extended... ... it was ridiculous but awesome.
Oh wow, so cool! Do you have some blog posts about that, YouTube videos, any line of journaling? Would love to learn about that experience.
will someone please make this? a phone with a browser, basic camera, large battery and a UI that doesnt suck ass? a phone for adults that is affordable? i want more and more each day to get away from apple
this makes absolute sense. most of the times when my iphone 14 is literally in life support. honestly would trade off the thickness to not have to charge everyday
Phones are tools, not fashion statements.
iPhone Thicc- body positivity!
iPhone Travel? Please. We don’t go on Craig-approved drug-fueled vision quests just to land on mediocrity like that. You’re close though.
It’s gonna be the iPhone Voyager.
"Impossibly thin" is right in line with Patrick McGee's "Apple in China" who argues that the main reason for Apple's designs is to keep imitators at bay by introducing manufacturing challenges that only they can meet. Indeed impossible at the time of release. One generation after the other. He estimates this gains them about 6 months of headway. Tough world.
(Yes, to be fair, there is more to this new phone than just "impossibly thin".)
The Samsung S25 Edge, which has already been on the market for a while, seems to be pretty popular.
It's 0.16mm thicker than the Air. I've got to admit it was surprisingly pleasant to hold.
I even did a low key bend test and it did not bend, but I literally had store security walk up to me and ask me not to do that.
https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s25-edge/
0.16mm is roughly the diameter of a strand of human hair. (0.1 to 0.18mm.) In a consumer product, that's basically imperceptible -- and, in all but the most precision-engineered products, it would be within standard manufacturing tolerances.
So I suppose there already is a phone with an analogous form factor.
Yeah. I got a kick out of looking at the specs and the Edge and the Air had the same exact imperial measurement of 0.22 inches.
It just spurred the rage that we still haven't adopted metric in the US -- even after spending a good chunk of the 1970s learning it in school and being promised metric would be the new measurement standard.
> learning it in school
In all seriousness everybody still probably needs to learn it in school, because the scientific literature is entirely in metric. Even papers authored by Americans and published by, e.g., the American Chemical Society, all use µg/mg/g/kg and µm/mm/cm/m for their measurements. If you don't have an intuitive understanding of those measurements, you can run into visualization problems.
The funny part is that in elementary school here in the mid to late 90s, growing up in a rural area, metric was only touched upon for a day at most and until high school chemistry and physics classes, I very rarely had to deal with metric. Which sucked! My math classes kept to U.S. customary system / imperial units for example.
(It wasn't even told to me that it was the default for most of the world. It was disappointing to learn later how much resistance to metric there was in the U.S.)
weird. i did elementary in the midwest during the 1980s and we spent equal time on metric and imperial, in fact i think it was some kind of requirement that both were given equal attention
It turns out they have been teaching metric in (US) schools, through the grades, not just for an hour or whatever, again. Why? I don't know, but I approve.
Everyone educated since the 80s in the US has learned the metric system in school, this is a non-issue.
Moving the needle on what units people use conversationally is what's hard.
even after spending a good chunk of the 1970s learning it in school and being promised metric would be the new measurement standard.
And then Reagan showed up just in time to save us from that Commie nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Metric_Board
It also didn't help that the Metric Conversion Act defined it as voluntary, and the U.S. Metric Board was essentially toothless from the start.
You're making me wish I still had access to a CMM. I wonder what the tolerances are on an iPhone.
A proper bend test from jerryrigeverything:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yQHFCpO6gHE
If I had sense, I would've just waited for his video. For the record, I did not try nearly as hard as he did. Thanks for the link!
>but I literally had store security walk up to me and ask me not to do that.
Are you suggesting they did this because they expected it to bend because it was thin? If so, I doubt it. Regardless of thickness, I suspect security would ask someone not to physically damage their devices.
I don't think they have any knowledge of its tensile strength and they were requesting I stop being a jackass.
I think if even some percentage of "testers" attempted this maneuver enough times that the device would, in fact, break.
What would you have done if it did bend? It's not meant to be unbendable, which would have made you liable for the damages that happened next.
I kinda metered the amount of force I was using very closely. For lack of a better description, I tested the springiness very carefully. But yeah, would've paid for it.
This just seems like Apple's reality distortion field in full force. There are already thinner phones. Just like there were thinner laptops than Macbook Air when it was launched but Apple fans in their Apple bubble hadn't heard of them and so bought Apple's propaganda.
I say this as someone that owns 2 MacBooks Pros, an Apple TV and an iPhone.
Absolutely, and yes on the Macbook Air! Although the Honor phone mentioned elsewhere calls itself "thinnest at 8.8mm", +/- camera mesa, etc... So at best 8.8mm folded in pocket for a complete phone. Much thicker that an iPhone Air complete phone (and more screen space).
But mostly one thing that's difficult for us to evaluate is whether this is "at scale and profitably". On the competitors' side anyway. The Honor seems to be a $2000 phone (higher even than Google's foldable!) - probably before tariffs, not clear. How many will sell? What margin will Honor make on this? Hard to tell although it would be possible to dig the historical numbers.
Here in Germany the Honor foldable is 1700 and the air announced as 1200 but 1450 EUR if you want the same 512GB as the Honor.
Is anyone buying an iPhone because it's slightly thinner than other phones? I've never heard anyone say the width of the phone was their reason for picking an iPhone, or any phone for that matter.
There are certainly people buying iPhones essentially for fashion/status-symbol reasons: i.e., because they look visually different from other phones, whether that is because of thinness or anything else. Why else would so many Android devices have copied the FaceID notch so soon after it was released?
Are notches popular? The Androids I've seen have used a hole punch camera ever since Andy Rubin's Essential. There's certainly no Dynamic Island.
Its unlikely anyone is buying a phone because of how thin it is (within reason), but it is quite likely that they are more likely to learn about a new phone available to buy if it is "impossibly" thin. Advertising is important — even for recognized names like Apple.
My dad had his phone stolen a couple months ago. He bought a used one of Craigslist to replace it.
I'm curious if the new shinies will make him want to upgrade. If it was just iPhone 14, revision 4, I doubt he would care.
In a month we'll get the inevitable slew of stories about bent and broken iPhone Airs as sure as water is wet. I really don't care how thick my phone is, I care that when I drop it, it's not automatically broken.
I generally like and buy Apple stuff, but yeah, I'm weary as hell. I don't do subscriptions and I don't like the tech bros--agree 100% with the rant on here about how crappy everything has become--"enshitification."
>Is anyone buying an iPhone because it's slightly thinner than other phones?
Yes. I have at least two co-workers that have stated (we will see if they follow through) that they are going to move from their current phones (13 Pro and 15 Pro) to the Air because of the thinness.
I will buy one of these because I want a phone that doesn't create such a huge bulge in my pants pocket
People who buy iPhones don't need a reason to buy iPhones other than just for the sake of buying iPhones. That's the key to Apple's trillions. Apple would have made this phone 2.75cm thick and there would have longer lines and same people singing paeans of thick phones and how it is going to change the world and solve global warming and eventually bring everlasting peace.
> or any phone for that matter.
I'm strapping phone to my arms during runs; for me, shaving off those extra grams count. Bought an Infinix specifically for this reason. I didn't specifically look for the thinnest but it came the the most lightweight.
I don’t think so. But it gives buyers who were already inclined to buy an iPhone another form factor option. Nothing wrong with choice.
My sample size is small but the usual reason I hear from non-technical individuals is that they want the best camera possible.
Trend is towards screen real estate now, with folding phones
What’s the evidence for which way causality works? Apple solving design problems they care about would inevitably involve solutions only viable at their scale. It’s hard to say whether that’s how they choose their design problems.
Their process seems pretty similar to their approach with unibody MacBooks or the original MacBook Air, both of which were introduced long before imitators were their primary competition.
> What’s the evidence for which way causality works?
One qualifier would be "at scale and profitably."
But for more detail, yes, the situation has changed over time and probably the reasoning has changed over time.
McGee spends a lot of time on the difficulty for Apple R&D to keep up with Apple design bureau's demands. To the point that Apple execs arrive at decisions that for the sake of internal peace and meeting deadlines, Apple Industrial Design is not to make arbitrary demands (like they used to) and must consider manufacturing realities. Which still leaves Manufacturing struggling at every step to keep up. So - usually - manufacturing is very much pushed to the edge of what's possible by Design. Even though Apple teach China phone manufacturing (again "at scale and profitably"). Design are the ones pushing. Whether Design is really concerned with keeping ahead of competitors... is not explicitely told by Apple people. They do seem to love "impossible". In my recollection, it's more McGee's observations and conclusion.
Apple mainland China companies competition has also been a widely varying quantity. In part due to Chinese fashion trends and in part due to Apple political difficulties in China (which come and go). Underlying should be "at scale and profitably": Apple rightly shouldn't care if a few exotic phones come out. That wouldn't matter to their bottom line. They are described as caring when there is a flood of matching phones coming out - and even then with some latency.
Overall btw, "Apple in China" is fantastic. With massive amounts of local color and "story viewed from the Apple China people's side". Lots of bits that were missed if you mostly followed Apple from the side of what we see in the US.
Thinnest smartphone so far is Chinese HONOR Magic V5 folding phone at 4.1mm, though. iPhone Air is thicker by 1.5mm(1/16") at 5.6mm. Thinnest Samsung Galaxy is 5.8mm.
That was partly true when he was writing the book or doing research, but is no longer true today. China have manage to make phone that is under 5mm, and even stated the only thing that is stopping them getting even thinner is the USB-C port.
The only thing where Apple is consistently ahead of the rest of the industry is the processor.
But on the other hand, apple seems to be the only company unable to get rid of that ugly huge notch. Everyone else improved on that years ago.
it's a feature! /s
If your "impossible" designs are manufactured by non-exclusive suppliers it isn't much of a moat.
> iPhone Air features N1, a new Apple-designed wireless networking chip that enables Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread.
Congrats to Apple for finally designing out Broadcom and vertically integrating the wireless chip
Wireless chipsets have just always been notoriously unreliable. It will be interesting to see Apple can improve reliability here.
Very interesting that it has Thread too. I wonder if that will be a somewhat viable system in a decade. (Show me where I can buy a cheap Thread border gateway that isn't an Apple or Google voice assistant or whatever.)
We're now on the third generation of iPhones that include Thread radios. Mines been sitting dormant for two years waiting for software that utilizes it.
The Aqara Hub M100 is a nice cheap Thread border router.
I’ve read two articles on thread and still don’t know what it is. Something to do with smart homes?
its a low level protocol like WiFi on top of which Smart Home protocols, like Matter, run. It allows for IoT devices to be managed, registered and configured completely local with a hub (any iPad, HomePod and so on) and requires no servers. It is private by design and more secure in some ways, as no one but your hub can control the device. Currently a lot of IoT devices rely on a server that registers and controls them, and is in the hands of a random company you need to trust.
TLDR: privacy, security.
I’ve been impressed with my Thread setup. It’s fast and reliable. Don’t have to think about it, just works.
I mostly use Eve devices. My AppleTV serves as the hub and I keep it plugged into Ethernet. HomePods scattered about keep the mesh strong.
What does it mean though, practically? What could I do with a thread-enabled iPhone?
I wonder if they will eventually add NFC to it. It probably needs to be certified since NFC is used for payments.
NFC is handled by an NXP chip which is completely different than the Broadcom (wifi, BLE) chip. its a simple, extremely well engineered chip that costs nickels and is passively powered so it doesn't affect battery life at all. No incentives whatsoever to build it in-house. Broadcom and Qualcomm were a whole different story.
doubling down on matter! Adoption has been slow but it is starting to ramp up quicker
I wonder why they don't put it to 17/Pro.
my guess is ramping up production and for testing in real world. they did the same thing with C1 modem and released it only for iphone 16e.
They did
N1 is just in 17 Air, no?
edit: ahh I confused it with C1X that is just in Air
I'm going to add +1 to the crowd that thinks that almost no one ever said "Nice, but I wish it was thinner". Who would that be really? Surely apple made their market research before spending the R&D money creating this product. So presumably there is a market segment for it. But who is it?
The standard 17 and Pro seems very much the great product they always are. Incremental refinement. Don't like it? Get one 1-2 generations older. My iPhone 11 still feels very much good enough (which I imagine must be terrible for Apple). Perhaps their idea is that you can't just refine the 15-16-17 every year. You need to try _something_ else, or eventually people will stop paying attention?
This is total speculation on my uninformed part, but to me, the Air seems like the result of their research into foldables. The way hardware is laid out in that upper area is very reminiscent of the Flip category from other manufacturers with their a-symmetric halfs and considering Apple is a very efficiency focused company these days, letting that effort linger till display tech catches up to whatever Apple is waiting for, would feel like a waste perhaps.
Also, as long as we retain an actual Pro version that is willing to be a bit chunkier, I don't see any issue in having an Air line for casual users, maybe that will be the way mainstream devices go with future efficiency gains, similar to the MacBook Air now being "good enough" for most people. Silicon-carbon batteries will likely enable some of that pretty soon, suspect that like with GaN, the supply chain cannot handle Apple level demands yet. Remember, the original three MacBook Airs were beyond compromised too.
Just don't fall into the trap of making the Pro thinner, akin to the 2016 MacBook Pro disaster. Keep the iPhone Pros like the current MacBook Pros chunky for those who actually use these devices and we are golden in my book.
> letting that effort linger till display tech catches up to whatever Apple is waiting for, would feel like a waste perhaps.
To add to this, it's often said that research can only take you so far, at some point you have to ship something to get the opinions and hands on from a wider audience of users to make further discoveries and improvements.
> My iPhone 11 still feels very much good enough (which I imagine must be terrible for Apple)
I think Apple has come to terms with the fact that people are no longer upgrading their phones every 1-2 years. They are probably happy just to keep you in the Apple ecosystem where they can sell you apps, services, accessories, other compatible apple products - and hopefully get your repeat business when you do one day feel the need to upgrade.
As someone who is still on 12 pro and probably won't upgrade to a 17 because of no real need - there really is no better way to ensure my repeat business than selling me a phone that lasted me this long.
I'm pretty sure they know people aren't upgrading every 1-2 years - they have some pretty extensive data on that front. There is a subset but there are some pretty sharp people working at Apple even if this thread likes to rip them every chance they get.
The issue with size I have with phones is that they are too high, so I cannot have it in my jeans front pocket and then sit down.
Thinness has not been an issue in the last 10-15 years.
A thin phone is also very hard to hold, it kind of flips in your hand.
The format the Samsung flips use I feel like solves your issue.
Nobody cares about how hard it is to hold, otherwise we'd have 4-5" screens rather than the phablets that are the norm and basically the only option.
Exactly. Remember when people, for years, complained that phones, for years, kept getting larger and larger?
It's the difference between stated and revealed preference. Phones kept getting larger and larger because larger phones sold better.
Though apparently we have hit the sweet spot a while ago, as phone size is stable now.
There is no point in history at which larger phones have sold better.
Sadly the iphone minis did not do well commercially, at least as we're told.
Must have been a conspiracy then.
Compare for any version. iPhone/Pro always sell better than iPhone Plus/Pro Max.
There is no year in which the larger size sold better than the mainstream size. Ever.
You are literally just making shit up.
You are comparing cheaper phones with substantially more expensive ones. For a meaningful comparison we have to compare phones with a similar price but different size.
False and irrelevant. The claim was "Phones kept getting larger and larger because larger phones sold better."
That claim is demonstrably false. Whether attendant facts like adjusting for price point lead to a subtler inference does not change the absolute fact that the proposition is not consistent with reality.
Price can decrease sales even if size increases sales and price and size are correlated. Causation doesn't always imply correlation.
Again, completely irrelevant.
The claim is "larger phones sold better."
That claim is flatly, objectively false.
I meant of course larger size causes more sales.
I’d very much prefer a phone that’s shaped like a slab (smooth back), no weird camera plateaus and no sad excuse for a battery, but something that can last days.
I have 14 Max, and it is so heavy. I don’t mind the thickness, but the weight is very annoying.
So while I didn’t say “I wish my phone was thinner”, I did say many times “this should weigh about half of what it actually weighs”.
Pixel user here, but I feel the same way. The fact that my phones are getting heavier instead of lighter seems counterintuitive on its face.
Pixel 1 (143g)
Pixel 3 (148g)
Pixel 5 (151g)
Pixel 8 (187g)
Pixel 9 Pro (198g)
Of course the displays of these models get bigger which presumably contributes to the weight increase. But still, you'd think parts get lighter over time, not heavier.
> you'd think parts get lighter over time, not heavier.
I'm just guessing, but I would assume that parts get _smaller_ (so, maybe lighter but not in a "less dense" way) but any space gained is taken up by new parts for new functionality or extra battery
Good point!
I would actually like a phone that is lighter but fatter. Having empty space inside. Letting a good enough camera be flush with the back and the wider sides could add sturdiness. But as others have pointed out, consumer choice is an illusion. It's "you want this".
It's not just about thin. It's also about weight. The Air has a bigger screen but weighs less than the iPhone 17.
By 12g…
And a bigger screen.
I have an XS and wanted to upgrade. But I still don't see a super appealing reason. Battery still decent at 72%. Photos still good enough. browsing fast, apps fast...
It is the best iPhone I owned (3, 6s).
But yeah, spotlight is slow and the phone constantly runs out of storage, so apps need to be deleted before installing updates and least used apps are constantly removed. Additionally the screens are way better now and you do see the difference with photos made on an iPhone 16. I guess I'll upgrade late this year when I am sure the 17 (pro?) is a reliable piece of hardware, like my iPhone XS is.
Agree. I don’t understand the teen of making the phones thinner but larger. I guess I’m part of the small demographics that love the mini, hope my mini 12 have a couple or more years of live in it.
In the same boat, the 12 mini is the perfect size. My hands are probably average or slightly above average size for a man and I find any phone larger than the mini difficult to securely hold while using it with one hand.
Just going to keep this one until they make something similar again.
There're dozens of us! Dozens!
I'll stick to my almost-4-years-old 13 mini as long as I can. Probably will change battery before original batteries are too hard to get hold of
Some people just want "the best" regardless of what it is. If you can improve a measurable spec on a luxury device, some people will covet it.
People who have no concept of material resistance who will come crying when their phone folds very easily with accidental day to day mishaps
I see people every day who have their iphone in their back pocket while sitting. I can’t imagine this model would handle that unless it’s made from pure unobtanium.
When you need to stack 2 phones together because you're oncall, because you're a streamer, etc.
Why would you need 2 phones for oncall?
One personal phone, one work phone.
100%, separate church and state.
especially if you're signed into an account that manages your phone. As we discovered its perfectly possible (or was) to remote wipe a personal android phone if they are signed in using your company google account.
but less paranoid-ly it means you can put your workphone physically else where so you are not tempted to "check in" or have out of hours fun ruin your time off.
Definitely not advocating for the same device used for work and personal stuff, but for on call I think extra work device (phone), if not really needed other than receiving a ping, is just useless. Apps that notify you about incidents are not really doing anything "outside" of on-call shifts.
But you still have to carry two phones, or using work phone during personal time (as part of on-call).
How is this better than just having PagerDuty/Incident.io/whatever and receiving pings there? You are disrupting your time anyway, but having an extra phone for that seems redundant.
With a single case fitting two iPhone Airs back to back and rotated, like a long stick? :)
Honestly I do. I want it thinner and lighter. I don’t use my phone very much so I don’t care about battery very much nor do I about any kind of specs. Wait… yeah that’s why I won’t buy it I love my iPhone 13 mini
I've ever owned an iPhone and probably never will, but I very much like smaller, lighter, thinner. For a device that stays with you all day, the less cumbersome the better, no?
That is the dumbest side profile I have ever seen. The camera bump and camera together are thicker than the rest of this thing. By its design it now demands a massive case or just won't ever sit even reasonably flat on a table. Ridiculous.
It will arguably sit flatter than the prior iPhones, which rock diagonally. This will be tilted a bit, but at least be stable.
It won't be completely stable, when used without a case. The geometry is such that on the side of the lens it's the lens that is touching the surface where you put it, not the bar-shaped bump. Meaning, it won't sit on the long edge of the bar.
Is this confirmed by journalists who were at the event today? It seems true for the Pro models, but I can't tell for the Air.
Yes, see for example the hands-on video of The Verge.
You can also tell from the side profile images on the Apple website. Drawing a straight line from the lens to the bottom edge of the phone doesn't cross or touch the edge of the "plateau", by a good bit.
OK cool, yeah there's definitely still a wobble. [1] Bummer!
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xtu0aVF-hg
I've got an iPhone XR with a chunky (highly protective) Speck Presidio case that's comfortably thicker than the camera protrusion and therefore lays 100% flat.
Gotta say it would drive me nuts to have a phone that didn't lay flat and couldn't therefore be put down safely on the edge of the sink etc.
It is really freaking obnoxious, I can attest to that. I think they either don't want to be mistaken for a Pixel for vanity reasons, or it's easier to do the magic camera switching if the 3 cameras are closer together. But for whatever reason, I hate not having the cameras in a row with a plateau that is symmetrical.
Apple is always one step back, two steps forwards.
"Just" put an magsafe battery on the back.
1. Create a problem.
2. Sell the solution.
3. Profit.
If it runs all day like they claim that probably won't be a big seller.
They very conveniently left out a number from "all day".
Website says "Up to 27 hours video playback", which is apparently 7–8 hours more than the iPhones 13–15 and 4–5 more than the 13–15 Pro. Also normally their battery estimates are conservative.
These days the question is more about continuous use of Gmaps.
But hey, at least the battery is (partially) replaceable that way.
Why should a phone sit flat on a table? What's the advantage of that?
I seriously don't understand this (common) complaint that I see. If anything a slight tilt makes the screen a bit more readable.
I don't want/need the whole thing to be flat but I do prefer it to be stable. For instance if the plateau were a bit thicker so that the camera lens was flush with the surface (even just an extra bar sort of inside the plateau) it would mean that when I put it down it would never rock back and forth when I'm tapping at it on a table.
The problem with the one-sided camera bump is that the phone is unstable. It wobbles when you touch it, making using it while lying “flat” on the table incredibly annoying.
The camera bump is there for the same reason the wireless mouse has the charge port on the bottom: Apple want you to hold it.
Right now I have to lean my phone on my purse to get a nice reading angle, because the lens block is lopsided and my phone wobbles around otherwise. The Air bump is still a better angle than flat, and I bet the lens doesn’t keep it from resting stably on the lower edge of the chin (?) rather than the lens edge.
No, it wobbles and doesn’t rest on the lower chin. Look at the Verge hands-on video on YouTube.
Yup. Well, darn.
It will tilt towards you which would actually be more ergonomic than lying flat.
My iPhone 16 Pro with a case doesn't shit flat. I don't see why this is a problem.
> My iPhone 16 Pro with a case doesn't shit flat. I don't see why this is a problem.
That would definitely be a problem.
It's not about the thickness — this is surely Apple just flexing some of the engineering work that has gone into building a future foldable phone (which inevitably requires thinner hardware to fit two screens in the thickness of one).
So don't take this at face value, it's just a prelude to a foldable phone next year.
I agree but cynicism makes me think it’s a beta, not a flex. Shipping half your next flagship phone to learn about manufacturing, durability etc etc in the real world is kind of genius.
Exactly what they did with Vision Pro. Ship a beta to collect feedback.
Probably right because it’s called iPhone Air and not iPhone 17 Air. Seems like this is a one off phone.
They often discard with the version number for the first release of a product bifurcating, and from then on it follows its own version path.
The first Apple Watch Ultra wasn't the Apple Watch Series 8 Ultra. Subsequent Ultras follow their own versioning. The same with the SE, Air Pod Pros, iPad Air, and so on.
Yeah, the next one wouldn't be the iPhone 18 Air, it would be the iPhone Air 2.
Yea, that'd make no sense in my opinion. Calling it iPhone Air 2 and then iPhone 18 Pro Max. Just confuses people.
Yet that's precisely what Apple has done repeatedly across product lines. Just yesterday they introduced the Apple Watch Series 11, and its low cost variant the Apple Watch SE 3. They also introduced the ruggedized larger variant the Ultra 3.
>Apple has done repeatedly across product lines
But there is no macbook pro 2, macbook air 2, or iphone se 2
I’d place a bet that Apple does not go down the foldable route, they must have seen what happened with Samsung and their Z Fold. Much hyped but turned out to be somewhat of a dud.
> prelude to a foldable phone next year
Or perhaps a prelude to small, triangle-shaped phone that users stick on a shirt or lapel, and tap to activate.
https://startrekshop.ca/products/star-trek-the-next-generati...
Yeah I was first very excited to see a smaller iPhone again, but was very very disappointing that is about the thickness.
NO BODY cares about the thickness!!! I want something that I can hold like the iPhone 5!!!! Or iPod touch size!! Don't want a big screen to watch netflix!!!
This is freaking phone for god sake, back in the old iphone days there were a balance.
Stuff like this is what turns me back to dump phone. I want a phone, not a freaking computer in my hand!
I sincerely hope that apple will consider making a phone with a worse camera that is flatter. As someone who rarely takes photos, and never photos of importance, the bump is just a dead weight to me. My dream phone has a body like iPhone 12 mini (which I currently use) without the protruding camera. As long as it runs all the common communication apps reliably, I'm happy. I'll pay $100 more than the standard body version even. But it doesn't seem like apple (or any notable phone brand) thinks this is worth doing.
It's the peril of being a niche customer. I can and have voted with my wallet, but it doesn't nudge the needle anyway.
> As someone who rarely takes photos, and never photos of importance
Even people who do take photos often would probably gladly sacrifice some image quality to loose that massive thing on the back of the phone. The thinness of the phone almost make it look worse as long as that camera sticks out like that; like a huge watch with a thin strap or something...
> My dream phone has a body like iPhone 12 mini (which I currently use) without the protruding camera.
Sounds similar to the iPhone 4, still my favorite of all the form factors in terms of "hand feel". It was the right thickness for me, just a bit heavy for it's size. If they refreshed it to reduce weight and extended the screen to the borders I think it would be amazing
Have you tried the iPhone SE 1st gen ? Lighter, better processor and screen but almost same design. It’s only 9.5yo and still works perfectly, you can find plenty second hand for 100€.
I still have my SE 1st gen that I pull out from time to time because I use it as the 2FA for my other Apple account, and I am always struck by by how much better it feels to use than even the 12 mini. It is such an ergonomic size for single hand use, and it surprisingly still runs very smoothly.
Using an SE 3rd generation and don't want any other iPhone. Had it for 1.5 years and it still makes me happy - as on the first day.
I was comparing models and probably the “next similar” would be an 16e but I really don’t want the “apple intelligence” - I’ve got my own thanks.
It’s a pity that the SE is going the way of the dodo and dinos - much better phone than a mini-tablet. I still miss my iPhone 3 and the rounded corners and solid aluminium back. Good times.
My phone is an iPhone SE 2nd gen. It's much more ergonomic and I can use it with only one hand, typing text included. Previously I had an iPhone 6S, same screen size (4.7″).
Other iPhone models are giant walkie-talkies for me. They need one hand to hold them and another to type text or slide the screen.
Same here, small but powerful enough for my daily usage. First iPhone I used to earn back what I paid it for.
PS: It was a dirt cheap price as the selling guy needs money for iPhone 16
No, I haven’t. I guess the feel isn’t my most important feature. I usually buy the latest high end model but keep it for a while. Using a 12 pro still and it’s already starting to feel sluggish so I might upgrade to this 17 version, it’s different enough to spark my interest but I think I’ll need to hold the Air before deciding if I like it. It looks comically out of proportion in the marketing pictures. I also don’t use cases and I feel like this is begging for one.
Agree, the 4 was great (except the home button which broke).
If you take Apple's presentation at face value, most of the iPhone Air hardware is within the plateau, with the rest of the body being almost entirely battery. So it's not immediately obvious that even if they did do away with the bump, that there'd be a useable phone left over once considering the necessary reduction in battery size.
You might want to check the 16e. It has 16 insides (without magsafe and uwb chip), with screen from 14 and not very protruding (although still) but good camera. Its also cheaper than base model iphone.
16e with a skinny case, and you have a completely flat phone
it looks like the bump doesn’t have just the camera but also some other stuff like the processor ?
I agree with this so much. I recently upgraded to the 13 Mini and had to go back to the 12 Mini because I hated the big camera thing on the back. I actually like the 12 Mini camera more than the 13 Mini also. It felt like the 13 Mini couldn’t take close up photos worth a damn.
Pixel 9a is the closest to a no bump phone out of the major brands.
Incredible lift-to-weight ratio is going to contribute to epic hang times from this thing while the camera bump provides a center of gravity for it to rotate around for predictable flight paths.
Talking about using this thing as a boomerang?
For the reference...there was an app (I think it's banned on all the stores now?) that used the phone's sensors to record its hangtime when thrown in the air (pending it survived the landing, I guess). I think there was a scoreboard?
Nicknamed The Tomahawk
This has a couple of up sides.
1. Biggest is that Apple can finally tell if people really want a thinner phone (I don’t). Maybe once they find out the answer, they can finally start using the space more productively.
2. They mentioned local LLM in passing, but this is the biggest possible selling point of the executives actually back real work on making them consumer-level easy. Have a LLM marketplace. Let users sub-train with their own ideas and local data. Enable users to privately and safely port their personal LLMs to their next Apple. Apple has the best most efficient hardware available and they have it in millions of pockets. It’s about time they use that to become the dominant phone and personal device maker. Instead of focusing on anorexic phones.
Sigh. I can't stand the camera bump. I would run not walk to the nearest Apple store with all my savings if they made a phone where the camera bump is made flush by adding thickness elsewhere to match, filled with extra battery. Thing would last for weeks. Ah well back to reality.
I see this said all the time but I think people underestimate what an extra few millimeters of thickness would feel like in the hand. Both in terms of grip-ability and weight. I would reckon if people actually got to use a device like that they'd quickly realize they don't want to use it in their day to day.
The iPhone 14 Pro was noticeably heavy, but the switch to titanium the following year made the 15 Pro feel way lighter. The only difference was 206 grams -> 187 grams, but you'd swear it was 25% lighter.
Okay but in this scenario there would still be a slimmer/lighter iPhone to buy, so what's the problem?
The apple watch ultra is thicker and overall bigger than the regular one in the name of better battery life, and people that don't need that buy the regular one. Win win!
The Apple Watch Ultra is thicker but still within reason for a thing you wear on your wrist. For a thing you're pulling in and out of your pockets and is already straining people's pinkies at their current sizes, I can't imagine a phone that's as thick as the camera protrudes being at all usable by a normal person's measure. The iPhone 16 Pro is advertised as 8.25mm thick. The camera bump is an extra 4.3mm, so flattening it out would make the thing 12.55mm thick. Spread across a big 149.6mm x 71.5mm body, or in the Pro Max case, 163.0mm x 77.6mm, you're adding a lot of mass.
Now I'm curious to do the math.
The iPhone 16 Pro's volume (not counting camera bump, you don't hold that in your hand anyway) is 149.6 x 71.5 * 8.25 = 88,245.3mm^3
Bumping the thickness to 12.55mm you end up with 149.6 x 71.5 * 12.55 = 134,239.82mm^3
A 52% increase in volume.
In the Pro Max you'd go from 104,352.6mm^3 to 158,742.44mm^3
The iPhone Minis sold millions of units and Apple still determined it wasn't enough to justify existing. I'd bet a big brick iPhone would be far more niche. I'd certainly like to see one and hold it in my hands but I think you can see why Apple wouldn't go for that.
iPhone 5(s) was peak case design imo and the last to have a flush camera iirc. The 12 and 13 mini were close, but still had the bump.
My personal favorite would be that style with modern chips and a full glass display. Basically an updated mini without a camera bump.
They'll never make this though because the minis proved the market is tiny.
Well, take this as a data point of one. I hate thin phones. It's like holding a dull knife. It's not comfortable. There's a reason OXO and other brands started making utensils with THICKER handles. They feel better to many people (me included)
I also don't care about weight, up to a point. No phone I've owned in the last 25 years has felt too heavy.
>Both in terms of grip-ability and weight.
It will be much more grippier and easier to hold. The weight part is very subjective of course.
I'm not comfortable with lighter models for example and always have to buy a case simple to feel the phone in my hand.
I guess many people hold a thick device like that - iPhone with a case, battery case, etc.
I promise you I would love and worship a phone like that every single minute of my life. :-)
But yeah, I know you are right and the market has spoken. I accept this however begrudgingly.
I'll do you one better, how about the camera is not flush but recessed so it is less likely to be the thing that gets smashed?
This. I wish it was flush - typically it's actually protruding.
I've seen one guy attach an ECG lead to the back so that he could lay the phone down without the camera part touching the surface. As a bonus you could spin the device on it.
They don't make it protruding as a design choice. There's a bunch of room needed under there in order to take the incredible photos that phones are capable these days. Google what those lens modules look like under the bump.
The choice is in the rest of the phone. Recall the context:
> if they made a phone where the camera bump is made flush by adding thickness elsewhere to match, filled with extra battery
Or smeared with hand grease
Pixel 9a is probably the closest to what you're describing on the market today.
I love the wide camera bump of the Pixels. It means the phone sits solid on the table without rocking and serves as a nice ledge on the bad for holding it. I wouldn't mind if the phone was thicker for extra battery but the bump is actually a plus in my book.
https://intl.redmagic.gg/products/redmagic-10s-pro is what you want (I have the 9S and absolutely love it)
> 23,000 RPM fan
Phones should not have fans.
I kinda like it. I'm not much of a mobile gamer, so mine only comes on to prolong battery health when the battery is fast-charging. The next model is said to gain water and dust resistance too as well as keeping the active cooling fan: https://www.gsmarena.com/redmagic_11_will_boast_a_world_firs...
I will most likely upgrade to an 11S around this time next year. The other factors that drew me to it were the huge (6500mAh) battery, a real analog headphone jack (used daily with my Etymotic ER4XR), and no dumbass notch cut out of the screen.
Which is such a shame because the Pixel 1 was exactly what they are describing. It was a physically perfect phone. It had no camera bump and the front screen wasn't bulging up past the sides so you could drop it without shattering the screen.
Could you just buy a case that adds the thickness to get rid of the bump? Much cheaper and easier than waiting on apple to do it.
> the camera bump is made flush by adding thickness elsewhere
Cant a case do this for you?
You can do it with a case, but a case with a battery in it is even thicker.
I'd be at least INTERESTED in seeing what my iPhone 15 Pro Max would look like without a case and with a built-in battery that made it not have a camera hump.
I will wholeheartedly agree I'd prefer the aesthetics of what apple produces versus what it looks like inside a case.
I wonder if an aftermarket shell and battery could achieve this.
why not get a battery attachment case/snapon
why can't apple just my ridiculous combo of wants that represents 0.2% of the market???
It's thinner, but at 165 grams it's not appreciably lighter than a regular-sized iPhone (the 16e in particular at 167 grams). People generally want a more lightweight phone more than they want a thinner phone. So it's only for people who also want a larger-than-regular iPhone screen.
I naively assume the amount of internal aluminum/supports probably canceled out some of the potential weight savings.
6.1 inch display vs 6.5 inch display. Not quite apples to apples here.
Of course, but if your main concern is weight and you don't necessarily want a larger display (or would even prefer to go smaller than 6.1"), then it fails to be an improvement.
> Biggest is that Apple can finally tell if people really want a thinner phone (I don’t).
It's going to be so painful if the answer is yes.
> Apple can finally tell if people really want a thinner phone
They would need to sell two otherwise equivalent new models att the same time where one is thicker for that.
The bumper is back! I was one of the weirdos who liked it unironically for the iPhone 4 back in the day, antennagate prevention aside.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MH004ZM/A/iphone-air-bump...
It's $39, but if it's indeed rigid as the description implies, then it may be a legit option for drop protection without compromising the thinness.
I've long been inured to the Apple Tax, but that $60 plastic strap is taking it a bit too far IMO
Yeah especially because it's not even compatible with the Apple Cloth, for when it gets dirty.
Won't it still significantly add to the thickness, at least in terms of making one-handed typing harder?
IME it's pretty comfortable to use.
The sides can be made grippier and the back of the phone left slippery, so the in-out of pocket experience is nice, while the grippier parts fit in the palm when in use.
The added thickness on the border is also a welcome affordance, and as your fingertips are on the thinner back it feels thin still.
To me it's kinda the best of both world.
Have you tried it on this phone? Seems like it would vary from phone to phone as to whether it's a plus or minus.
...unless it lands on the big protruding camera lens.
That's fair. The corresponding full-body case Apple is releasing for $49 does have a conspicious extra lip higher than the camera bulge (albeit that's typical to mitigate camera flash glare). https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGH24LL/A/iphone-air-case...
The 16e is 167 grams, where the Air is 165 grams. It feels like the Air is to the 16e what the Pro is to the standard titled iPhone — the expensive version.
Which makes the marketing feel a bit incongruent with what we've gotten here. It's not noticeably more lightweight than what is currently offered, it's less featureful than the 17, but more expensive than the 17 (albeit perhaps prettier).
It seems like engineering failed to make a true superlight in its class despite narratively trying to re-evoke what we really did experience with the original MacBook Air. Instead we got an elegant up sized 16e priced like a Pro.
It's also a bit weird that iPhone Air being an Air is more expensive. MacBook Air and iPad Air are the cheaper options in contrast
No it isn't. The cheapest option is the iPad, then iPad Air and then Pro. It'll be the same with macs once the rumored A-chip based mac launches.
Not weird.
iPhone E, iPhone, iPhone Air, iPhone Pro
There's no MacBook E and MacBook non-air, so the order matches.
Apple’s pricing structure is: X SE < X < X Air < X Pro.
You fail to mention that the 17 and 16e don't only differ by weight. Miniaturization is costly.
Yes but the name “Air” claims lightweight, not thin
Air, as a product line, quite famously started with Jobs emphasising the thinness of the MacBook Air by pulling it from a paper folder. Taking what are ultimately marketing terms as literal face-value descriptors isn't particularly useful.
Footprint to weight ratio is an important factor. S25 Edge weights 163g but it felt noticeably lighter in hand than other phones with similar weight.
Definitely. I think many larger screen buyers of iPhonee will be happy there is the option to trade off the extra battery they used to get by default with a large screen for now less weight.
It's just odd to me that despite its price it feels closer to a superthin upscaled e, rather than a superthin upscaled 17 or instead being extralight. Now I imagine they didn't have a lot of weight to lose given how optimized for weight phone components were already. The Air branding just had me hoping they had a bigger engineering statement to make than what they did.
A lot of pseudo-intellectual babble over what is clearly a cool piece of engineering that many people are excited about. Turns out, you can just do things, some people will think it's awesome while the people in the middle of the curve continue to keep the midwit meme alive.
Maybe this will take off like hotcakes but I'm in the "I don't think this does anything for me / anyone" camp.
Granted I loved the 13 mini and that didn't sell so who knows.
It’s clear that super thinness is a technology imperative necessary to get Foldable IPhones. In order to fold, you first must solve thinness (since the final decide will be 2x once folded).
Apple focusing on thinness is proof to me a foldable phone is next.
Why do phones need to bend?
Because.
Seriously. Take a look at the foldable touchscreen phones that do exist. "Because" is the only answer.
Wouldn't you want a moderately priced device weighing under 200g with a big screen? I would. It would be great for reading books everywhere.
I wouldn't. I like being able top use my phone one-handed and not have the battery die before the end of the day.
Kindle
Awesome, can I fit in my pocket and will I have it with me at all times?
My Kobo mini does! And it still runs a current OS, so it syncs with my bigger Kobo I use at home.
If you acquire men’s clothing with proper pockets, yes. The second part is entirely up to you.
LOL. I have perfectly fine pants, thank you. I already carry my keys, my wallet, my phone, the last thing I want in there is another item that's bigger than my phone.
And most people are like me, which you will see in a few years, when foldable sales take off.
There’s a single and obvious reason. Bigger screen.
And if you’re going to ask why a bigger screen? It’s the same reason your laptop or desktop isn’t 7” wide.
My laptop isn’t 7” wide because I do my work on it, and that work involves reading long text files and requires a keyboard big enough to comfortably type said long text files, not because “bigger screen = always better”. It’s all about the use case.
I lament my 13 mini coming to the end of its lifespan. Good design.
I attempted to replace my 13 mini's battery today using the iFixit kit. I broke the OLED panel doing so. Removing the screen take much more force than I though. I did this hopping to keep my iPhone maybe 2 more years. Now I am waiting for ordering the 17 next Friday. I will have to manage having half of my screen being white until then...
> Removing the screen take much more force than I though.
Sorry, how is applying less force more dangerous?
(in general, wish the force meters would be widespread so that iFixit kit just had a monitor with a number and a beeper once you reach the needed force level)
Same. I have 12 mini and got a 13 mini refurb. Perfect phone.
I have mine right here. Upgraded away from iOS but not because it came to the "end of it's lifespan"
"It starts at $999 for 256GB", I on the other hand am in the "prices gotten ridicilous" camp
> Granted I loved the 13 mini
It is almost as good as the (smaller) first gen iPhone SE with the physical button.
The group this does something for is the shareholders. Apple is still a product company, but their number one offering is AAPL.
… shareholders who expect Apple to sell phones that people want.
Clearly there is a disconnect between what commenters want and what actually sells.
The marketing shows what sells. People want to be 25, hot, in cool places with cool looking friends, with great lighting.
Also, satisfied people don't have any need to comment.
Yes; the mini phones never sold very well, yet there are always commenters that ask for it. There are no small phones on the market, even the asus zenphone - which used to be the best compact android - is just a big phone now.
I searched the gsmarena and it only lists 3 modern phones:
- Sony Xperia 10 VI
- Sharp Aquos sense8
- Ulefone Armor Mini
With the last one being the only one that is actually small, the former are just "not that big".
I'm not sure that this will sell well.
$0.25 fentanyl sells good. Doesn't mean it's what people need.
Fentanyl is a fascinating market case study because nobody actually wants fentanyl, they want oxycodone or heroin.
It's the "market data reveals that consumers actually want the cheapest shittiest airplane tickets" of drugs. And you can read that in a couple different ways.
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
When a phone costs north of 1000USD something is terribly wrong. 99% of "modern" phone use is basically (doom) scrolling, browsing the web, using core apps (like maps) for directions, taking pictures and finally communicating with whatsapp and making the odd/rare old school phone call.
This should not require spending 1000-1500USD on a phone.
Im doing all of the above with a iPhone SE for what i paid like 300-350USD for.
Second hand phones are even cheaper, just change the battery and you are good to go.
Okay, if your use case doesn’t require it, then don’t buy it…? You aren’t the only person in the world and some people might actually make use of this phone’s features(?)
You can hate Apple for it, but the phone costs $1000+ because people will buy it. Apple has been proven right year after year since 2017 (iPhone X)
You can still do everything you mentioned on a $150 phone, which exists in parts of the world. If anything, one could complain that the $150 phone still takes pictures worse than an iPhone 5
As you point out, it doesn't require it.
Your comment is like complaining about luxury handbags when cheap ones exist too.
I don't know what you're suggesting. Companies shouldn't make expensive versions of things even when there are consumers who want to buy them?
You should also realize that it's people buying the expensive versions of things that helps subsidize the cheaper ones made by the same company. And it's the quality Apple is providing that even makes a secondhand market viable, because their devices last much more than other brands.
Well i would never have a 50,000 dollar bag (like those red-carpet people do), so why have a 1500 phone? Is it just a status symbol? A phone!
In Turkey, iPhone Pro 17 costs $2,610, yet there are still queues outside Apple stores. Considering that the average income is much lower than in the United States, people are still willing to pay more for this phone than you might expect.
People pay for how they look (which is fine) not what they do.
im on an SE too and i have no idea what ill buy when this phone dies… i would rather buy an android than get a 16e
Recession indicator handset
Whenever Apple releases a new phone, I like to visit this page to actually compare it to previous models
https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare
Also, It's a bummer that they didn't launch something for the mini series. I prefer smaller screens that fit into my pocket, I don't care about thinness. 13-mini will be the last iPhone I can upgrade to in a few years, after that I'll have to look into other phones
Another thing that stuck out, what's the point with having such a thin phone, yet the camera system points out? I would much prefer a complete flat backside
I'll vote with my wallet
https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-17,ip...
Interesting. So apart of camera and battery life, the upgrade from iphone 12 mini to iphone 17 is unimpressive and for someone like me who likes smaller sized phones and don't care about refresh rate (my goal is to decrease my screen time rather then increase), its actually a downgrade.
Thanks to this site, i've just realized that the ip17 has bigger screen than ip16.
It's more the other two dimensions that I want shrunk. Did anyone think their phone was too thick to fit in their pocket?
No kidding. I just want one that I can use one handed again. I’m on the IPhone SE, have hands that can play an octave + 2 additional keys on a piano, and I can’t reach the whole screen with a single hand.
I’m probably just holding it wrong.
The trick to this is to attach a handle to the back of it. I'm using one that telescopes from the "popsockets" brand (I'm unaffiliated and have no idea how it compares with other brands). It makes it possible for me to access all parts of my screen holding it one handed. It should be a standard feature.
I want a handle on the back of my phone even less than I want a larger phone. I also refuse to use cases and any other contraption that adds further bulk.
I have had an excellent experience with the OhSnap grip. https://ohsnap.com/products/snap-grip It is significantly smaller than the popsocket and adds a strong magnet which can attach your phone to magnetic surfaces. It looks flimsy, but I've had it two years and even moved phones and it shows no signs of breaking.
Totally agree. Apply can pry my iPhone SE 3 from my cold dead hands.
The perfect form factor. Touch ID instead of Face ID. It's the absolute pinnacle of the iPhone models, based on the iPhone 6.
I don't understand why I can't just have this same phone with a slightly better camera. That's all I want.
Occasionally I reach around the other side to press buttons as if I am using a guitar/violin grip but I don't do this enough to not be awkward
You can actually swipe down starting at the bottom third of the screen, and the top of the screen will move down so you can reach it with one hand.
Or they can make the phone human-sized and not resort to software hacks to resolve poor ergonomics.
That helps with reaching up, but my thumb also doesn't reach the far bottom corner either. I don't have a super-octave handspan but I don't have small hands either.
Thanks to their incredibly poor demos I believed until THIS MORNING that to do that maneuver, you had to start your downward swipe ON the little bar that's about 2px from the bottom of the screen (which works, but is nearly impossible with a case).
I'm glad other people have chimed in. It drives me insane that no one thought to make one-hand mode not change the width as well or be a total aspect change.
Just make it configurable yknow
I have a Unihertz Jelly Star, it fits in my hand and it works great.
Unihertz would be an amzing phone company if they updated their software literally ever.
Instead you are stuck with the OS, and security updates, that were out a year before you bought it. And you can't install LineageOS either.
We're in the minority. The iPhone Minis did not sell well. I think women especially do not want a small phone because they carry it in a purse anyway (and slap a case on it with an extra handle to make it easier to hold).
> The iPhone Minis did not sell well.
I’ve said this many times when this came up.
The Mini didn’t fail because it was too small. It failed because it wasn’t small enough.
I want a small phone that I can use single-handedly. A smaller screen is a tradeoff. The Mini had the disadvantage of a smaller screen plus the disadvantage of not being usable with a single hand. Because of that, I never bought one - if I’m going to be handicapped anyway, I’d rather have a larger screen.
> It failed because it wasn’t small enough.
I've never seen a preference like this, in real life. Usually the thing closest to what you want is the preferred option. You're suggesting there's a hump in the preference curve, pushing people away from their preference, buying a larger phone than the smallest, when they "want" a smaller one.
I have trouble believing this is true. Do you have any other example of this type of preference curve? I suppose the "uncanny valley" may be one, but that seems more understandable.
I'm not sure I'd call it a curve.
Small phone vs. larger phone is a very simple tradeoffs calculation.
Large phone: good screen, bad ergonomics Small phone: small (thus worse) screen, best ergonomics
I'm willing to pick the second option above.
Unfortunately the Mini is somewhere in the middle: smaller screen than the larger phone - thus worse in that aspect -, combined with worse ergonomics than an actually small phone. It's the worst of both worlds.
I don't know about other things, but ever since the iPhone 5 I've been wanting another model that I could use with a single hand. The Mini was never that, so why would I sacrifice a good feature (larger screen) for... nothing in return?
Also, increasingly shrinking the screen places increasing demands on apps and app developers to support those dimensions.
It's not like enlarging the screen where you can at least generalize it by scaling everything up and it's still useable.
With shrinking screens, you have to decide on tap target and content size minimums. It's quite an undertaking that needs to pay in the market.
The iPhone Mini size isn't to bad, but I agree to some extent - I think perfect size phone for me would be about original iPhone SE size. It could have a 5" screen if you made it edge-to-edge (for ref the iPhone Mini has a 5.4" screen).
Original SE was fantastic. Still is.
> The Mini didn’t fail because it was too small. It failed because it wasn’t small enough.
The size is fine. But why they gotta handicap cameras?
All I want is a mini-sized phone with max's camera. Is that so much to ask for?
At this point I'm strongly considering ditching the iPhone and going Watch + Fujifilm Camera. Maybe keep an old phone at home to manage the watch.
> Is that so much to ask for?
Actually, yes. The mini already has limited space to work with, they had already to shrink the MB, the battery. It would take much more effort to put a pro camera into it. Also those camera do heat up.
Personally, i think the camera setup on ip13mini is fine.
Yep! iPhone 13 Mini: 5.4". iPhone 4S: 3'5". More than 1.5x as large. It's HUGE. It's not really mini.
Give me 3" iPhone. That would be mini.
> iPhone 4S: 3'5"
This is a very funny typo, considering the topic at hand.
But yeah, I think I stopped being happy with phone sizes when they started going beyond 4" or so. It's hilarious to me that they can make a phone that's ~5.5" and call it "mini".
I'm an Android guy, and had high hopes for https://smallandroidphone.com/, but the guy who was originally driving it is running his resurrected Pebble company now, and there's been basically no useful activity in the Discord for at least a couple years now, so I assume it's dead.
I think the mini refer to physical dimension.
You can take calls on an Apple Watch. Is that more the size you're looking for?
I don't have an Apple Watch, and I have no interest in getting one.
In any case, the Apple Watch has a much smaller screen and absolutely horrendous ergonomics for everything but the simplest use cases.
So, to answer your question: no.
I'm just waiting for Apple Watch to not require an iPhone at all. I'd actually love to just ditch the phone altogether.
> think women especially do not want a small phone because they carry it in a purse anyway
The correlation I saw a while back during one of the debates about the trend towards phablets was it depended a lot on your usage patterns.
Are you someone who tends to use your phone while sitting down? Larger form factor
Are you someone who tends to use your phone standing up, especially while walking? Smaller form factor.
They didn’t sell well because it was COVID.
You have absolutely no idea how many people are curious which iPhone I have
Insightful! That's a great point: A period where a lot of people (especially the average-higher-income Apple demographic) were more likely to be sitting at home all day. Having a phone that is heavy and barely pocketable is nbd if you just have it sit on the coffee table or desk all day.
> I think women especially do not want a small phone because they carry it in a purse anyway
Yeah, I've noticed this. Many women also wear clothing where they either have no pockets at all, or the pockets are more decorative than functional, small enough that a truly small phone would have trouble fitting (certainly not the 5.5" iPhone "mini", which is hardly mini at all).
Because phones are status symbols for most people, what better way to show youve made it then pulling a giant shiny rock out of your pocket.
Hilariously phones are so big they don't fit in some women's bags - clutches or multi compartment bags for example
I honestly think they didn't sell well because they were called 'mini'. They should have just marketed them as the base level iPhone and it might have had a chance.
Apple sold more than 5 million iPhones 13 Mini in 2022. If the phone had come from any other manufacturer it would be considered a hit.
They should have called it the maxi, for 'maximum smallness'.
Not to be crude but I suspect the company that makes the "ipad" is very careful with "max" and "maxi" branding.
I recently doubled the thickness of my iPhone SE by adding an external battery. Fits in my jeans pocket fine along with several other things in the same pocket. If they can get it that thin, why don't they just add more battery and take us back to the time when we could run phones for weeks between charges.
[edit] I'll answer my own question. Nobody is going to replace an iPhone because it drops from 21 days battery to 14 days battery, but they probably will replace an iPhone that drops from 21 hours battery to 14 hours.
There is an accessory outboard battery for this new iphone.
You know, that's a good point. At least the air will have amazing battery life once it's in a purpose built battery case
Yep. I keep holding out for a new Mini. They keep making phones wider and taller. Thanks Apple!
I’m still holding onto my 12 mini wishing they would update it. Perfect size imo.
My battery was going out on my 12 and I got an SE. It's a good experience. If you can get a thumb print one, I personally like it a lot more than face ID.
I wasn't sold on face ID until winter, and then the appeal become viscerally obvious.
I like the size of a regular iPhone. What I really want is a lighter phone. Unfortunately, compared to the iPhone 17, the Air is about 30% thinner, with worse battery life, camera, etc, but only around 7% lighter. I was expecting at least 20% lighter if it's called "Air".
Exactly.. and it’s not even the height. It’s mainly the width + placements of UI elements at the top.
Air could’ve been the perfect mini replacement. Same width, but higher.
But no.. why get the air when the pro has so much more of everything, and is only 100 more
You have to sacrifice screen size to shrink the other dimensions, and they already have smaller screen iPhones. It seems most people care more about big screens than size in that dimension
They don't have smaller screen iPhones anymore lol what? the iPhone 13 Mini is the last phone that can be in that category. Does anyone really think that 6.1 inches is a "small" device?
The 17 does technically have a smaller screen than the Air, but only by 0.2". Not exactly a small phone. They don't even have a 6.1" phone anymore - smallest now is going to be 6.3".
The smallest iPhone would've been classified as a "phablet" a decade ago
I remember a coworker getting a Dell Streak Android phone in 2010 and it was enormous. Definitely felt more like a small tablet.
The GSM Arena review is mostly about the confusion of whether it should still be considered a phone at this size. Ultimately they decide it's just too damn big for a phone.[1].
It had a 5" screen.
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/dell_streak-review-531.php
Even with a 5" screen, it was bigger than for example iPhone 17 in every single dimension due to its hefty bezels (and not insignificantly so; iPhone 17 is closer in width to iPhone 13 Mini than a Dell Streak).
Screen diameter is in general a bit misleading figure for phones from different generations as "full screen" phones tend to have a taller aspect ratio and hence larger diameter even with same body dimensions.
Only a little bigger but you're right, I didn't think the bezels on the Streak looked that big but I see they're really pretty substantial. It's the dimensions of a modern 6.5" phone, basically.
Just give me one good phone with a small screen please, and everyone else can buy one of the other 10,000 options with huge screens.
Take the Unihertz Jelly Star. No I get not paid for advertising. I just be happy to have it found.
Does it have all the normal US bands? their site doesn't give much assurance, and they have a graphic with every non-US carrier's logo and no US carrier logos.
Apparently there is not enough of a market of people like you to make it worth manufacturing, sadly.
> they already have smaller screen iPhones.
Not small enough to be worth the tradeoffs though.
I’ve been a little concerned that the (non-transparent) back is “protected” by glass. I understand that Marketing has to work with what they’re given, but that’s a bit much.
You need it to be glass and not plastic because otherwise it would cut in half the number of expensive repairs, which would likely tempt people to risk not having AppleCare, a very profitable business.
iPhones had glass backs for the better part of last decade
Why?
I got the Samsung 25 Edge and did move from a the regular sized phone to "plus" without the constraints and weight that usually follows. I can reach the screen edges that I can't on the same size plus version. Added bonus that i don't get a strain in my pinky from the weight and its still very pocketable. So I'm sold on thinner phones except the wobble from hell when its laying on the table.
Yes, the fact that there is no American small phone with an e-ink screen is IMO proof that they basically want us to suffer.
It’s because they’re working on a foldable phone. And to make that work you need to phone half as thin first. This is not because they think people want thinner phones. It’s because they think people will want bigger screens and this will get them there.
Yes. In the era of slim pants.
Funny, most of the people presenting on the event stream, especially women, were wearing very loose pants.
OP is indicating that they felt the phone was too thick in a previous fashion era, that of tight pants. Loose is very very in
5 years too late
Tim had some slim pants.
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for smart phones with a bigger screen.
Exactly my thought when I saw it. When I said smaller this isn’t what I meant!
Exactly. I'm still using my iPhone 13 mini and won't change it for something bigger. I wouldn't mind something a little smaller.
Back when I got my iPhone XR I immediately thought it was too thin, and got a case for it which added a non insignificant amount of thickness.
I’ve found the Pixel 8 and 9 Pro to be quite a reasonable size and they run GrapheneOS pretty nicely.
No, but if I recall correctly the mini didn't sell as well as they wanted.
Every time a new iPhone comes up people on hacker news pine for a new mini, which I understand. But everytime someone has to bring back up that the 12 and 13 minis were the worst selling sku two gens in a row, with at one point the 13 mini only attributing to 3% of 13 sales [1].
I'm sorry, but the market has spoken. And there's Android phones in that form factor if you really want it.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...
> there's Android phones in that form factor if you really want it.
I'm genuinely interested. Which ones?
When I looked for a new phone on gsmarena with a similar form factor as my old one, there were pretty much no options. So few even, my old phone appeared in the results. I too would be interested.
There's this 6.1 inch phone, now stop complaining.
There are not Android phones in that form factor
>Hahahaha LMAO. Here's your upvote my friend.
Back to reality, Apple sells close to 200 billion worth of iPhones per year, so yeah, maybe they know what they're doing?
We'll see. I wonder how well the Air will sell. I do understand the Mini didn't sell well, so I'm obviously not the average consumer.
People underestimate what you can do with trillions of dollars at your disposal.
They could build a small town with all things you can imagine, cars, cinemas, hospitals, schools, whatever then get people to live there for months and use whatever new device prototypes they plan to launch a year later, and have an army of analysts even looking at their damn micro-expressions each time they pick up their phones in different ways and all of that might come down to like 50 million a year, which is like 0.05% of their revenue.
Apple is not anymore a startup where two/three guys make major decisions out of intuition (they ousted Ive because of that), again, this is a 2 trillion dollar company, they're not just vibing, lmao.
If you’ve been following the rumour mill and also understand Tim “zero waste” Cook’s MO of reusing parts in multiple models, this whole thing makes a lot more sense when you realise they’re going to release a folding iPhone next year, and it’ll be the thickness of two Airs.
(side note) And the folding phone will be a "Apple First".
I wonder if they still still have a stupid camera notch on the device. They is no point (to me) have a thin phone even you end up having a 5mm notch the size of your phone
Reusing parts for them, massive piles of software-bricked e-waste for us.
“Thinnest” should be measured by the thickest slice for a given dimension.
I have an iPhone 11 which also has a camera bump and the experience of typing while the phone is on a flat surface is laughably annoying. For a company that prides itself on design aesthetics, it is honestly an embarrassing miss.
Genuinely curious: why do you often find yourself typing on the phone resting on a flat surface? I can’t think of a single time where that’s been the best way to handle my device.
I do this all the time, but I switched to iPhone only this year after a decade as a Nexus/Pixel user. I really wonder if this behavior comes from people who got accustomed to using phones with iOS vs Android, because it's certainly much more frustrating on iPhone.
Basically, whenever I sit down at my desk, I always have my phone sitting there, too. That's how I keep tabs on my personal life during work. But it works much better in Android:
* The Always On display came to Pixels a long time ago, so it was very useful to have your lock screen showing the date, time, and what sort of notifications you have.
* The notification management is just light years better in Android, so you don't have to even unlock your phone all the time to see what's going on.
* The Swiping keyboard was introduced a long time ago in Android, and is far superior in my experience, to the iPhone one, so it's pretty tolerable to type up quick things with the phone lying flat on the surface.
I'm actually kind of surprised that you don't interact with your phone on a desk or table. Do you just leave it in your pocket all day? Do you leave it on your desk, too, but just find it too cumbersome to deal with there and are constantly picking it up?
I do this all the time, often when I'm at a desk or table. I had to get a bulky case for my iPhone just so it didn't unstably contact at only 2 points and rock with each tap.
Why don't you pick up the phone and type on it? That seems a lot more ergonomic.
I find myself using the phone on the desk, placed between my keyboard and monitor. I do this because I find having stuff in pockets less comfortable than not, so I put things on my desk. I sometimes want to communicate with my wife about domestic logistics and prefer typing short replies without lifting the phone every time. My work laptop is not logged into my iCloud account, so cannot reply there. Happens a few times a week.
So people would like Apple to make a radically different decision about camera sensor size or phone thickness so that those who want to hammer out a short message a couple times a week on their desk don’t have their phone wobble slightly or, even worse, need to pick up their phone to use it in hand?
And why use a shitty tiny screen keyboard to type if you're literally sitting at your desk with a proper keyboard in front of you?
As an example, not everyone is able to use iMessage on a work computer.
This has similar vibe to "You are holding it wrong"
Which is an interesting comparison because most of the people were indeed unrealistically deathgripping their iPhone just to see the antenna bars drop.
I’d do it more if it wasn’t an annoying UX! I have message previews on lock screen turned off. If I get a message when my phone is sitting next to my keyboard on my desk, I unlock it to view the message. Might type a quick reply.
Apple doesn't advertise this as the intent, but until the Air I felt that the Phone+Case combo is the complete phone, as it is intended to be used. Add any of Apple's official cases, leather, silicone, whatever, and that's the official "thickness" of the phone. The cameras are recessed, the front display is recessed, the whole phone is wrapped in leather and further customized to your style.
Now the Air has a bump that is so big no case can hide it without also being unreasonably thicc, breaking the trend. I wonder what a case mfg could stuff into the awkward space on the peninsula where the camera is missing so the case provides a uniform surface when laying flat, even if that means a bigger bump on the top when cased. The phone would have a natural angle towards the user, that's kinda nice. Maybe a little bluetooth speaker setup so owners of the Air can more efficiently irritate their fellow passengers.
Just do not understand the market for this one. The current size of phones is a solved problem. Nobody is asking for these things to be thinner. Most people use cases and are happy to add some thickness for battery life. Besides, the camera "plateau" makes it all futile.
I would love a lighter phone. If I chase after kids at the park, the thing is banging around like a lead weight in my pockets.
Safe to assume those are your kids?
I already imagined a guy in cargo shorts.
Why make a worse product for a problem that can be solved by carrying your phone a different way, or not having your phone on you for a moment?
"You're holding it wrong"
This phone is not significantly lighter than previous gen. It's 146g vs 170g for the iPhone 16.
That’s ~15% improvement
That’s not nothing
Parent is wrong, the Air is 165g, not 146g. The previously lightest iPhone in production is the 16e at 167g, so almost no difference in weight between those two.
The iPhone 12 Mini weighed 135g. Even more improvement :)
The correct solution already existed but it wasn't expensive luxury fashion bullshit enough so it didn't sell and they'll pretend it never existed.
Plastic would do more than less battery and more glass/ceramic though, right?
As other comments have said, this isn't going to change that experience whatsoever
But 165gr is not really that light.
And 6.5” is not small.
I'm in the market for this
I've been hoping for Apple to return to "thin" and it's nice that they're trying. I don't know whether I would buy this, but my current iPhone 14 Pro feels like a brick — thick stainless steel
When I go for a run, it's uncomfortable to have in a pocket depending on what running clothes I am wearing. The heaviness makes it feel far more likely to break all the times I have dropped it (and I have dropped it many times, without a case)
Thinner phones are aesthetically pleasing and feel nice to hold. I can keep a battery pack nearby for emergencies
I’m asking for thinner
What do you need battery life for?
Aren’t you in your house or office or car near a charger most of the day?
Do you spend 90% of your waking day in the middle of an open field far from any sort of charging capabilities?
Why would I add more weight to a phone so I don’t have to put it on the charging MagSafe puck that is inches away from me at all times
Why would you want worse battery life just for shaving 2,31 mm and 12g. That's a ridiculous compromise, especially since weight is the more important factor and it's going to be barely noticeable in this case.
Battery life isn't just about runtime it's also about the number of cyles you will be able to do before you have to deal with the bullshit that is iPhone battery replacement.
There is objectively no good reason to prefer that compromise appart from the "feeling" factor, which is not a reason by definition.
If get the battery compromise in the mini iPhones (even thought they could have just made them a bit thicker without changing much of the feel/functionality) because that's part of the deal with the form factor but going with a very large display only to make the phone thinner is beyond stupid.
And it's more expensive when most of the specs sheet is equal or worse.
I suspect you're the exception not the norm.
I don't think the average person sits at home for 90% of the day doing nothing but using their phone and resting it on a magsafe.
But I could be wrong!
Either way, I'm pretty sure that's not the lifestyle Apple wants to market their phone to.
But I could be wrong there, too!
also in the thinner camp here, and would gladly have accepted a way worse camera if they made the back uniformly thin actually. the closer we get to the "just a glass plate" thin design from the expanse the better :-)
but yeah, everywhere around all day there is charging options easily even in many public transports here around europe, battery life is simply not a convern anymore for most people at all. the only time i even thin kis when I forgot recharging over night for some reason, but then in the office theres plenty of options to recharge too
I’m not saying they are sitting at home most of the day
Those who commute to and from work by car can charge in the car
Those who work in an office can charge at the office
Those who are at school can charge at school
So you want a thinner phone, but want to carry your charger with you everywhere? Or buy chargers and place them everywhere?
Yes I have a charger in the car, downstairs in my house upstairs in my house in the office and have a portable anker charger if I fly or go backcountry skiing for the entire day
A charger is like $50
Why would I carry around a brick in my pocket instead to save a few chargers
How does that make any sense
Also my iPhone 14 Pro lasts a full day 90% of my days on 1 charge
I use my iPad or MacBook most of the day for work or am driving
When you go travelling and do not want to carry around a backpack, and 1 day of heavy video recording, watching youtube on train plus 1 year of lithium battery degradation. That's when I want larger battery.
Their point still stands. A lot of us strive to NOT be in our cars, offices, or schools for extended periods.
Where are those people instead?
The vast majority of western society is in one of those settings most of the day
Planes also have charging ports
Trains have charging ports
If you are at the gym you can have a MagSafe portable charger in your gym bag that charges your phone when you hit the showers
Give me a few examples of who actually isn’t near a charger for 8 hours at a time
A full time skier or surfer?
I can’t think of the groups of people who need such long battery life
Most planes and trains in Asia don't have chargers. Maybe your country does. Your country is not the norm. Places that do have chargers are swarmed by people with tiny batteries desperately trying to charge up. And those charging spots charge about 1% every 15 minutes.
As someone who's been all around the world and goes places every week, I'd take a battery that lasts all day and charges when I sleep over needing to stop and try to get another 5% of charge wherever I can and constantly being on the lookout for chargers.
Also, people go into nature. We take hikes and walks in the park. It's nice to have a map there. It's also not easy to charge in the middle of the forest. And there are lots of people outside and needing good batteries. Nobody is staying home 90% of the time.
Plugging your phone in is annoying. I want to avoid doing that as much as possible by only doing it when I go to bed.
There are 100s of MagSafe and wireless charging options that work seamlessly
It does not seem Apple cares about customers being too stubborn to not want to use any of the many options to juice up a phone mid day
I guess those users can get the iPhone max and not have to charge all day. So you’ll be fine
Aside from desiring a longer battery life, you'll likely be shocked to hear that some of us (non-iphone users) still use the Aux jack and the SD card slot too!
What do you think the lifestyle of a typical Apple user looks like?
Seriously?
Where are people consuming so much content that they need more than 10 hours of screen time per charge
Just doom scrolling in the middle of a field for 600 straight minutes until their phones die?
Watching on a movie on a 10 hour flight while not having to sit in awkward position for charging is one use case.
It's all about the tail scenarios. Sure, my daily life is OK. But what about when traveling or spending a weekend day bopping around doing errands, getting a bite to eat, then going to a friend's house? I never want to think about charging my phone until I go to bed.
Yes that's it. I'm dumbfounded by the people arguing about the common life.
It's when you need the phone the most that battery life matters and it's usually when you are very far from your common routine/habits.
When you are in holydays in a foreign city, constantly taking pictures, looking up stuff, using GPS to find places, this is when battery life is the most needed and relevant. Inconveniently, it's exactly the times where it will be hard to find a convenient power sources, exactly when you don't have time to wait in a single spot to let your phone charge and precisely when it's a pain in the ass to have to deal with external batteries and other half-assed inconvenient "solutions".
It makes a huge difference.
But Apple doesn't sell useful technology anymore, they are in the business of selling high end luxury fashion, that sometimes cosplay as technology, so whatever I guess...
When you are doing all those things isn’t your phone in your pocket and therefore not draining battery?
When travelling how? By car you have a cable charger or wireless charger in 99% of cars I’ve been in
Planes have plugs Trains have plugs Ubers have plugs
It seems like that is a once in a while occurrence for you
In which case you’d be better off with a thin phone the vast majority of other days and pack a thin MagSafe charger for those once in a blue moon travel days and it would just be slightly thicker than a thick phone while the vast other days you’d have a thin phone
"I'm accustomed to being glued to a plug so everyone else on the planet should be too".
No, thanks, I have up to 5 days of the runtime, I don't need a paperthin phone which I need to babysit.
I travel internationally pretty often. I also use my phone as a GPS when driving. Both cases have resulted in me having my battery at under 10% and desperately hoping I have enough power to get to where I need to go. And always having a charger or backup battery of some sort is just inconvenient.
For the people who are at home 90% of the time, they're probably not using a phone the whole time. They'd be better served by a desktop.
Since they aren't going to offer the smaller profile it seems that at least some segment of people want, and they don't have any new ideas to innovate on, they have to release something in order to maintain "growth" - which we all know must happen on schedule.
i hardly use my phone. it mostly sits in my hip pack. i'm extremely interested in the Air. the thinness means it takes up less space in there, which is very much appreciated. since they won't make another mini, this is the next best alternative. i'm also thrilled about having all-Apple silicon down to the cellular radios. more power-efficient and faster updates when improvements to cellular capabilities come out. very exciting.
the small battery won't affect me much. web browsing is the most demanding workload on my phone, which is not a problem on this a19 soc unlike the 13 mini whose soc struggles to keep up. i also charge my phone every night before i go to sleep and these phones do a great job at not draining overnight.
I'm actually curious about this one. Something that feels more seamless in my pocket, however like you mentioned, it would require for me to not use a case, which is something I might do.
See my other comment. It’s a necessary feature of foldable iPhones. First you get them then, then you release a foldable phone.
iphones are also a fashion accessory. lots of people will buy it for its distinctiveness
Not when you have to throw a case on it anyways. Maybe the cases won't be so bulky that this will actually be nice though.
Bingo !
It's wild to see the HN crowd, bleeding-edge technologists, regularly bring up "lying flat on a table" as a critical feature for a supercomputer inside a camera that fits in your pocket.
Somebody (many somebodies?) is rolling over in his grave.
"a supercomputer inside a camera that fits in your pocket" stopped being a novelty 15 years ago. We call it just "phone" now!
"lying flat on a table" is a critical feature for a device that on a daily basis lays on the table.
If it clanks and thuds every time you press it (and pressing it is the only way to use it) while lying on the table, then it is bad design that should be addressed.
I legit don't think I have even once used my phone lying on a table. Ergonomically that makes no sense. But then again I neither use my iPad nor Macbook lying flat on a table either, so what do I know...
Huh, that shocks me. I'd say half my day my phone is on my desk here. I'll occasionally swipe/tap it to deal with notifications and various other things.
But I came up using Nexus/Pixels, which had an "always on" display very early, a great UI around "glanceability" putting all kinds of useful and interesting things front and center, a much better Swipe keyboard, and a much more functional notifications experience, so maybe that trained this behavior.
Do you not? Do you just... leave your phone in your pocket all day?
Because we already all own a supercomputer inside a camera that fits in our pocket so the technology specs don't really move the needle.
Maybe a supercomputer from a 1980s perspective.
What an absurd take. If we use FLOPS as a crude measure, the Air would be comparable to the leading supercomputers of ~1999/2000. There's many reasons why that's a very poor comparison but ignoring the absolute insanity of the raw compute available in a pocketable, thin, battery-powered handheld that you can buy literally this week, is ridiculous. Modern smartphones are nothing short of sci-fi when compared to even recent living memory. We're simply used to them due to their sheer ubiquity.
The A19 GPU doesn't even have hardware support for FP64, which is the precision used for TOP500. No, it is not comparable to leading supercomputers of 1999/2000.
Wow, a phone with a battery that's so bad, they're selling an extra one to strap to the back of it, on launch day... The most innovative thing that Apple has done recently is figuring out how to have their CEO deliver a gift wrapped gold bar to the president. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbEsY-YpF1E&t=133s
If you check the actual specs, the Air’s battery life is the same 27 hours as the 16Pro. That’s pretty good for such a thin device. Obviously 27 hours is an optimistic estimate but to match the 16Pro means that the Air battery isn’t actually bad.
They likely offer the battery pack to make people feel more comfortable who don’t ready the specs but just make an assumption based on looks.
> [...] the same 27 hours as the 16Pro. That’s pretty good for such a thin device.
Maybe pretty good for a thin device that they made so thin for no good reason at all. Making it so thin is not something to be proud of, and we certainly shouldn't let it slide as an excuse for bad battery life.
I mean, when did "remarkable all‑day battery life" become something to be proud of? I consider a phone that doesn't last a full day defective. All-day battery life is the bare minimum, not something to be proud of.
Made it thin for no good reason that appeals to YOU. Doesn’t mean that others don’t appreciate the design. We don’t all value and need massive battery capacity. I’d be glad to trade a little battery capacity for a slimmer device. As it turns out, if you are upgrading, there is no reduction in battery. It only looks lesser compared to the new 17 and 17 Pro which also got battery tech upgrades.
Then don't get the Air?? The iPhone 17 is normal phone thickness. Or you can go for the iPhone 17 Pro which is extra thick and which Apple specifically called out as having their largest battery in an iPhone ever.
"this box was made in California"
WOW. You managed to make a cardboard box without using Chinese factories! Very impressive, Tim Apple!!
Apple released the first magsafe battery years ago. The battery life is also the same as the 16.
man that is depressing
> man that is depressing
Only if you had a misconception about what and whom the big tech CEOs represent. Otherwise these actions are very expected in an oligarchic society.
It still has 6.5 inch display and the camera sticks out like a sore thumb. Where's a 5 inch display normal thickness phone?
> Where's a 5 inch display
When companies try smaller phones, like the iPhone 13 mini, they don't seem to sell very well. So the companies stop making them.
Ever since Apple started making their phones big I've wanted a smaller one. I never bought a mini because it has a worse camera and that's more important to me.
My wife actually has a 13 mini and loves it. I also wish that there were good smaller phones, but I can't really blame companies for focusing on what sells.
I'm also curious who the market is for a thinner phone. I imagine pockets on some clothes women commonly wear might work better with a thinner phone, but those pockets are almost always too small in other dimensions to actually hold the phone
Pure speculation but the fact that it has a strap accessory. Feels like something for the younger generation. Life is on your phone. You take your phone everywhere but you don’t care about pro features. Reminds me how a lot of younger folks either don’t drive or are uninterested in it.
the strap is probably more for Asian markets. for instance whenever I go to Japan I see a lot of people still use straps (it's been a thing for years now). But here in California it's pretty rare to see slings used like that.
Differ strokes for different folks. I can see the phone being quite popular in the US including California.
It's like, Star Trek slate-futuristic-cool. With that new glass UI design? Call me an imbecile, but I think it's fun
>I'm also curious who the market is for a thinner phone
Hm, i'd consider it (if i was upgrading yet again).
Why? My 15 Pro (not-Max) gets way too hot way too fast doing basically nothing and it p*sses me off - so, i'd rather not (yet?) take a bet if the new 17 Pro (Max) does better with an entire new thermal design - considering _something_ is _always_ off with new Apple hardware designs, starting with the iPhone 4...
I just want them to release a new iteration of 13 Mini at some point. I don't want a larger phone, I don't care about how thin it is with a massive extruding camera bump; give me an actual handheld phone.
For now my 13 Mini works perfectly fine so I'm in no rush, but when the time comes, I'm going going to buy a massive device that I can't comfortable use with a single hand.
We’re a dying breed. I wish they’d just turn the SE line into minis.
This reminds me of Nokia's glory days around the turn of the millennium, when the mobile phone's essential functionality was well established and they excelled at packaging the same thing into ever-smaller cases made of ever-fancier metals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8850/8890
The Motorola Razr of course was part of this trend too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Razr_V3
I actually sold my Nakamichi cassette deck to afford the NOKIA Communicator back then. The OS was problematic and couldn’t deliver the functionality that I expected. I ended up switching to a Palm or Handspring device, can't remember which, and stuck with a Nokia monochrome phone until the iPhone came along and changed everything.
5.6 mm? Pah! The Moto Z beat them by .4 mm almost 10 years ago: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/05/the-moto-z-was-so-a... And, more importantly, the Moto Z had a reason for being so thin: the ability to add "mods" that attached to the back of the phone magnetically.
What I don't like about iPhones in terms of practicality is that the corner camera makes it impossible to lay them on a table without wobbling. Google does a better job with its Pixel phones.
> The Moto Z beat them
The unfortunate part is that you can make anything better in a single parameter, but Apple has effectively no competitors. People who buy Apple will continue to buy Apple.
For people to switch, the competition has to come out with something that is visibly and unbeatably better than what Apple has.
I know many people in developing countries who'd rather have a 5 year old iPhone than a new android.
Bs. I've seen people migrate between iphones/pixels/galaxies. Some write about it in HN even.
HN is for nerds. Majority of population is not. Not really indicative.
So there's one feature the Air is missing according to a deep dive of the Compare sheet (https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/): The Air does not support mmWave cellular connectivity, while the other models (and previous models going back awhile) do support it.
That is...weird? Why would the Air's design prevent that?
The mmWave functionality requires a glass section on the frame as it can't pass through metals. They've redesigned this on the 17 Pro[1], but likely didn't find a way to integrate into the Air's design.
1. https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/09/iphone-17-pro-mmwave-glass-cu...The C1 modem didn't support mmWave and I assume it's the same case with the C1X.
I’d guess they are trying to limit power draw given the smaller battery. It’s a trade off.
What does that mean in practice?
The carriers offer a superfast download speed that is based off of mmWave: Verizon for example offers 5G Ultra Wideband: https://www.verizon.com/support/5g-mobile-faqs/
On my current iPhone 13 Pro I can get about 100 Mbps in San Francisco.
I remember having ~150Mbps with an iPhone 8 on LTE in 2017. Bandwidth itself has basically never been the limiting factor for the last decade or so. The problem is always data caps, and unless 5G/mmWave/etc is somehow magically exempt, it's not really a benefit (you can now burn through your monthly quota in seconds instead of minutes - great!).
Unlimited* bandwidth plans are more common nowadays.
You don't need mmWave for 100Mbps.
I have seen 2+ Gbps over mmWave.
"Regular" 5G can do hundreds of Mbps, maybe even 1 Gbps under ideal conditions.
I talked to ChatGPT about it for a while. It says mmWave means you can get 1-3gbps speeds if you're in a covered area. However, most are stadiums, airports, etc.. Verizon has by far the largest coverage, then AT&T.
At least in my daily use, it means nothing. I've also never seen speeds like that when I've tested the phone.
I'd be paranoid all the time about breaking it by accidentally sitting on it. Thinner just means it won't have as much strength to resist being bent into an ass-shaped curve, right?
i'm sure most people reacted like you in focus groups. I dont know how many times they said "its our most durable phone" and "its so strong" etc. Got to be a way to directly counter this first impression.
That's so weird, they're implying that it's more durable than the thicker iPhone 17
It’s now the only model in the lineup with a frame made out of Titanium.
Yea, indeed strange. Will be interesting to see people test the durability.
Well. iPhone 17 Pro they sell cases for 59 dollars.
I assume the cases for iPhone Air will be 100 dollars.
That’s what Apple care is for.
Best part of using Apple products by far
it's titanium, which is quite rigid compared to aluminum
In this case watch your toes!
iPhone Cup is coming out next year, pre-curved.
iPhone Ass, made to fit in your back pocket.
iPhone Ass Pro, for those with a larger ass.
Initial reactions are negative, so I predict this will be a hit.
like Apple Vision Pro?
No
Like the iPad which many said is useless and just a bigger iPhone and so far Apple has sold ~500,000,000 iPads
iPad still _is_ pretty useless, unless you opt for the "pro" models which let you do some productivity work on them. otherwise it's just suitable for consuming content.
Turns out that people really like consuming content
Not useless for what feels like every child in the US under age 12
Useful for shutting them up and feeding them addictive trash media you mean.
Yes
Children in the US under age 12 don't do productivity work on the iPad. Steve Jobs didn't make the iPad as a kids toy.
So a product that sells 500,000,000 units is not successful because the previous CEO who died 14 years ago would want it to not be a toy?
Got it.
> Steve Jobs didn't make the iPad
Yes, that's correct.
Well we can have LLMs do all the work so consuming content is the only role left for us.
I've been using the iPad OS 26 betas and it does dramatically improve the viability of the iPad 9 I have.
I guess you missed that people around the world watch TV for 2+ hours a day :-)
Exactly. A thousand pundits don't have a tenth of the vision of a single Apple PM.
That sucked up all the early adopter $$$$ waiting to be spent. AAPL hit the jackpot there.
Who actually wants a thinner iPhone?
I specifically want an iPhone with less mass.
I view my phone primarily as something I'm obligated to carry on myself at all times to function in modern society. The easier it is to carry the better. When I need to upgrade my phone, I'll always choose the smallest iPhone by weight.
Same. There are really only two features I care about in a phone: a high refresh rates and weight. At 165 grams the iPhone air is by far the lightest 120hz phone apple has ever made. Second place is the iPhone 15 Pro at 187 grams. Getting ready to ditch my 15 pro.
Me too, and I’m planning the same upgrade. Always wanted to downsize but 60Hz was a deal breaker for me. Been using 120-144Hz+ displays exclusively since the VG248QE in 2013.
I was quite surprised to see this entire thread full of HN users who apparently want some brick phone to doom scroll lying flat on a table all day until the battery dies.
Right, thinness doesn't help with anything. I want smaller width and height (i.e., a iPhone 17 mini) so that the phone will fit better in my jeans pocket.
keeping my short 13 mini for as long as possible
There are dozens of us, dozens[0], who love that damn form factor!
[0] https://youtu.be/lKie-vgUGdI
In the same camp as you. Perfect phone form factor.
Thinner makes sense if it's consistently thin. I don't get what's the value of thinner with a giant bulge.
Thinner anywhere means less weight, which is good.
I'm not sure about this. I think that if the weight balance is weird (esp. in the heavy top light bottom scenario - I sincerely hope it's not a thing with this new iPhone), it'll act as a lever and put more strain on your fingers to hold the phone.
I have wondered about this also. It may require holding slightly higher up on the device, especially when reading in bed.
> Who actually wants a thinner iPhone?
I'm considering it. I'm not particularly married to the thinness. But I like the lightness.
I'm not an avid photographer. And I don't put a case on my phones. The only real tradeoffs I need to look into is processing and battery life.
It's half a folding phone.. they did the R&D, might as well offer it as a halo product.
It's 1/3 of a folding phone, the Huawei XT / XTs is the benchmark to beat ;-)
https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_mate_xt_ultimate-review-2808...
The folding iPhone will just be two iPhone Airs taped together with Apple Sidecar / Handoff enabled.
Opportunity for you to make a blog about taping two iPhone Airs together and reach the top post of HN for a few hours.
If I was that competent, I would make a YouTube video and make money with it.
I do, I've been waiting for thinner iPhones to retire my iPhone 11.
i'd take a phone 5 times thicker if it meant i got a week of battery life instead of a 5 hours
Not sure you'd like the weight. All the major phone makers have consumer research saying they've reached the limits of weight comfort and many makers are working hard to pull back from those limits.
Well that's what magsafe battery pack is for
People who want to show off that they have the latest iPhone
A lot of people who put their phone in their pockets do.
I'd like to hold it, it seems like it might be more one-hand grippable in this form factor.
Supermodels who wear really tight jeans. We care about minority here sir.
You have hit the nail on the head.
HN is mostly male. We need the opinion of the women that put a lot of effort into their appearance. Not wishing to over-generalise, but they need a thin phone that takes awesome selfies and shows that they are higher status than those with old fashioned bulky phones. Apple have ticked the boxes and they have probably booked out all the prime advertising spots to reach this demographic.
ok I was going for sarcasm but this works too
I'm going to put a chunky Otterbox case around it no matter what.
I want it smaller. iPhone mini was the best.
Not me, I was hopping for a folding iPhone
everyone.
I would prefer my phone to be operable by one hand.
But you can't fit as many ads and/or cookie banners on a smaller screen. The tech treadmill requires those things, so here we are.
The most annoying thing about handling my 12 Pro Max one-handed is the weight, with thickness being 2nd, and screen size being a distant 3rd.
I went from someone who had to have the latest phone on pre-order to someone who doesn't bother: this is the first time I'm considering a new phone release in years. I suspect many other people are in the same boat.
I'm just not sure if I'll miss 3 cameras too much.
I have an iPhone 16 pro max, I’m five four with I assume smaller than average hands for a male and I have no problem using my iPhone one handed
Thats what Steve always wanted
It's a UI problem not an hardware one imo. Pretty much when iPhone came out UI research flattened and everything seems so standardized now, I only see gimmick stuff like liquid glass. For example, I don't see why a submit button cannot float near the thumb on the right or left side of the bottom of the device(could predict by checking device orientation)
I cannot totally agree. From my experience, if the phone is wider than ~68mm, I cannot hold it firmly in my hand and operate it. The UI comes after that, for how far I can reach.
The camera bump looks like it's twice the thickness of the entire phone.
It probably aligns very well with any sensible case.
for it to align with the case the case would need to be as thick as the camera bump thus negating the entire point of a thin phone while introducing all the problems of a thin phone.
If the Air is thinner than non-air with the case on it's still a win.
When Samsung came out with its ultra-thin phone earlier this year, reviewers said you can't really tell from pictures but it really does feel different in-hand, and is substantially lighter. This one is slightly thinner than Samsung's
Not enough for me to upgrade, but I would consider this one if I were buying this year
The rumors are also strong for a folding iPhone next year, in which case this may just be them using the same thinness work they already had to do for that. A foldable would prompt me to upgrade
Around 2000-2005 there was a race for the smallest phone with ludicrously small displays. I believe Nokia was kind of leading and “winning” the race. Then blackberry and iPhone reversed trajectory and suddenly bigger was better, and Nokia died out.
I think we are on the same path here, thinner is not what I want. I want a powerhouse that can run AI for at least 48 hours on the worst conditions, a week at least in an ideal scenario.
My memory is from around 1998-1999 when I did some research to buy my first phone. From memory, I think that at that point Ericsson was winning that race in the more affordable end of the market, with models that I remember being smaller than Nokia models from the same time, such as:
* https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_pf_768-108.php
* https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_t10s-115.php
* https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_gf_788e-110.php
And Motorola had the smallest/lightest phones at the premium end of the market, with the StarTAC line.
* https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_gf_788e-110.php
* https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_startac_85-74.php
In the end I realised that size was not the most important factor for me so instead I got a Motorola 8700 [1] which I didn't enjoy using, then sold it shortly after to get a Nokia 5110 [2] which I liked very much.
[1] https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co80944...
[2] https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_5110-7.php
The one I have more vivid memories of is Nokia 8210, pretty small
https://www.businessinsider.com/drug-dealers-are-buying-noki...
https://photogallery.indiatimes.com/gadgets/phones/most-icon...
Yes I forgot about Ericsson, same era.
Funny how these are now classified dumb phones, while they have some odd niche market yet :-)
You want a phone that can run an LLM for a week uninterrupted? Wouldn't that weigh like 4 lbs and require a backpack to carry around?
Somehow I don't think you're the demographic Apple is interested in.
It wouldn’t weigh 4lbs if Apple invested on that research. Who really cares about this much thin phones really, Apple is out of ideas, far from revolutionary anymore. They have the hardware to run LLMs, they should invest on batteries and inference quality and consumption with SLMs, rather than delegate AI to Gemini and ChatGPT…
Well both of the Pro models increased their battery life. Apple isn't going just one way.
Agree, but by how much on the Pro models? Shouldn’t we expect twice the battery duration every 24 months at least?
Based on what understanding of battery chemistry and technology?
Based on what history of any other battery powered device where that has happened?
You know what has been grind my gears for a while?
It's the protruding camera lenses being off-center. I don't mind the "protruding" part but, every time I interact with my phone lying onto a table or countertop or whatever, I have to bear with that silly tick-tack because the damn phone is not level.
iPhones last killer feature was usbc. These are all good and appreciated upgrades for someone with no phone, but my wallet is happy none of it is really that interesting and enough to warrant an upgrade. Right now I don’t know what they could do to get me to want to. Folding? Even more zoom? Even more battery? Return of the headphone jack???? I won’t lie, a headphone jack might…
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/apple
Customers: we need better battery, no camera bump, better displays, more storage, ...
Apple: here's the thinnest phone ever
They did increase the RAM for the iPhone17 by 50% (8GB -> 12GB [sorry, there was no RAM bump, I was looking at the iPhone17 and iPhone17 Pro page and confused the 17Pro RAM for the 17 RAM amount]) and the 128GB storage option is gone, so the 256GB option is the minimum now, for the same price as the initial iPhone16.
> They did increase the RAM for the iPhone17 by 50% (8GB -> 12GB)
good. they just caught on with Android in 2020.
Fortunately different Operating Systems have different RAM needs and they’ve been making the trade-off between power usage (battery weight) and RAM fairly well.
Every time I hear "people/customers want it" I answer that I don't want it and immediately hear in response "but you are not a human/customer". I'm confused... I stopped asking.
Somehow the Apple customer base loves to be told what they should want.
It is quite telling when they boast about the battery life of the other models, but the Air is just "All day battery life", and then immediately announce their magsafe power bank 20 seconds later in the broadcast!
It has better battery life than the iPhone 16 - was that terrible?
It's late but I spent way too long looking at the top image wondering what the weird phone angles were on the left and right until I realised it said AIR
Same....I was like does this phone have a stand in the back? Stared at that picture for like 1 minute and gave up. :D
Same! Though it was some liquid glass distortion of the phone or something.
And then I stared at the line about "remarkable all‑day battery life" and wondered what is so remarkable about that. Anyway... "The new iPhone Air MagSafe Battery has a thin and light design that magnetically attaches to the back of iPhone Air to extend battery life during busier days." So you can always turn it into a normal thickness phone with normal battery life it seems.
I didn't get it until I read your comment. I simply gave up.
I thought it was foldable in a weird way..
Aaaaahh so that’s what it is!
Same here, I got excited thinking it was a folding phone on the left
lol Yeah they need to fix that. I thought it was some new kind of phone stand.
AAPL is down 1.3% on the news, while GOOGL is up 2%. Their phone offerings have diverged so dramatically with this last refresh cycle.
AAPL often drops after launch events. “Buy the rumor, sell the news.”
Maybe the Google stock was affected by this?
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-cloud-anticipates-le...
> Google Cloud revealed Tuesday it has lined up about $58 billion in new revenue over the next two years as it vies to become a more central component of the tech giant's future.
> The company said during its July earnings that the cloud division had surpassed a $50 billion annual revenue run rate. Google Cloud's backlog of non-recognized sales contracts is growing even faster than its revenue, unit chief Thomas Kurian told investors at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology conference.
Im a long time Apple person and in the last year I moved to Android just for the folding phone. It's just too good to pass honestly
Do you think Google stock is up because of this announcement? It's not like they generate most of their revenue from Pixel phones, or Android overall.
Yes, a move in the global share of mobile phones a few percentage points from apple ecosystem to google ecosystem is even more important now Ai is the denominator in every valuation.
This in a nutshell.
I think the long and the short of it (place your bets) is that it could be perceived that Apple has lost its foothold on this ever-important (tm) share of the AI marketplace, whereas Google is happily integrating Gemini into all of its services, in a way that is actually functional / useful, with the most obvious entry point being its own Pixel hardware. They just dodged a regulatory bullet, partly due to AI competitiveness, but maybe they're not going to be on the whipping end of that sea change, after all ...
One small disagreement - the most obvious entry point is one of the 3.5 billion android devices in the world (against apples 1.5b)
The relatively small changes in share price (~ -2% vs +2%) is likely just some optionality coming out of the respective company valuations for the small probability apple announced something big like Ai that works or a $400 phone for the mythical people who don't live in silicon valley and make 7 fig salaries.
I think people trade on announcements like this, regardless of the full financial picture.
All I want is a 4-5 inch phone :( bring back the mini!
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for smart phones with a bigger screen.
People get old. Old people cannot see small text. Big text requires bigger screen to fit.
One could argue that a lot of 50-ish people have pro max with iphone 5-ish screen estate.
Small screens ain’t gonna happen
I'm 40 and I'm clinging to my 13 mini until they offer something comparable, even though the battery is getting old enough I'd really like an upgrade.
I can't be the only one.
Same problem here with my mini - it can barely get through a day now. Do you know if you can walk to an Apple store and ask to just replace battery?
I have iphone 11 and you can have battery replaced just fine. I did it few months ago and the phone became like new. I am not sure about Apple in US but if they won't do it then some third party will.
I've had good luck with my local Apple store replacing batteries in older models. I made appointments rather than walk-in.
The bigger problem is that app and web designers have stopped accommodating smaller screen sizes. I can't use my bank's app on an iPhone mini, because the buttons end up off the bottom of the screen (and the app doesn't scroll). Ditto for a number of popular web apps.
Well, for the same reason I’ve mentioned, they should: even pro max on 1,25…1.5 zoom will easily become mini
My eyes aren't great - I need three different sets of glasses: reading, office, long distance - and I'm clinging on to my 13 mini, desperately hoping that they in fact end up making something smaller. Granted, I bet I'm not the median buyer, but I would instantly upgrade to an iPhone that's around the size of the 4.
What’s with the size?
I comfortably use pro max with one hand: phone rests on the pinky at the point where usb-c hole is.
Reachibility (gester of swiping down on home indicator) brings UI half screen down to reach upper regions.
Some use pop sockets.
Hey! That’s how I use my iPhone 15 Pro!
Mainly for reading web sites and my calendar, but it works one handed for that just fine.
Three sets of glasses means you had nearsightedness before you got presbyopia.
That means you still get to see fairly good at short distances.
People with ordinary presbyopia can’t see shit at arms length and closer.
I’m over 60 with bad eyes. Gimme a fucking iPhone 17 Mini to replace my aging 13 Mini, I’ll just hold it closer.
But the whole point of presbyopia is that you cannot see what’s in close proximity.
The way you know you need your glasses is when your arm’s length isn’t enough to move your phone farther (not closer) to see.
Fine, I’ll hold it farther away. My point stands. :-)
> Old people cannot see small text.
The old people you know need a better optometrist. (Hint: progressive lenses.)
Many hate the distortion to the point of being physically sick
Most people aren't old.
First iphone was released 17 years ago
Things that we called "feature" phones nowadays and iPhone 3 worked alright with all sorts of people. Maybe phone manufacturers shouldn't opt for putting so much bullshit into the screens. Reading news, video calling people, audio calling, recording voice, messaging. They all work alright with small screen estate and good UI design.
The only thing I see a possible issue is dealing with camera features. But, you know, tech companies should actually innovate stuff... I know radical.
Small screen sizes will not allow Apple to sell you as much as they do now.
Because above all, the iPhone is a vending machine owned by Apple and paid for by you.
minis didn't sell. Your wants are not mainstream enough :)
Can't be just me who feels underwhelmed by the announcements yesterday? I can't imagine why they prioritise making thinner iPhones at the expense of longer battery life.
Because longer battery life comes at the expense of heavier phones and lots of people think the current phones are too heavy already.
Iphone Air does not have LiDAR Scanner if it matters to anyone.
Does it has a screen ?
Can I get regular thickness but twice the battery life instead? "All day battery life" is the bare minimum dressed up as a feature - I get at least two out of my cheap android.
Unless you can deliver multi-day battery, it's useless to provide anything more than all day battery. If the battery can only last 1.5 days for example, then the user is stuck trying to find a charge in the middle of the day. All day battery means they just need to charge overnight (which most users already do).
> Unless you can deliver multi-day battery, it's useless to provide anything more than all day battery
The battery time estimates are based on certain usage patterns, not 100% utilization of power-hungry apps. A battery that can last "36 hours" can offer more real-world usage per day than one that only lasts for 24.
Edit: Looks like the only estimates Apple provides any more are video playback hours, which is much more power-efficient than general app usage and internet browsing.
But a phone with a 36 hour battery that still requires charging at night leaves the user/owner thinking "This is disappointing, I thought I could get 36 hours". As opposed to a user who has "all day charge" and charges at night thinks "This is what I bought and expect".
A user whose phone has "all day charge" that has to plug their phone in at 3pm because they used it too much in the morning would be, IMO, more disappointed.
Ultimately "all day"/"36 hours" are marketing labels that are at best rough approximations of reality. Your original argument sounds like "if Apple says that the iPhone Air's 3,149 mAh lasts all day, then a 4,500 mAh battery is useless", but as any heavy phone user can attest, with high usage even a new iPhone battery will need to be charged midday, regardless of what Apple says, and an extra 50% battery capacity can be the difference between regularly needing to charge midday and not.
> Unless you can deliver multi-day battery
Do you really think they couldn't?
The magsafe battery thing is actually pretty neat, but not using it to instead have a thinner phone feels pointless because you still have the giant bulge from the camera.
Apple obviously could create a multi day phone battery, they would just need to make it thicker. But there are 230 million people that buy an iPhone every year. I suspect Apple knows what it's doing.
I wonder if this one bends in your pocket[1]. I'd much rather have the 'iphone thicc' which can be 10mm thick if it fits easily in my hand :-)
[1] https://qz.com/1288272/bendgate-was-real-apple-knew-the-ipho...
I remember Matt Honan's ridiculou8s write-up in Wired magazine when he was Editor, complaining about getting in a taxi with the iPhone 6 in his back pocket and it bending. I'm sure we will see more of that.
That was 10 years ago. The stability has improved massively. What was the last phone that bent under normal circumstances?
The transformation here is not size or performance or intelligence but security.
The iPhone Air and iPhone 17 with MIE (Memory integrity enforcement) promise to be the first devices capable of resisting even nation-state-level attacks, through hardware+software integration of memory tagging to stem use-after-free and buffer overflow attacks, and hardware defenses against speculative execution attacks.
Third-party software developers can opt in to MIE now; users should insist on it from their application vendors.
https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...
A19 uses the 3nm process and its benchmarks look similiar to the A18. My two cents I would hold off to next version of the air/pro with the 2nm process and the A20 series chips.
Technologically impressive, how thin they got it.
Since it costs $1000-$1400, I'm going to need a nice big thick ruggedized case around it.
AppleCare+ is really good IMO if you're interested in caseless. I can get my screen or back replaced same day for as little as $29. On my iPhone 17 I've broken the screen twice and gotten repairs done same day.
I broke the back glass on my 15 Pro a few months ago, still covered by AppleCare+. I made an appointment at the biggest store in town, and they didn't have the part in stock when I got there. The Genius ordered the part and told me they'd have it in a few days. Nine days later, they finally got it. I made a new appointment, showed up, and they told me they had the part but didn't have a replacement phone in stock in case something went wrong during the repair. They offered to have me go to another store nearby, which had both the part and the replacement device, but I opted to just take the gamble (since back glass replacement seems like a low-risk repair).
The whole experience left me very disappointed with AppleCare+ and the Genius Bar in general.
Why the heck didn't they have the part in stock given that I made an appointment several days in advance? (You go through a little menu saying exactly which part is broken, rather than a free-form text field, so their systems _should_ have known that they'd need a replacement back glass in my color.) Why didn't they tell me before I hauled myself in for my appointment that they wouldn't have the part in stock? Why does it take 9 days to get replacements? Why didn't the first Genius tell me that other stores in town had the part in stock? Why didn't they have the backup device in stock or warn me in advance of my second appointment?
I worry that Apple has gotten complacent with service because they can get away with it.
I'm sorry you had that experience. That has not been my experience, but I am on the latest iPhone so I could see that an older model might have more trouble. Hope you have a better experience in the future, it's not acceptable that's for sure. I'll keep this in mind when recommending AppleCare+ in the future.
I don't know, this still feels like hassle to go there, hand in your phone, plan accordingly as you'll spend some hours without, and go get it back later. If that happens once a year fine, but still, I'd rather just get a case (and save the $10/month AppleCare+ seems to cost).
It's not a problem for me to be without my phone for a few hours, as I can still text from my Mac (except for RCS + SMS messages). But yes, it's definitely a downside. I prefer the comfort and weight of a caseless phone. For me, the phone has been incredibly resilient and outside of once having a potlid drop from the ceiling on my phone, shattering the front and back of the phone (which was replaced in 3 hours, next day, when I broke the phone at 9pm).
Interesting. I think I want to avoid the downtime of my phone (and preserve resale value), but that insurance price point isn't bad if you want to go caseless and also cover less-predictable oopses.
I feel like this is more of a tech demo than a product. It is impressive engineering, for sure, but you can pay $100 more for the Pro and get significantly more features and battery life.
> you can pay $100 more for the Pro and get significantly more features and battery life
Segmentation. More features aren't material if you don't use them. And plenty of people (not me) habitually charge their phones to the extent that carrying around extra battery just in case is sort of like having a 400-mile EV for grocery runs.
I don't feel like I need a thin phone. I need a smartphone which can last for a week after a single charge. From what I understand, the energy density in modern battery processes is enough to pack 100 Wh battery into a phone, but for some reason we are stuck with 20 Wh for years.
You wouldn't want that weight. Well, 99.5% of smartphone users wouldn't want that weight. Maybe you would.
I can withstand +250g.
I believe the counterargument here is that we've gotten used to phones being relatively thin, and people have learned to charge their phones every night anyway. Something about stated vs. true desires, just like with the Minis where people said they wanted smaller phones but then nobody bought them. I believe it might be a similar thing where people say they want thicker phones with big batteries but they won't actually buy them when they realize they will be noticeably thicker and heavier.
Summing up, a company that has no more ideas about how to innovate and resorting to tactics like "we improved last year's model by x (with x not so big or relevant to you, user), and if x is not good enough, we have also made it thinner".
Truly boring. But you can't pretend more from a boat manned by a boring captain, focused exclusively on money/market/stocks.
Not an iPhone nor Apple user, but I feel like we're regressing on battery life. My old Moto G used to last a full week with single charge (yes, I'm a very light user: no social media, games etc.). My newer Google Pixel's battery, with its larger capacity, with the same usage pattern, lasts for 2 days if I'm lucky. That is to say, the normalized idling time for newer phones have grown significantly shorter.
Now, this Apple ad appears to be boasting as if battery that lasts single day is a generous offering. Perhaps it's adjusted for a heavy user. Still, I don't get the impression that we aren't getting actual improvements on battery life.
The Apple foldable is coming. There's no way they invested so much R&D for a thinner phone if they aren't looking to get into that market.
This. Absolutely this. Presumably the foldable flips back up and extends to just beneath the camera bump, hence most of the phone is effectively double the thinnest part of the iPhone air.
Yes, and everybody will think Apple invented it.
I understand the market "has spoken" but I feel like I'm on crazy pills when I put a ruler across my iPhone 13 mini and look at where the 6.5" mark is. No other dimension is relevant to me until we get this one under control.
Anyone else unable to load the page in firefox mobile? It starts loading and then either crashes the tab or force-closes itself
Yep, me too
https://archive.is/1MQJf
"a breakthrough design"
They copied pixel.
It really looks like a Pixel:
https://store.google.com/product/pixel_10_pro
To be fair, their announcements where close apart. There's a chance Pixel copied iPhone.
The pixel has had a "visor" style bump for many years, last year's model rounded it off for the current look. This year's model is design-wise very similar to last year's.
Doesn't seem super likely. The Pixel's had a visor for years; the new design at least appears to be a natural progression from that.
Edit: forgot which thread I’m on, yes the air looks much more like Pixel.
Copying pixel would have been great. They copied AND made it worse.
I wouldn’t in a million years buy a pixel, but their team deserves credit for making really beautiful hardware. IMO better than iPhone 16 Pro and MUCH better than iPhone 17 Pro.
I don't really see the point of making phones so thin when the camera sticks out as much as much as the phone is thick. I would rather have a flat phone that is thicker
As a feat of engineering, I find this very impressive, but as a product it doesn't seem to me to be very compelling.
I hope they include instructions on holding it correctly ;p
Top tier comment!
I feel like phones are currently in the "Osprey backpack" stage of product development. There's nothing new happening and no new problems to solve, short of a miracle like making your backpack half the weight or something. So what they do instead is add features one year but take others away so they can add them back later.
So it's like: year 1: super thin, super light (shit battery life, no headphone port etc), then year 2 it will be: awesome battery life, headphone jack (but thick, heavy).
Basically they have to be careful they don't ever make the perfect phone. They do have planned obsolescence as another trick up their sleeve, though. So you'll never see an Apple phone with upgradable storage etc (the Android ones go more for having the software becoming obsolete).
I looked in the tech specs and found no mAh listed. Just video playback time. I find that incredibly sus.
Does anyone know it? Was it in announcement video?
Given the no one has any idea about how much power the A19 Pro SOC will use for activity, what actual purpose would that serve?
They actually have both offline and streaming video playback time, which had been pretty standard for iPhone for a long time as their battery life measurements.
Every time I read an apple press release, I immediately bounce off because of the purposeful omission of the definite article when referring to their products; like "iPhone Air features ..." instead of "The iPhone Air features ...".
It's irrational, but it's like an uncanny valley via text for me.
Good looking phone though.
That bothers me way more than it ought to too. When I hear people saying it IRL I keep thinking that trillion dollar companies are engineering our speech.
What can ya do? :/
Yeah, I noticed this too when watching the keynote. It's interesting and must be deliberate, I wonder why they do this.
"Drop the _the_, it's cleaner."
https://youtu.be/k5fJmkv02is&t=177
5.64mm, 165g. Compare with Samsung Edge: 5.8mm, 163g, 200MP camera https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s25-edge/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-air-vs-samsung-s25-edge...
I'm genuinely bummed that Apple killed the Plus iPhone.
For years, it was the perfect sweet spot -- bigger screen and bigger battery without the Pro price tag. It was especially great for elderly users: easier to read, easier to hold, and they didn't have to pay $1,000+ just to get a phone they could actually see and use.
The jump from the base model to the Plus was usually just $100, but you got a noticeably larger display and often better battery life -- the kind of practical upgrade most people actually cared about.
Now, if you want a larger screen without breaking the bank... well, you can't. Apple's lineup basically forces you into the Pro models, which feels like a loss for accessibility and for people who just want "big and simple."
I wish they'd kept the Plus around. It wasn't flashy, but it served a real audience.
This will be the replacement for my iPhone 13 mini. Although I wish they would make another mini instead.
I wonder if the thinner profile will make it more comfortable in smaller hands (both in terms of reach and center-of-gravity), but I'm skeptical.
It's actually not that thinner (1.9mm compared to 12 mini) so I doubt it will. And it definitely can't make for the huge size difference (134mm of extra width).
Ditto. This adds 10.5mm of width, but shaves 4mm of depth (2mm on each side, as measured when holding in one hand). So the net increase is only 6mm. I won't be pre-ordering one of these, since I want to feel it in-store prior to purchasing.
The weight is also significantly (in percentage terms) greater.
We will have Silicon Carbon battery that has 2x energy density of normal lithium battery shipping on Smartphone later this year. Apple is very slow in new battery technology adoption, but one could imagine in a few years time this iPhone Air will have double the battery life.
They'll just use the improved battery density to make it wafer thin (with a big camera bump).
Which will mean they remove all buttons and connectors making it annoying as hell.
But it'll be cool.
who is 'we will have'? I've had this in my Oppo Find N5 for the last half year already. Bigger battery than any iPhone on the market including the upcoming ones. And that certainly wasn't the first on the market silicon carbon phone
>Oppo Find N5
The Oppo Find N5 only has about 55% ( IIRC ) battery density increase. We expect to have 100% increase by the end of this year.
Who is we? What density increase will be launched by whom end of this year?
> in a few years time this iPhone Air will have double the battery life
So, we can buy this iPhone Air in a few years!
The thinness of the letters in the title really accentuate the camera bump. For me it makes it looks like it's called APR and really draws attention to a design feature I dislike, having said that I know that some people find camera bumps a positive feature.
So basically: thinner, shinier, faster. Itэs impressive from an engineering standpoint but at what point does thinness stop being a feature and start being a liability? I feel like we’ve been here before with bendgate.
I thought this. I've had a previous phine with bending issues and I'd personally stay well clear of anything this thin.
I notice the release claims "our most durable iphone ever" - curious if this is actually true and whether there's any design to stop the risk of bending.
I just can't imagine anyone wanting this? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but do people really want a thinner phone? I love my 16 Pro and plan to get the 17 Pro.
Definitely feel like thicker and longer battery is better. Heavier feels nice.
Saw another comment that said this will give Apple the opportunity to learn if people really want a thinner iPhone. I hope they learn that people don't. Curious to find out the answer.
It's annoying me that Apple has called it "iPhone Air" and not "iPhone 17 Air", this is Apple creating (again) confusion for every tech person in the future
Like the iPad, in the future it will be called the iPhone Air 2025 (which runs iOS 2026).
If you're going to do a phone-width camera bump, at least make it flat so I can put my phone down without it wobbling. Apple's bump on a bump is the worst of both worlds.
Related ongoing threads:
Compare the New iPhone Models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186294 - Sept 2025 (95 comments)
iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186044 - Sept 2025 (42 comments)
Apple Debuts iPhone 17 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186023 - Sept 2025 (104 comments)
I am constantly reminded how far away I am from the median phone buyer.
I've yet to notice a substantive difference between my current Moto g 5g, which cost ~150 USD and my previous phone, a Pixel 5a which cost ~450 USD. I balked at the price of the pixel at the time, but figured that's just the price of admission these days. It is now useless since the screen/mobo failed soon after I switched. After it was obsoleted, I just opted for the cheap Moto and will probably never spend more than 200 USD on a phone again.
If you're on here, you probably work in tech, and if you work in tech, you're probably pretty affluent, which means you don't need to signal that you're affluent.
I wish they could just make a phone that has 3 or 4 day battery life. I never understood this obsession with thickness, even the normal iPhone is too thin to properly hold without a case.
totally agree, chasing ultrathin designs has diminishing returns. There's so many practical ways to extend battery life such as letting users selectively dial down performance, adding a bit of extra thickness/weight, rethinking how power hungry features are scheduled... It's a matter of priorities, and Apple is obsessed with design (with dubious results, ie magic mouse charging port)
I completely agree with this; in practice I have to charge my iPhone in the daytime to make it through the day (probably not when it was new). It would be great to have it go multi day for the days I don’t/cant do an overnight charge.
That would be how you get a one pound iPhone which no one would buy.
Based on what evidence that adding more battery necessarily makes it a pound? Based on what precedent of mainstream phones ever approaching that weight?
“A new titanium USB-C port is 3D-printed to be thinner and stronger, fitting into the slim design while using 33 percent less material than a conventional forging process.”
Super fun. Titanium printing
I have nothing intelligent to add to this (other than wanting a phone that lays flat), but it's interesting that this thread has almost 1800 comments, far more than the iPhone thread (currently at 256) and the iPhone Pro thread (currently at 89). Maybe people are just excited to talk about a slightly different form factor?
FWIW, I'm coming from an iPhone 12 and was dazzled by the Air.
> iPhone Air features an eSIM-only design that saves space internally, helping enable the unbelievably light and thin form factor.
I've only ever had phones with at least one (regular/physical) eSIM, and a 'slot' for an eSIM for travel.
What are the pros/cons of only eSIMs?
Edit: I'm not questioning eSIMs, which I know can be handy: my iPhone SE3 is physical+eSIM. I'm curious about no physical SIM. If you can support 1-eSIM+physical is it a big deal to go to >1-eSIM+physical?
I have an only esim since the iPhone 11 was released.
Pros:
- Super easy to get esims while traveling. e.g. in Mexico i downloaded an app while still in the airport and paid $5 with apple pay and instantly activated a 1 month esim.
- You can have multiple esimss. With physical sims you are limited to the physical number of sim slots on your phone, usually 1 or at most 2. With esim there is no such restriction.
- More secure. esims can't be cloned (e.g. sim swapping attack) or simply removed from a stolen phone like physical sims.
Cons:
- If you get a new phone, you cant just pop your physical sim in. You need to go through your provider to transfer, which requires calling them and verifying your identity.
I actually dont see this as a con really, I see this as a security benefit. Since I only get a new phone every 3-4 years, the 20 min on the phone it takes to transfer is not a significant burden.
> If you get a new phone, you cant just pop your physical sim in. You need to go through your provider to transfer
Which, at least with my provider, you cannot do while roaming. So if I break my phone while travelling, I cannot access my online banking until I get back home.
> - Super easy to get esims while traveling. e.g. in Mexico i downloaded an app while still in the airport and paid $5 with apple pay and instantly activated a 1 month esim.
This can be done with physical+esim, which my iPhone SE3 has.
Is there a distinct advantage to eSIM-only, with no physical slot, for travel?
> - You can have multiple esimss. With physical sims you are limited to the physical number of sim slots on your phone, usually 1 or at most 2. With esim there is no such restriction.
If you already have 1-eSIM capability, would it be hard to go to >1-eSIM+physical?
> Is there a distinct advantage to eSIM-only, with no physical slot, for travel?
IDK about only but it’s easier to get an eSIM setup ahead of time. It’s also easier to keep a bunch of esims handy vs physical sims. Guess it depends on your needs.
> esims can't be cloned (e.g. sim swapping attack)
This is incorrect. eSIMs are no different from physical SIMs once provisioned. The only difference is that instead of you having a physical smartcard, there is now a JavaCard-compatible card (embedded on the logic board or emulated by the modem) that gets provisioned remotely.
SIM swap attacks have nothing to do with your physical (or emulated) SIM, they were always about a social engineering attack onto the carrier's staff to replace the (e?)SIM associated with your account. eSIMs actually do make this easier because instead of the attacker having to show up in person at a store to pick up a physical SIM they can skip that step and do the whole process online.
> simply removed from a stolen phone like physical sims
If this is an attack vector you care about, you can enable a SIM PIN. In fact, this also works with eSIM if you really want to. But beware, doing so means once a phone reboots it will not have a data connection so things like Find My iPhone/etc won't work.
> You need to go through your provider to transfer, which requires calling them and verifying your identity.
I don't think this is true for all providers. I've never had to do this for T-Mobile for instance, it just activated without intervention.
When they first introduced eSIM only on the 13 iirc, not every country had that rolled out especially with old telcos in South America so if you travelled there for work or family you were completely shut out and it means buying a burner. I am not sure how that has progressed in the past 4 years but hopefully more telcos adopt it. The downside is no real portability of cheap plans using regular sim cards.
SIM cards are huge. Even the smallest form factor is a pretty large component. It has to be accessible from the exterior of the device and often has an ejection method of some kind. Getting rid of it is huge from a form factor standpoint.
I am sure there are downsides to eSIM but particularly for the average consumer who gets a SIM in their new phone and never changes it... there is probably zero difference.
Depending where you are in the world some banking apps only work with phones that have physical sim cards.
fwiw, I dropped my e-sim iphone in the water.
I asked my provider to issue a new e-sim that I could use in another phone, but it asked me to verify my id by sending me a text message I couldn't receive because I didn't have a phone.
I couldn't buy a new phone without a new sim, because I had forgotten the pin of the card I needed to use, and the pin was visible on a website that was protected with 2FA.
So I bought a physical sim card from my provider shop (using my last physical 10 euros), then went to a used iphone reseller, who let me setup the phone before paying, so that I could use the phone to actually pay for it.
It was not fun
You can’t swap them easily between phones.
If you break your phone, you may lose access to the number until you return to your home country.
Other than that, it’s the same.
For most people esim is better
You can swap them between iPhones pretty easily. There are some issues with virtual carriers - I went to Japan recently and the travel eSIM I got didn't work for most of the trip until I realized there was an old busted APN configuration profile installed from the last time I went.
I was talking about swapping esim back and forth: definitely harder than an ordinary sim.
Sure you can transfer them while upgrading the phone to a new one.
Not sure, but my provider don't do eSIM so I guess I can't get one.
eSIM is essentially a client-server protocol for provisioning secrets into an embedded SIM (whether discrete chip soldered on the mainboard or emulated by the modem).
The QR code you get when you purchase an eSIM is merely an access token to initiate the provisioning process. Some carriers may make these single-use, or attach extra restrictions such as fees if you want to get a new one, or restrictions they themselves don't know about like that you must be on an IP from your carrier's home country to reach the provisioning server (good luck debugging that if you're not already aware of it - and no, on-device VPNs won't save you as the OS will not use your VPN for this traffic).
Even the mechanism that allows you to move an eSIM from one iPhone to another requires carrier involvement, which they have to support (internally I don't believe it moves anything, instead merely requesting a new SM-DP code in the background and sending that to the new phone). It doesn't work for all carriers.
Oh and you already need to have some existing IP connection to provision the eSIM in the first place, so first-time provisioning is tricky. I'm sure there is a workaround for it, but again carrier support varies.
TLDR: it allows the carrier to interfere when provisioning or moving the eSIM which carriers can and do take advantage to make the process more costly/painful and discourage easily using alternative carriers.
This is an interesting move. Extend the moat. At the same time I'm considering hard wiring a powerbank to my phone so it will have a month of stand-by time.
Por the love of god. I'm already scared of dropping my current phone because its so small in my hand unless I put a beefy case on it. Just leave it thick and use the innovations to put a bigger battery in there. I don't give a shit about saving 2mm but and extra 10 hours of battery life would def perk my ears.
They're just flexing their engineering skills. Mass producing such a thin phone, where most of the non battery internals are housed in the camera bump can translate to meaningful products
Like wearables, glasses, etc. The fact that they're mass producing this is key
As much as I want this to succeed because Apple makes great products, I don't know who asked for it. People have voted unanimously with their wallets that bigger screens with longer battery life is what they want. The trend to thin down phones stopped around iPhone 8 or so, when the big screen was introduced. Since then we have seen many cycles where the phones got bulkier with larger batteries and screens. No one complained.
I have Samsung S25 Edge which is essentially same thickness (5.8mm) the biggest difference is weight, phone feels really light compared to my old phone.
The most annoying thing on the phone is wobbling when it is on flat surface thanks to lenses sticking out.
Battery life is alright. I can get 2-3 days of life from it with light use. If I am using it a little bit more, then it is barely one day of battery life.
And compared to iPhone Air it has real SIM slot.
Yep, weight matters a lot more.
For this they could engineer a good plastic but it wouldn't sell because it wouldn't feel "premium" enough. So instead, we get nonsense like that. And it suits them well because the thing is that much more likely to break so they get more chances to have the customer pay for repair or phone change.
Win-Win for them, lose-lose for the customer, basically everything Apple is about currently.
I really don't want the liquid display so I guess this means i can't update my iPhone until they give us a way to permanently disable this.
I want a version of this where the camera is flush with the surface of the phone. I understand and accept that this means the camera will be worse.
I half-expected them to have removed the charging port with how thin it was, but looking at the specs it's (thankfully) still there.
USB 2.0 speed only is a little disappointing but it's not the only high-end device not to have faster speeds.
I'm not an Apple user but from an engineering perspective it's hard not to be impressed by the levels of miniaturization involved.
What do you use USB for? Most likely your use cases are now classified “pro/expert”, and the Air isn’t focused on that segment.
I use it to sync music and ringtones. I have found wifi sync is not reliable. It locks up frequently, and corrupts playlists.
At least air is titanium.
Pro returning back to aluminum is very-very bad for durability.
Aluminium is very soft: it just deforms to a splash on every drop.
I really hope they go back to steel.
Steel is too heavy. As they pointed out aluminum is much better at dissipating heat than titanium. Shooting video has always heated phones up. A lot of the video features were aimed directly at actual professional video work so I’m not surprised if preventing throttling was a key goal. Game performance will come along for the ride as well.
They also said that this was the first unibody iPhone. Can titanium be made the same way? The unibody MacBooks are really nice though I’m not sure if the same rigidity issues are at play in such small devices.
Well too bad for them making 17 pro as heavy as 13 pro steel.
Too hot? Well bu-hoo, throttle it. Or, I dunno, don’t run glass shaders.
I drop my iphone more often than I need it to compute pi.
Aluminium deforms on drop too easily. Thanks, Ive had enough of iPhones 6 and alike to willingly come back.
> at actual professional video
On a phone? You must be kidding. Arri, red, blackmagic, sony.
I’m hoping we see that C1X chip in Macbooks soon. I have a cellular 5g iPad and it’s incredibly stable with my work VPN and doesn’t have the constant drops and reconnect issues that I have with hotspoting through my iPhone.
A cellular Macbook would convince me to upgrade!
The thinnest phone is still the Vivo X5 Max from 10 years ago. It was 4.75 mm (iPhone Air: 5.5 mm) without significant camera bump to speak of. Here are some pictures:
https://gsmarena.com/vivo_x5max-pictures-6865.php
Apparently the "thin phone" trend is coming back.
I'm always impressed how Apple can name so many products with so few words. Recycling Mac[Book] / Pad / Pod, Air, Pro, and 'i' (hardly even a word) gives you basically their whole product lineup. iPad Pro, MacBook Air, AirPods, iPhone Air, iMac Pro. AirTag must be the only one that has a unique word in it.
I don't get why HN is so negative, I would not be surprised if this is one of their best selling phones in years
I don't think many people read the link where it says the Air has 27 hours of video playback compared to the 33 hours of the iPhone 17 Pro.
I think people are assuming it lasts 6 hours just because they sell a magsafe battery pack.
It's barely much a trade-off at all for a phone that has the norm of daily charging.
They’re running out of ways to innovate across all of their product lines. Introducing yet another product size is the easiest way for them to make it look like the iPhone is still innovating. I’m sure there will eventually be an Apple Watch Air as well as iPad Pro Max/Ultra too.
I don't get the effort of reaching that thickness and then bumping that monster at the top. It will unbalance the phone for sure. I mean there must be a consumer base that would buy an ultra light smartphone without the back camera so to make it consistently thin? I'd buy it
The Plateau also includes all logic boards and most other components for the phone except those that must be physically located on other edges, so getting rid of the camera wouldn’t really help.
The main body of the phone is just battery and display.
Based on what teardown are you concluding the logic boards take up that much? Based on what phone design history where removing cameras failed to free up meaningful space?
They really know how to get your consumer juices flowing
Aside from Macs for development I've never been an iPhone person but I'm seeing this like ooh. But no I'm good with my $160 motorolla android phone, no shade against this phone, good enough for my needs.
I do wish Android phones had lidar
Air lost lidar btw
They introduced N1 network chip. I noticed "thread" technology along with wifi and bluetooth. Tbh, it's first time I heard of this tech. Could anyone enlighten me what this "thread" wireless technology is and its impact?
What is Thread? https://www.theverge.com/23165855/thread-smart-home-protocol...
What is Matter over Thread? https://www.theverge.com/22832127/matter-smart-home-products...
How to set up Matter over Thread? https://www.theverge.com/23823041/matter-thread-device-setup...
Don't see much improvements that really matter to a common phone user. Battery, maybe?
Reminds me of Windows versions that came after Windows 7. Why don't people just stop doing new versions after the product has reached its saturation point?
Recently got a iphone 16 pro to my mom. First thing i reacted on when opening the package was. Damm that is a thick phone. Compared to my S25 and older android phones i have the iphone 16 feel old and clunky, like from another era.
I'm concerned about HN database storage capacity, so here's a simple way to think about this. If you're interested, consider buying it. If it's not for you, no need to argue a whole lot. Plenty of other topics worthy of discussion. XD
all the text in this thread is smaller than one of the large iphone announcement photos. Don't worry
Do they use compression?
No need to worry, tech bros got enough cash for storage.
The camera hump removes all the "feeling" of having a super thin phone. Also, my phone not being thin enough was never a problem I had. Laptops being thin? Yes that makes sense. But this is barely lighter than the other iPhones. It's all aesthetic.
Ad has nothing for me. I want to know more about it's satellite reception, it's physical limits (actual specifications with units too much to ask?), it's hardware security improvements, how many GB of storage, and the final cost.
https://www.apple.com/iphone-air/specs/
I've bought an iPhone 16 this year so it will be at least 4 years before I start thinking about a new one. Hopefully we'll have some sci-fi tech until then.
I was hoping for an Apple TV that can do AV1 decoding.
Are we in 2012, who’s asking for thinner phones?
Let me know when I can replace the battery. Of course that’ll ruin the current business model because it’ll be even more apparent how rarely we’ll need to upgrade these things.
I feel like "are we in 2012, who's asking to replace their phone battery?" would equally reflect the real world.
I'd say the vast majority of people don't actually care about either.
I have the largest version of the iPhone 16 and it isn't that big. When I first upgraded the size difference was very noticeable, but that faded pretty quickly. It is annoying that it fits into my front pocket when turned diagonally.
I get the thinness. My current iPhone is perfectly thin enough on its own, but when you add a case… yeah, the whole package could stand to be thinner. Not sure if that is achieved given the bump.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION ON THIS MATTER
This announcement contains so many fake marketing words I can't help but read it in DJT's voice... Add Tim Apple's present and yeah, cool tech, not interested.
That's the iPhone I was waiting for. I love mu iPhone 14 pro but despise its heft. My previous iPhone was iPhone 6s and when I see it in the drawer and take it in my hand I feel nostalgic for that age when the phone wasn't so in your face with the wight and the tick feel in my pocket.
The iPhone 17 air is 146 g vs the iPhone 16 at 170 g. I don't think you're going to notice the 25g weight saving in your pocket.
Weight is very noticeable at this range, maybe not in the pocket but at hand. You don't always hold the phone in perfectly ergonomic position.
BTW iPhone Air is 165g. It's 22g more than my iPhone 6s but since its much taller and wider I expect it to feel lighter.
It's 51g lighter than 14pro, which is very significant.
If you care about weight, you wouldn't be buying the pro then. The valid comparison is against the non-pro.
Apple doesn't care about weight. If they did, they'd use a lot more plastic and a lot less glass, metal and ceramic.
The valid comparison is against the phone with the features I want. In my case ip14pro is a great phone but too thick and heavy and iPhone air has all the features I care but its thin and lightweight
The iphone air is not lightweight. It's only 11 grams lighter than the iphone 17, which is a superior phone to the iPhone 14 pro in every way, as far as I can tell.
That's %7 lighter in a wider, taller and %30 thinner form factor. It's pretty significant.
Good luck taking any telephoto pictures with that iPhone 17. Or anything needing LIDAR. Or doing any sustained gaming. Or doing anything advanced with photography or video requiring RAW.
But admittedly the differences are smaller than they’ve ever been.
My iPhone 13 mini (5.4" display) is 141g and it's immediately noticeable how much lighter it feels than a pro phone. I can imagine the effect being more exaggerated given the larger but thin profile of the 17.
The 16 pro max weight is 227g. 227g to 141g is a substantial difference. 170g to 146g is not a substantial difference IMO.
I don't need a thinner phone. I need a phone that can use a physical SIM card, has a physical keyboard (something like the N900), and a 3.5mm headphone jack... I'll just skip on that overpriced piece of junk.
The first thing I do after opening this page (or any other phone announcement) on Hacker News is press cmd+f and search for "headphone". Turns out not many people care about this anymore.
I still do, and I surmise there are many who simply do not comment. They do not want the downvotes due to wrongthink.
I feel like Apple goes back to the crutch of industrial design when they start running out of new use cases.
Or maybe I have it backwards and they always lead with industrial design and fall into use cases.
All I know is that I want new use cases from my devices.
Idk why they keep putting camera bumps. Can't they make it flat ...
TBH, this phone looks crap. I'm sure SJ would have hated the form factor.
Bigger, less featured, and more expensive than the iPhone 17… I don’t get it
> Dual Capture is a new feature that combines the front and rear cameras, so users can record themselves while at a concert or get their reaction to a game’s big play.
Oh goody.
Their obsession with camera bumps has left them blind to good design, this thing is a grotesque, ugly monster
Since the iPhone 5, no phone sits steady on a flat surface anymore, wich is sad
"iPhone Air will be available in four gorgeous finishes"
Didn't the hype train around the word "gorgeous" for software run its course? To me its an immediate turn.
I think the Air makes a lot more sense through the lens of a foldable iPhone.
Even for Apple, there are a significant amount of challenges in building a best-in-class foldable. Supply chain, manufacturing, hardware design, software. Apple is well known for planning ahead; breaking down problems by tackling some in an Air model first seems in line with how they operate.
The price difference really drives this home. It’s only $100 difference between a Pro and an Air. By the time you buy the perhaps-essential battery pack it’s the same price.
I don’t expect this model to continue more than a year or two, it’s a niche option only there to set the stage for a foldable that will take its place.
> iPhone Air is easy to use outside with 3000 nits peak outdoor brightness
This will be a nice upgrade for bi / motor - cyclists who like to mount their phone / google maps on their handlebars!
Don’t put your iPhone on your motorcycle handlebars if you value the camera: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102175
One of these that has no camera would be cool. Alternately, a thicker phone with more battery and no camera bump. Either would be fine.
This is the worst of both worlds.
> 5.6mm
Fiiiinally something thinner than X820 !
https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_x820-1556.php
Obviously, the next move is to build and sell the new iPhone Air 2 which has a two-day battery and improved camera system.
Looks uncanny at that screen size, my only hope for a mini replacement is probably a reality where glasses make screen size irrelevant.
i have been waiting for an updated iphone SE and with this event i am officially giving up. there is no phone that is simple, functional, reliable and not overpriced. apple is the company that is supposed to make it but i guess they have moved on to other strategies. instead they focus on making hideous bulges and UI that would make steve jobs’ head explode. im fed up with it
The thin phone is engineering prep for Apple Vision Air.
It really does feel like there is a long term strategy with miniaturization and functional integration.
The power of a MacBook Pro in the bump of a phone, the rest is just battery, screen, antennas and heat dissipation. What other form factors are they working towards?
Software is eating hardware. I mean, who needs a phone or a laptop if they can be virtualized from a headset? Maybe the phone in the pocket becomes just a folding keyboard + battery combo.
Who needs compute in their headset when their phone already has enough to drive it?
One of my long term personal projects is a "post-laptop" portable computer combining a keyboard with an ARM computer module. The assumption being you could do without a screen and just use headset display like the xreal
iPhone 6 is where they peeked.
iPhone SE 1st edition was my peak iPhone. Everything else has been downhill.
iPhone SE 2nd edition for me, I prefer soft edges.
Design-wise it's iPhone 4 for me. It still feels great to hold. I wish the Pro models went back to this all-flat design, and let the other models worry about thinness.
I want an all-screen iPod gen 2-4 as a phone.
It was the 4 / 4S for me. Perfect size.
this is basically a modern iPhone 6 plus, so I guess they agree with you
iPhone 3GS was peak.
I love the new colors, especially Sky Blue but why do I need my phone to be wafer thin? It's an engineering marvel, and I'm definitely not complaining, but it just seems odd to make every part of the phone except the top part where the camera resides as thin as possible.
I would have gladly taken uniform thickness and a bigger battery or better transceivers any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Call me a Philistine, but all I really want out of my phone is its ability as a communications device (voice, video, email, SMS, etc) and a GPS. I spend so much time in front of a computer, that by the end of the day I want to unplug myself and touch grass.
Either way, big respect to some former undergrad classmates of mine at Apple who may have played a role in this. This new generation of Apple devices is bringing back color and personality, and I'm all for it. Same for ever-improving FaceTime cameras. The camera on the front is more important to me than the one on the back.
But how thin will it be when I put an OtterBox case on it, giving it some chance of surviving for more than 4 months in my day-to-day use?
IF ONLY MY PHONE WERE THINNER, I SCREAM INTO THE VOID.
Ok, to not be totally glib, I think my reaction to this is coming from a place where, if I made a big list of every single thing I want in a phone, "thinner" would be at the bottom.
I want more freedom to do what I want with my phone, primarily to stop it from spying on my activity to give information to advertisers. I would get a phone twice as thick as my current phone if I could just use it to tell advertisers and information brokers and monopolies to f-OFF with it. I do not care about this and I hate that thousands of man hours and millions of dollars are going into this shit.
For the people who don’t care about a thin phone, they can still get the Pro with its better battery life. This is just an option.
I was totally going to get the Air (I do want a thinner phone), but the screen is way too big. I’m so tired of giant phones.
Can anyone answer the important question? Can I take a big square photo with the whole of that big square front sensor?
I do like this, but since most people put some big case on their phone anyway, does the thickness of the phone matter that much?
Well, a thick phone with a thick case is very thick while a thin phone with a thick case is only somewhat thick and a thin phone with a think case is only barely thick.
I don’t care about how thin the phone is. Let me replace the battery without risking shattering all the glass on the thing.
There's a small potential for enthusiasts to potentially make an aftermarket shell that sits flush and uses the space for an additional battery. Won't be cost-effective nor mass market but people have done crazier things (like add USB-C support to Lightning phones) before.
What exactly is their strategy with preventing cannibalizing sales between the Air and the Pro Max? This release makes no sense.
This is cool but what I really want is another iPhone Mini. I got tiny hands, phones are way too big for me.
Anyone know if this has a silicon-carbon battery? The spec sheet just says “lithium ion”, which doesn’t answer the question.
I want the iPhone square, where the phone is as thick as the camera bulge so I can put it down on a table.
You joke, but this is basically what a foldable iPhone will be (though there will undoubtedly still be a camera bump...).
They keep shrinking in the wrong dimentions.
All I want is a new SE-sized iPhone with a headphone jack. I'll preorder right now if you want to collect my money
Funny how everyone agrees here after the event that it's suddenly GOOD that Apple didn't present a folding phone.
After more than a decade it's still an odd experience to observe how the market is self-adjusting to match Apple's portfolio...
Would be interesting to see if the iPhone Air isn't already a Polymer OLED panel, as a supply-chain ramp-up for a foldable design...
> "This is MacBook Pro levels of compute in an iPhone, perfect for GPU-intensive AI workloads."
Am I just an old man screaming at cloud here or is it unnecessary for a phone to be focused on GPU intensive tasks ? Impressive as it is and all.
> iPhone Air features an eSIM-only design that saves space internally, helping enable the unbelievably light and thin form factor.
Also this is frustrating..
Phones are the main computing device for young people and hosted LLMs are eating the world right now. Not everyone will find a problem with this, but I am hoping for practical local LLMs sooner than later, and for maximum impact, they should also be able to run on phones. This amount of computing power in a phone is what could help make that happen.
Fair point, a local offline llm with siri does actually sounds quite nice.
there is only one target audience for this model and is users that already carry the iPhone without case.
Why do we need thinner and thinner phones?
I feel like Apple hit the diminishing (stopping?) returns on thinness years and years ago. Who cares?
Why does no one make flat back in phones today? everyone just accepted ugly design...
> fantastic all-day battery life
LOL; fantastic would be several days.
all-day is better than gone by late afternoon.
This is 100% going to bend, right?
This might be an unpopular opinion but does anyone else think that phones are now targeted towards teenagers and young adults and not the general crowd anymore ? I feel Apple has completely made their phones a social tool and not a technology innovation product. Camera, colors and the ability to distinguish your phone from others in selfies (another social feature) and in public is what it seems to be about. Gaming on the phone is another aspect. The phones look different each year (on purpose) and they are increasingly targeted towards young adults who can spend 1000$ of their savings all year towards just looking cool on social media with better pictures and a social profile. I noticed this transition around iPhone X era where design language lost meaning as long as they could compete in the social media world. I feel Instagram and TikTok should thank apple for becoming more social.
I really like the 15 camera I have and feels really good for a casual photo person. I feel that the 16e is more than enough for 99% of those not into social media. Like the phone without social media is just keeping in touch with close friends and family and occasionally taking pictures and making payments. And once in a while a few apps that help you track something like maps or health apps.
The 16e feels like a really enough phone if you don't want to get into the rat race.
My old 13 pro is quite thin and uncomfortable to hold in hand without a case. Why would someone push so hard for a thinner phone? Boosting about extra battery if SIM slot is removed, while doing insane over-engineering to shave a few millimeters is quite a tell.
I know Apple is super successful and will have another great set of quarters, but this is quite disappointing.
I have the 13 pro. I personally find it quite heavy (quite a thwack when you drop it) or just tension when you wear shorts for example. That said, I have zero interest in this phone.
> Why would someone push so hard for a thinner phone?
They have to "inovate" somewhere. The suckers won't pay hundreds of dollars for the same crap over and over again. They tried to "inovate" the GUI, it was a disaster. Now they turned to HW.
My first thought was, “thinner and lighter? Apple has totally run out of ideas.”
I wish for the day Apple create a true slick Iphone Air … without a protuberance
Is this a foldable prototype. Will the iPhone foldable be 2 iphone Airs joined together?
If you flip one upside down and attach it to another one, you end up with a stable phone that has twice the battery life.
Why do we measure devices at their thinnest part rather than at their thickest part
Thin phone, giant screen. How bout thick phone, tiny screen. Call it iPhone Earth
I just want to know how much it weighs.
Still looking for a phone as light as the Pixel 5 at 151 grams
It says 165g. It's lighter than the base model.
Lateral move. shrugs
I'd been more excited if they brought back the 3.5 mm audio jack.
Hot take: iPhone Air isn't about making phones lighter, but to justify making their other models heavier.
iPhone Air is 165g.
The new iPhone Pro 17 is 204g but the 15 Pro was only 187g. iPhone 17 is 7g more than the iPhone 16 which was 170g (only 5g heavier than the new Air).
Their pricing ladding places the Air above the regular 17 and below the 17 Pro.
If Apple didn't make the Air, then the 17 family would have been Apples "Heaviest range of iPhones they have every made".
That said, I am very happy about how Apple are adding more battery to all their phones - which might be were the extra weight is coming from.
Hot take
"Hot takes" are for Reddit.
People on HN are expected to think before they respond.
If this thinnest iphone air has 27 hours of video playback, why does the regular iphone 17, which looks twice as thick only has 30 hours? At this point, I just want long battery life. Like an "all-week" battery life would be a nice start.
they are mostly likely using a higher density battery in the air, at least that's what the rumors suggest
Since all components are near camera, how is the heat dissipation
bReAkThRoUgH dEsIgN
What a joke. Recycled design from 6/11 is breakthrough in Apple world
when will apple make an iphone for adults? adults who need good battery life and have better things to do than take pictures for social media. a good UI wouldnt hurt either
Once you start rocking case accessories, profile of phones can definitely get thinner, i.e. phone loops, those suction cups. I'm fine with going thinner with the trend and I think we're going to get some pretty slick phone cases/accessories that makes actual thinner flusher carrying profile.
At the end of the day, I want future phones to be a A4 piece of paper that I can fold up like ... a piece of paper. If it means dumping stupid billions to shave sub millimeters of generations... then I guess that's the price to pay.
When they do a folding phone next, the thinness will have functional value.
Apple already released a folding phone, the iPhone 6 Plus!
Titanium? I thought they’d learned that lesson with the Powerbook G4.
Here’s an actual hot take compared to the sentiment in this discussion: this will be the best selling iPhone ever.
Specs wise sure, I’d also love a bigger battery than it being thin*. But the iPhone has been an unbelievable fashion statement, and this insanely sexy iPhone will be the strongest yet.
I’m pretty sure when it comes out, people will actually hold it in their hands and the sentiment will turn. Not talking to you tech nerds, but for the other 99% of the world.
I remember this take when the iPhone X came out, which incidentally also felt like the first year (here in the US) where Apple was truly detested, publicly. Instagram and Twitter were chock-full of memes like "999x Kinder Chocolate or 1x iPhone X?" and the notch/design overhaul met a pretty lukewarm reception. The agony of yearly upgrades really set in, then.
It's not impossible for this to take off, but I won't hold my breath. It's a small gamble that could go either way.
I would be surprised, but not very surprised.
I think the price point above the 17 and close to the 17 Pro gives it less appeal, but I guess it does make it more "premium" too.
I definitely don't think you're out of left field.
It's been at least 6 phones since anybody wanted it thinner.
It's also (I'm assuming) completely impossible to repair.
Reminds me of pixel phones, but more rounded, and more protuberant.
This chassis would be perfect for the 2nm chips next year
>> impossibly thin and light design
Thin, except for the top part.
I mean, who doesn't like big on top and thin everywhere else?
Pretty excited about this one. The amount of tech went into this is obviously insane. Happy to see the company is still the driver of innovation. I bet we'll see more slim phones coming up next months from other vendors.
Looks as thin as the zfold 7 but without the inner display.
Cools pics! They should show it behind a pencil for scale.
It looks so fragile to me like I’ll bend it the first week
Long time apple fanboy. I've watched most of these unveilings for the past 20 years. The new phones are impressive. But it was all speeds and feeds. The examples felt so wrong. The women dancing while on the phone. The guy running with while recording. The person needing translation to buy roses? None of those feel grounded in reality. It's like they are building tech for made up in corporate conference room use cases.
Live translation u/i feels like a significant upgrade for that specific product, especially if you are in a dense area with different types of speakers. It feels like a way better MVP than Meta Glasses that are only meant to do troll videos on tiktok or youtube. The examples they trotted out feel ridiculous but that's because they have been approved by their internal systems.
Agreed live translation on airpods killed consumer smartglassses killer AI feature.
Look at the age of the people running Apple (management up to the board) vs other tech companies.
Impossible to oversee. Everyone presenting was so old. It's like they were imagining what was hip and cool. Lets have a women doing salsa facetiming... who would she even be talking to in that scenario??
maybe they're just quietly marketing to the demographic most anecdotally * known for having money to spend In This Economy.
* i don't know if this is backed up statistically!
When you work at apple this (and $3000 glasses) is your reality.
> It's like they are building tech for made up in corporate conference room use cases.
Totally felt the same during the live-translation demo, when these two casual business folks were talking about "the client will love the new strategy". Dystopian corporate gibberish.
The lack of authentic examples diminishes the impressive tech. Great design is all about function. Why is it so hard to show how this would actually be used in the real world?
Hopefully it doesn't morph to Aang: the Air bend er
Regardless of the technical analysis: when does the fucking bean-counter retire? He's depressing and depressant.
Somebody should sue him for contributing to making the world a worse place.
Thousands of words to just tell me that nothing changed
“It’s our most revolutionary nothing changed in the history of iPhone.”
is it me or does it look like the pixel 9/10
Just give me a phone without the stupid camera bump.
By purchasing a new iPhone you are directly contributing to the humanitarian crisis in the Congo. A thin phone won’t change your life but it might be responsible for a life being lost.
It uses 100% recycled cobalt.
https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPhone...
It still increases the demand for cobalt. Which is the fundamental problem here.
They should have offered a no-camera version.
I want a smaller phone, not a thinner phone.
Price isn't too bad, esp now that the Pixel 10 is expensive, the base iphone is the same price for more storage which is kinda unexpected for Apple!
i was on the fence getting this but I am definitely not after watching this. Probably s26u when it comes out in Jan
5% more volume than a mini. Lame.
Booo bring back the 4" iPhone SE
What's so great about this? A phone with a weird shape due to the camera? Yahoo, yay so light /sarcasm. Who cares? $1000 for another shiny object thats thin, that has "ALL DAY" battery? Like every other iPhone or phone on the market?
It's not innovative -- innovative would be an "ALL WEEK" solution. This is worth looking at: https://youtu.be/WEmZpHXwu5k
I wasn't asking for my phone to be thinner. I was asking for my phone to be SMALLER. In the other two dimensions...
Really?! It’s 2025 and this is what they saw as important. We need repairable tech not this peanut butter and jelly nonsense that’ll be in the trash heap literal months from now. Feels like we’re back to the old Performa, Centris and Quadra era of rolling our more and more barely differentiated products u til folks loose track of what to buy. Have you been in an Apple Store recently, it’s starting to feel pretty cluttered.
Another data point, Googles own phone ad right now is literally along the lines of ‘feel like your existing phone never changes’, clearly a dig at Apple’s product atrophy.
The Google Ad states; “If it feels like your phone hasn’t change in years, .. maybe it’s time to change your phone.. Google Pixel 10 Pro”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tmjqHLLHruA
I guess Apple finally listened to all the people saying they want a smaller phone, and totally misunderstood what that meant
The problem is that these people are very loud on the internet but sales for small phones are abysmal.
The laptop class (myself included) just don't understand. A huge portion of the world only has 1 computer and it's their phone. They rely on it for work, entertainment, and connectivity. They don't have a laptop where they can do all these things on whenever they want. Their phone is it. They want a big screen phone. It's no surprise that every time Apple made the screen bigger, it sold better.
I loved my 13 Mini but I understand why Apple has given up on it. It was a very good effort. They tried. Didn't sell. Maybe a foldable can solve this problem for both sides.
They didn't put the good cameras in the Minis so it wasn't really a good experiment. I don't want a cheaper phone, just a smaller one. The improved camera is the only reason I upgraded past the 1st gen SE.
This. While I’m still using the mini form factor—incidentally, as are most of my friends—I long for a better camera.
If this was a bet my money would be that they release "minis" every say 3-4 years - the current 13 mini is within lifecycle imo
Well one can only hope so. It has maybe 2 good years left, would be nice to get a new one at some point.
They also made the displays have some weird scaling factor that caused an annoying bloom in dark mode. Took me a while to realize why it felt off, even though the form factor was right up my alley.
Most likely, the market for a small phone from a mainstream manufacturer is more than strong enough to sustain itself and even be profitable. The real culprit here is that there’s been a shift in the industry — it’s not enough for products to “just” make a profit, they now have to also be smash hits and money printers. Niche audiences may as well not exist, no matter how dedicated they may be, everything must target the masses.
I think Apple discontinued the Mini line because it's a bit like new software features makes the code harder to maintain over time. Every time Apple introduces a new generation of iPhones, they'd have to figure out how to make the upgrades fit in a much smaller chassis.
The limiting factor for that is currently the more recent iPhone SE 3 (2022), so that argument isn't convincing. Regarding screen size, the Display Zoom resolution of the Pro Max is the same as the iPhone mini resolution, and the Display Zoom resolution of the Pro is the same as the Display Zoom resolution of the mini [0], so dropping the mini didn't actually remove any supported resolution. What's true is that the hardware design and layout is more constrained for the mini size, mostly regarding battery capacity, but I don't really see a limitation for the software. Even regarding battery capacity, the 16e has really great battery life, so a mini using similar tech should still be acceptable.
[0] https://www.ricsantos.net/2021/01/21/ios-device-resolution-g...
I would expect the opposite, given continued miniaturazation, consolidation of functions into the SoC, and battery energy density improvements. The same advances that allow the iPhone Air to exist would also be helpful for a Mini model.
Chips are getting bigger physically because of the end of Moore's law. More power hungry too which means a better cooling system. Bigger camera sensors. Bigger battery. All these things rely on being physically larger.
Apple is long past a minimal phone lineup. It's not a question of offering just grey or white as the only choices. I'm stuck with an ancient iphone and would upgrade if a pocket-sized one happened. Hasn't happened.
exactly. the only reason the 13 mini even existed at all is because it was too late to cancel the model entirely when the absolutely abysmal sales numbers for the 12 mini finally rolled in. my partner absolutely loves her 13 mini, but agreed its a very vocal minority
> A huge portion of the world only has 1 computer and it's their phone.
If those people wish to use phones for something they're not suited for, that's their business. But companies can, and should, have more than one product for different use cases. Nobody says "well only 5% of the market wears this size clothes so you better get used to going naked", instead manufacturers make all different sizes so as to capture more profits. I don't even particularly care if the smaller phone costs more because it's not as much in demand (so, less economy of scale). The problem is that nobody makes one at all, so I can't get what I want at any price whatsoever.
Either all phone companies are stupid and leave money on the table, or nobody buys small phones.
All phone companies are stupid and leave money on the table. This is not really in question, imo.
a bit further down from the main stream, there are some fringe chinese manufacturers like unihertz doing small phones..
I wonder if there isn't a market for budget Androids in this range. Personally I have an Oppo Asomething that was around $50. I'd pay more for a smaller version which would probably have slightly better performance.
> A huge portion of the world only has 1 computer and it's their phone.
This is something that really surprised me to realise a couple of years ago - that unless they work in tech, most households (I don't know if most isn't an exaggeration, but a large proportion) don't have a laptop or desktop between them now.
> I wonder if there isn't a market for budget Androids in this range.
I think there is: https://smallandroidphone.com/ This was started up by the people behind Pebble (including its re-launch this year). I actually emailed them a while back asking for a status update. They told me there are literally no high quality screens of an appropriate size available to OEMs. They would have to design & spin up their own display hardware, which is where things change from "expensive" to "infeasible." If there was an existing, high quality 4.5~5" screen, I think it'd be an easy slam dunk. But there apparently is not...
Too bad. I just hold out hope Apple will try the Mini again before my 13 dies.
> This is something that really surprised me to realise a couple of years ago - that unless they work in tech, most households (I don't know if most isn't an exaggeration, but a large proportion) don't have a laptop or desktop between them now.
This is noticeable when you interact with consumer software where the mobile app is clearly the preferred or only way to perform some action.
> that unless they work in tech, most households (I don't know if most isn't an exaggeration, but a large proportion) don't have a laptop or desktop between them now.
They have been told since 10 years that phones are "computers" [1]. Some even believe this.
[1] from this point of view, a washing machine or a fridge are also "computers".
Also, I've been in poorer countries where the vast majority of the population rely on their phones to work. My real estate agent only used her phone for work including marketing herself, talking to clients on chat apps, and even doing the lease contract. Their phone is literally how they make a living.
My teenage daughters have had their own laptops before they had phones. They're equally comfortable on both.
Personally the lifespan of my phone is much shorter when I can't easily hold it and type on it with the same hand. Inevitably I end up dropping it trying to do that anyway.
So I really don't understand people who would choose a larger phone, over a smaller one and then save the money they would have spent replacing it (plus the money they would have paid extra because larger is more expensive) to buy a cheap laptop or something
As an oldtimer (Gen-X), I can't even with that mode of use. My thumb (is that what you use?) cramps up when trying to do that even a little.. I guess 30+ years of typing will do that.. The best I've done one-handed is type in my pin and launch an app and click an icon or two.
As it is, I hold my S21 with left hand, type with index finger of right - it's abysmal in terms of performance, but it's all I got.. landscape with both thumbs is usually worse because of such little lookahead / lookbehind - I can barely read the line I'm typing on - and fat thumbs. My kids do it all the time, but, well, their little girlish fingers (they are female) seem to manage it and they're quite quick at it.
My favorite phone (at least in terms of idea, execution wasn't perfect) was the Motorola Photon Q - full-size with slide-out keyboard. At least I could somewhat type quickly even if the keyboard wasn't great. Alas, 2012..
With a newish phone? I can probably type 10-20x as fast on my MS Natural keyboard (only one I can use for more than 30-40 minutes without RSI getting bad).. No wonder I don't "live on my phone" - I use it when necessary, and prefer my 40"+ 4K screen + real keyboard.
They want a bigger screen because they don't have a laptop.
> save the money they would have spent replacing it (plus the money they would have paid extra because larger is more expensive) to buy a cheap laptop or something
The kind of people who want an iPhone are not going to settle for a Cheap Laptop. A MacBook Air can only really be had new for around $800 nowadays and those big iPhones are only like $599 right now (if iPhone 16e).
I buy larger phones, and I don't drop them...so no money saved/lost there.
I have big hands, and can use my 16 Pro Max one handed no problem with minimal shifting of the device in my hands. I've never dropped it during one handed use on the go either.
Smaller devices are almost impossible for me to type on/be precise with touches because of this.
Apple makes at least some products that only the laptop class uses.
> The problem is that these people are very loud on the internet but sales for small phones are abysmal.
iPhone SEs sold like hotcakes and they were smaller than the minis.
The majority of people buying an iPhone SE is because it is relatively cheap not because it is small.
It is a lot like demand for spacious pockets in fashionable clothing. People largely think you can get that with no tradeoff on anything regarding the clothes. And, you just can't.
So, for phones, people say they want a small one to fit in your pocket. With, fair. But that generally means a smaller screen when you are using it. Which people don't really want.
Foldables help a ton with this. And I think that will ultimately pan out. People are understandably worried about being early on that train, though.
Foldables are weird at the moment, they are bulky and the aspect ratio (because it's a square) means that the viewable screen is often comparable to the S24 for example.
As a member of the desktop class, I'm fine with any size phone that fits comfortably into my pockets.
As a member of the female class, I wish my clothes had pockets!
Even casual pants. I never realized before I got a pair of pants from a gf who couldn't wear them anymore. Zipper for the left hand (wtf) and TINY pockets. These were medium fit black corduroy pants, they had the space!
My wife has a 13 mini and is sad she'll have to go to a larger phone.
Yeah, it's really the perfect size if you're not trying to use it like a tiny ipad. I'm super frustrated that they won't make another 5.4" screen.
The mini has still around 2-3 years of life left; we may yet get lucky.
Yes the 13 mini is a decent followup to the SE series. Except that the face recog is broken UI garbage.
Yeah I was really hoping for the phone to be smaller in different dimensions. Thinness is the least important of them.
It's a vocal minority on the internet which also owns a lots of other computing devices. I'm one.
IMHO most people in the real world increasingly use their smartphone as their primary computer and want a big screen.
I don’t like gigantic phones but smaller phones are incredibly hard to type for me
I'm considering adding a physical keyboard [0] similar to this one.
[0] https://www.clicks.tech
so that I may relive my Palm Treo glory days.
No, Apple's been obsessed with thin & light for decades. Only with Apple Silicon did that actually result in usable devices.
The Air is going to be very popular.
This comment section is making me realize the gulf between the average dev and the average consumer (again)
This is the first iPhone is 5+ years that is will be hard to ignore for the massive base of users who'd given up on yearly upgrades.
I came here expecting to see that reflected (and see how others feel about the camera trade-off) but it's mostly repetitive comments asking who wants a thinner phone (ignoring it's almost 40% lighter than the most of the Pro Max devices out there)
Yeah.
Air: 6.5in, 165gm Pro 17: 6.9in, 233gm My current Pro Max 15: 6.7in, 221gm
Coming from the PM15, I give up 0.2in, but it weighs 56gm less. I do 95%+ of my reading on my phone - articles, books, everything. But I find the PM15 screen juuuuust slightly too large to be comfortable in the hand, and the normal Pro screen much too small for lots of reading. And I’ve been noticing early signs of RSI.
These dimensions are the goldilocks combination I’ve been waiting for.
This seems to be true for almost every product update. Everyone hates everything. It's true when a new gen of a car comes out - "I guess I'm keeping my <last gen> model forever." or user interfaces or seemingly anything else. People hate change and predict the massive failure of every product revision. Flash forward six months and everyone has forgotten about these rants and likely owns the new version. Now, someone will come along and say "well, I personally" - Apple/Toyota/whoever doesn't care about "you personally", they care about everyone else who is going to buy the product. I'm not saying this is good or bad, it just is.
I'll be honest when I first saw the post I was intrigued, I thought it looked beautiful. Then I saw the size of the camera, the eSim only trade off, the boast about "all day battery" and slowly but surely started to realise that the things I care about in a phone are not those that would be hidden by a case. If they made the thinnest ever fold, then maybe.
The 40% lighter is nice though.
The Pro Max was the best-selling model of the last couple of generations, then the Pro, the the base. I agree with you, and I bet the Air will not be in 4th place like the Plus and Mini models.
You wouldn't sell any smart watches if you could actually use the phone with your hand.
looks like my iPhone SE 2nd gen will need to survive a 6th year lmao
I built up a bit of a stash before they discontinued them for good. Hopefully the (sealed and unused) batteries don't degrade too much while in storage so I can have enough spares to last me until software support is discontinued. It's like the modern equivalent of a wine reserve.
haha nice one, but mine is already struggling with all the glass effects
"all the people" do not exist. Apple is obviously good for building small devices. They have built multiple of them, explicitly, against the direction the market was going.
If "all the people" wanted these phones, they would still exist.
There's a linguistic difference between "all the people" wanting something and "everyone" wanting something.
What is it?
They nailed it. Big horizontal dimensions so it’s hard to hold in one hand (yes, I realize that many users want this, but many users don’t want this), a big thick camera so it doesn’t actually fit well in slim pockets (but lots of young people seem to like their phone sticking out of their pocket?!), and super thin everywhere else so a high capacity battery doesn’t fit. Nice job!
Seriously, Apple has not attempted a narrow high-end phone since the iPhone 5. The 12 and 13 minis were not positioned as premium phones and they did not have great cameras or battery life. If Apple had tried for a 13 Pro Mini and it didn’t sell, then maybe I’d believe that their market statistics were worth something.
I just wanted a folding iPhone.
It may still bend! We'll see how much this Titanium 'exceeds expectations', eyeroll.gif
That camera bump is ugly as sin
why the air is not 17?
what about next year will we get air 2 or air 2026 like the iPads?
hn endorsements? waow. better go line up for this one!
At this point I am like “fuck (perception of) privacy!”. I will just buy the 9a, or Pixel 10a if one releases by the time I switch from my (already large) iPhone 14. At least I won’t have to deal with the never ending shenanigans, the crazy prices, and the very real possibility that if there’s a damage it might be cheaper to buy a new one (in warranty).
Welcome back Droid X
take this thinner phone, add more battery to get back to the size of the current one, thats what I want. 3+ day battery life please.
There's a magsafe attachment you can get to increase the battery life
I think that could be the killer feature of this use that space for thin batteries maybe only 2500mah. i can carry 3-4 in my bag and have as much battery life as i care to carry around. and rather than push the charging to 30+ watts that turns my phone into a hotplate can recharge 3 batteries at once at 10w in same time. Bonus to apple on accessories sales
Problem is that magsafe means wireless charging which is highly unefficient. It's not that big of a deal for stationary applications, but for attaching a spare battery (which is itself limited by its capacity) you are probably wasting 30% of it on the overhead of the wireless power transfer.
I thought wireless charging was inefficient because the coils were never properly aligned, but that magsafe fixed that.
That's... a really good point! Never thought about it that way.
slippery like an ice cube and requires a case by design
Great, another cool iphone that I won’t be able to pick up off the table.
Now make it 4 inches, and we'll be back to something approaching the perfection of iPhone 5.
Small phones don't sell well. The numbers prove this. Most people want to doom scroll or consume video content on their phones and it is better to do that when the screen is bigger.
Once again, stuff I don't care about. We would be 3x as impressed if it was 3x as wide and 3x battery life.
TouchID is also still sorely missed, and I will die on that hill. I'm on a 2022 SE hoping they change their mind one day. FaceID is a repellent experience.
Too expensive.
can they just make it flat? seriously
Now take all of that manufacturing brilliance and, keeping the volume the same, turn it into a small thick phone which will fit in my pocket and hand. Won't need a camera bump
APR?
This is becoming comical. iPhone Air only supports USB 2 speeds. Seriously? Also iPhone Pro only comes with USB 3 speeds while amplifying ProRes RAW support...
I don't think I have ever plugged in my phone, like at all, ever, and it's not even an iPhone. And if I want to get any photos/videos I made with it, they are just in Google photos?
Like I get there are some people who maybe use the thing as an actual camera and they suddenly need to download tens if not hundreds of gigabytes of media off the phone but like.....I guess it's just not the phone for them? And like you said the Pro supports USB3 speeds so what's the issue? 5gbps is really not fast enough?
That is really wrong way of looking at things. USB 4 support doesn't require ANY innovation from Apple, any extra $$$ (maybe pennies) - it's pure representation that they lost focus and simply don't care. That port is CRITICAL for many things they actually focused on in the prerecorded ads we all watched today - video. All add-ons, storage are in 99% of cases directly connected to the phone via USB-C port. To not support the latest technology available but charge premium is really disappointing...
I think calling it critical is massively overestimating how important it is to almost anyone, but that doesn't mean your need isn't valid.
Out of curiosity, are there any phones from any manufacturer that support USB4 and can actually transfer data at more than 5gbps?
I've never transferred data over a wire to or from my iPhone, interesting that this is important for some use cases.
Backing up your 1TB phone without taking whole house wi-fi bandwidth for 12 hours is one.
... what is wrong with your wifi, that its non-functional with <200 mbps of transfer?
200mbps is still wishful thinking in a typical household with ISP-provided consumer-grade router/AP in a suboptimal location. At the very least it will slow everything else down while it takes ~11 hours at a sustained 200mbps to transfer 1TB.
Not sure that I expect the average hacker news commenters to stick with their ISP-provided router in a suboptimal location - you can pick up a wifi6 router for under $100, that will happily maintain gigabit speeds over a normal-sized house
Cant wait for Bendgate 2025 edition
Am I the only one who has never owned an Apple iPhone? I just got my Pixel 7 upgraded to Pixel 10 Pro XL, couldn't be happier.
You and more than half the world.
Thin design rendered moot by the ugly "plateau" (wtf is that marketing term?)
Just make the thing a uniform thickness and cram it with battery.
I am curious if this will bend.
I dont know whats apple obsessions with thinness, instead they should focus on usability and battery life.
I've been a PC guy my whole live, and was forced onto a MacBook Pro this year for work.
The battery life is insane. The idea of charging my laptop has become this weird ritual now, only known of in lore and legend, that I partake of only when there is a blood moon.
Now if you look at the smart watches, they are by far the worst on the market.
Meanwhile my 2019 i9 16" MacBook Pro gets battery life on par with the MacBook Wheel (as seen in this classic from The Onion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA) I kid you not, the hummingbird battery is real.
At least I have something to look forward to when I upgrade.
The battery life while in use is amazing. The battery life while closed and apparently asleep is abysmal and probably the worst of any laptop I’ve used in the last 20 years.
I think the problem is that Safari allows tabs to ask to be periodically woken while the laptop is asleep, and there is no obvious way to turn this off. And it will keep doing this until the battery is so low that the laptop needs to hibernate.
Safari on Desktop is just appalling, every year you wish there are some improvements and it is the same. webkit gets some update in terms of web features and bug fix. Safari itself doesn't seems to want to improve. Even Orion using same webkit engine is better.
See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44745897
TL;DR: Make sure Power Nap is turned ON. It allows macOS to consolidate wakeup requests into a bulk queue. So the thing isn't turning on all the time.
I read that. It contains no actual useful or authoritative explanation. It references Apple docs that sort of say that it's not supported on Apple Silicon. The man page says:
> powernap - enable/disable Power Nap on supported machines (value = 0/1)
Thanks, Apple.
Use Chrome. Problem solved.
They did that too, in the other products. Longest battery ever.
I’d really love an inch-thick iPhone Dad which has a battery that lasts for days on end. Even a week.
> I’d really love an inch-thick iPhone Dad which has a battery that lasts for days on end. Even a week.
You're describing a case with a battery pack.
They make some pretty beefy battery cases.
They could make it thicker and give longer battery?
That would be the iPhone Pro
I assume they're getting ready for a folding iPhone, so the thinness tech is being developed largely for that. They're releasing this thin iPhone to test the market and to make use of it in the meantime.
I don’t see it; to my mind the last great Apple thin product was the 12” MacBook from 2015.
> dont know whats apple obsessions with thinness
It forces them to the forefront of miniaturisation and efficiency. It's also something they're unusually good at, which creates differentiation.
> they should focus on usability
usability is so '00. Nowadays the focus is on ads.
> and fantastic all-day battery life lol, welcome to the future
Mini phones please. Thickness is not a problem, solved 10 years ago.
This costs 43 dollars and was released in 2007. https://www.ebay.com/itm/116641357542
The iphone air costs more than a thousand dollars but it's thinner.
I have no idea why people pay for this shit.
Another phone that does not lie flat on the table.
Quite frankly ,I don't trust Apple with their battery claims. Esp. when they sell magsafe packs for this one.
Sorry, but no air. Yes it would be a cool second phone in case you go to events, but in that case, I'd prefer a mini with a better camera.
Just give me my mini. Please.
I was hoping for more content on AR and the next phase of the Apple Vision Pro. Is the Apple Vision Pro considered a failure at this point?
They keep trying to hire me, so they haven’t given up.
It’s limited by TSMC. M2 is where v1 is. I expect they want at least double the efficiency, and maybe this new pro liquid cooling, to try for a v2.
can we just get an iPhone Fat with 20000 mAh battery and a LCD screen (5% of population is sensitive to OLED PWM)
https://mashable.com/article/samsung-galaxy-a21-airplane-fir...
https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2025/More-than-One-Million-Anke...
Well you could just stick a huge fat Magsafe battery on the back of the phone...
I prefer the term iPhone Thiccc
hear me out: they make a slim phone, just to develop the supply chain around a foldable display to finally release a folding phone that is a sandwich of the air!
/s
Such vision! /s
Alright, buckle up — here’s a *Curb Your Enthusiasm scene* where Larry takes the iPhone Air press release way too personally at the Apple Store.
---
### Scene: Apple Store, Santa Monica
*Larry* walks in, holding his old iPhone with a cracked screen. He approaches a blue-shirted *Apple Genius*.
*Larry:* So I hear you got this new iPhone Air. Thinnest phone ever, huh? Five-point-six millimeters. What is this, a phone or a Wheat Thin?
*Genius:* It’s our most advanced design yet. Stronger, lighter—
*Larry:* Stronger? If it’s so strong, why is it thinner than a Ritz cracker? You ever eaten a Ritz cracker? Crumbles right in your hand! That’s what I’m gonna be holding here. Crumbs! Phone crumbs in my pocket!
*Genius:* Actually, it’s titanium. Aerospace grade.
*Larry:* Oh! Aerospace. Yeah, good. Because when I’m playing Sudoku on the toilet, I really want NASA technology under my thumbs. Very important. “Houston, I got a number two problem.”
*Genius:* The new 48-megapixel Fusion camera—
*Larry:* Fusion? What am I, splitting atoms now? I just want to take a picture of a sandwich. I don’t need the Manhattan Project in my pocket. And the front camera’s square? Square! Cameras are round, wheels are round, even faces are round. You make it square, now I look like SpongeBob in every selfie.
*Genius:* Well, the square sensor lets you take landscape photos while holding your phone vertically.
*Larry:* Vertically? Vertically?! Oh, thank you, Apple, you’ve saved me from rotating my wrist. What a terrible burden it’s been. Centuries of humanity struggling, and finally Apple says, “Don’t move your wrist, Larry, we’ll do it for you.” Unbelievable.
*Genius:* It also has all-day battery life.
*Larry:* All-day? What’s “all day”? My day? Your day? A raccoon’s day? Be specific! At 11:58 p.m. the phone dies and you go, “Oh, sorry Larry, guess your day’s over!” I still got two episodes of Columbo left, pal!
*Genius:* It’s also eSIM only.
*Larry:* Oh, fantastic. No physical SIM. So if I lose signal, I can’t even take it out, blow on it, do the old Nintendo trick. I just stare at my \$1,000 “air” sandwich and pray. That’s the feature? Praying?
*Genius:* It starts at \$999—
*Larry:* Nine-ninety-nine! For a phone that could slip between two couch cushions and vanish forever. You should sell it with a metal detector. “Find your iPhone Air before it suffocates under the ottoman!”
(Larry storms out, muttering.)
*Larry:* Thin phone, thick price. What a world.
---
Want me to *write another one where Larry’s actually at the launch keynote*, interrupting Tim Cook from the audience like a heckler?
Don't post AI-generated comments to Hacker News, especially long comments which scroll the page but add nothing to the discussion.
Adds nothing? Buddy, I added you complaining — that’s the most engagement this thread’s seen all day
travel
YOU HAVE TO BE A REAL FUCKING DUMBASS TO CARE ABOUT PHONE THICKNESS.
iPhone (Hot) Air.
For the demanding blowhole. Now available in pink.
Who on earth is this for???
I here to say... will it bend?
Some day soon they'll release a phone with no battery and you'll need to BYOB.
My experience is "air" in an Apple product's name means battery life is measured in tens of minutes and the fan makes a horrible racket because the CPU is underpowered and intended for only short suprts of activity. That's fine for a laptop because you can keep it plugged in and use your other computer to do tasks that require CPU, but not appropriate for a mobile phone that you may want to operate untethered for hours at a time.
I'm sure Apple's official word on this is battery life is sufficient for more than a couple of hours of untethered stand-by. I'm just questioning the wisdom of the naming convention. They trained their user community to understand that "air" means low-CPU power / low battery life / thinner package. Are there enough potential customers who will prioritize thin form factor over usability?
Nevermind. I just answered my own question.
[Edit: I understand the Apple fanbois will want to down-vote this, but look at the second sentence of the second paragraph. I am not saying the iPhone Air will be bad. I am saying that the "Air" name has, in the past, been applied to some pretty sub-standard products. I am asking if it's wise to apply a name that has been used for lower-end products to new products that aren't "lower end."]
It's been long enough that this doesn't seem true anymore. The current Macbook Air is fanless, and has around 18 hours of battery life with an 8-core M4.
Did you uhhhh read any of the announcement, or just jump straight to writing this comment?
The 17 Air reports 27 hours of video playback - the same as the 16 Pro.
Did you read my comment? I did not say the iPhone Air has 2 hours of battery life. I said previous apple products that had the "Air" name were "less capable." I was wondering aloud why a company would apply this sobriquet to a new product, regardless of it's capabilities.
Ah, fair enough! I read this as saying almost exactly that, but yeah, I get what you mean.
> but not appropriate for a mobile phone that you may want to operate untethered for hours at a time.
I do think this shifted a little when the first M1 Air came out. Anecdotally, many now associate it with being more than capable unless you’re an actual professional.
Thin phone that we're all just going to put a case on and forget what it looks like because everyone's phone just looks like an Otterbox or whatever.
Apple is cooked.
Upvote for Otterbox
Eh the new bumpers and clear cases look interesting (but the white MagSafe pattern is just stupid — should just leave it off). I'll probably get an Air and one of these cases, or a thin third party case.
Imagine putting the phone on the table and seeing it rocking side to side when you press it, the nightmare. Somebody needs to change this stupid trend urgently, we don't need thinner phones.
The iPhone 17 will rock less than previous iPhones with the bulge since this new bulge goes across the entire phone width.
What I would like is an iphone for like $200 with a stable set of features that I don't have to buy off the used market. I don't care if it's 2 generations behind, because these new phones don't offer anything I care about.
As far as I can tell from the announcement, they're focusing on content creators. Since I don't stream and am not an Instagrammer, it's irrelevant to me. Selling me one of these cameras is just a waste. I don't even know how to make the phone use the second (or third) camera.
[flagged]
> Oh fuck off.
> Amazing marketing wank.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Awww you upset you can’t afford it?
You're an idiot if you think owning a $1k phone is a status symbol.
Oh now it’s about a status symbol. So you can’t afford a status symbol and you’re upset? :(
This with the glass ui thing feels like now they're doing "innovation" for the sake of "innovation". But as someone said on the other thread about this thing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45185576), at this point they could just make a cardboard phone, wrap it with some fancy words and would sell it like crazy.
I see many comments screaming "WE NEED MORE BATTERY LIFE!"
I'm curious who needs more battery life than the iPhone air will provide? Every single person I know of commutes to and from work daily either in a car where they can charge their phone or to a desk that has a charger (wired or wireless).
The iPhone Air is rated for 27 hours of videoplayback. Let's say it works for a QUARTER of that, its still 7 hours of playback.
What kind of people are away from a charger for more than 7 hours who also only consume content for those 7 hours on a regular basis?
What kind of individuals are these? Please explain
I am not using a car, I do not commute, I do not go to an office.
I usually spend my days outside, roaming the city, sitting in parks and cafes. I have a 13mini and started to carry a lightweight power bank in my backpack because it tends to run empty before I get back home, which is a problem with electronic ticket for public transport.
A lot of people will also simply prefer the convenience of not having to plug their phone in more often than necessary. They have it in their backpack or purse, which makes it extra inconvenient to think of taking it out just to charge plus needing a cable and charger in multiple places, compared to the evenings when you may remove multiple items from it.
Proximity to a charger isn’t the answer. I’m home all day, but I still don’t want to be monitoring battery life all day or tied to chargers. I only want to change while I sleep.
I have a 16 Pro and every so often something runs in the background that destroys my battery in half a day. I still don’t know what it is. The settings don’t make it clear.
I haven’t complained about the battery life on the Air, but I’d rather have a bigger battery to the point of eliminating the camera bump, than having a marginally thinner phone that shoves everything in a bigger relative bump.
Something running in the background is a software issue. Trying to solve that by throwing more hardware is the most expensive least efficient way to solve your problem
Upgrading to a bigger battery won’t solve whatever is draining your battery
While that is all true, it does give more time to realize what is going on, so I can address the issue, without leaving me in a bad spot.
On days with normal battery usage, how is having more battery life ever a negative? Long travel days, which may also have heavy map usage, leave users outside of normal patterns and often with unpredictable access to charging. Having a long battery life would ease stress around those days and be preferable to carrying a battery bank.
Those days are not the norm. So having a heavier phone 90% of the time so that 10% of the time can be less stressful is not efficient. Just attach a magsafe battery pack those days and you have full day battery life.
Going on a hike in the weekend? Or basically anything where you're not going to the office? lol
How many people hike longer than their battery lasts?
Isn’t the phone not being used when hiking?
Are they live streaming the hike that they need such insane battery life?
I hike and bike ride with my kids very often. Other than the odd picture and video I have my phone in my pocket during those hikes. The battery barely drains
My iPhone mini lasts about 6 hours. If I hike in the cold it lasts maybe 2.5 hours tops, and hikes are usually 4-6 hours total, so it's usually dead by the time I'm done, and so I can't tap to ride the train home unless I bring a power bank.
If I have a long train ride, like 2 hours, and I read on it, it'll usually use about 50% of the battery in that duration.
If I go somewhere new, and use google maps a lot to navigate around, it'll last about 3 hours total.
If I go somewhere with bad cellular signal, it constantly fights to connect and drains incredibly quickly, often in a matter of 2 hours.
The Air looks like it's supposed to have a battery that's about 30% larger than the mini's, and the mini is wildly insufficient for regular use.
That seems extraordinarily poor battery performance. FWIW, I often go on hikes that take a similar 4-6h time. Granted, I get to charge it on the drive over so I usually start the hike with 100%.
We'll use my phone to take photos and videos on the hike. Never ran into battery issues. And it's Canada, so hikes are in cold-ish temperatures.
What’s your battery health at? I skied out west last season and it was -25°C and my phone lasted from 9am to 6pm
Too high for apple to replace it for a third time, like 95%.
Congrats on somehow having a better battery life; all the mini users I know can't manage an 8 hour day with theirs without plugging in somewhere.
Being far from a cell tower would also place a lot of stress on the battery, so hiking by itself is probably more draining than you'd expect
TheDong, can you test if putting it on air plane mode makes any difference? Maybe you're on the edge of multiple cell towers and your phone is trying to connect/disconnect too aggresively?
Yeah, of course airplane mode makes my phone last longer, but what's the point of a phone in airplane mode?
It lasts longer if I turn it off too.
At this point I just accept that I have to bring a battery brick with me everywhere, it's fine.
I mean, if it's out of charge anyway, it'd seem more useful to be able to turn it on/off and use it sporadically or at the end to get back
A battery pack does make it pointless though
People go on hikes in areas where there are multiple days between charging opportunities.
Hiking often also occurs in areas with bad or no coverage causing higher battery consumption with the phone trying to connect. If you don't mitigate this (with eg. turning off or enabling airplane mode) this will burn through battery much faster than the usual city dwelling.
A very tiny percentage of the population does that. Apple is not going to make the form factor of a device that sells ~100,000,000 units in 90 days to accommodate the 0.01% of people who take multiple day hikes.
> How many people hike longer than their battery lasts?
ROTFL. All of them. If your phone stops in a middle of a forest, what do you do ? Just sit there until (magically) starts again ?
Like this guy who burnt down a forest when this exact thing happened (while he should have prepared better, don't burn down forests if you find yourself in this situation, it is inexcusable)
https://www.backpacker.com/news-and-events/news/a-hiker-star...
Was discussed here some time ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34894299
Replied to the other comment - but I poorly read your message that I responded to. You're absolutely right that this wouldn't be a normal / routine use-case.
You're watching video podcasts while hiking or what's the weekend hike use case for more than 27 hours of video playback on a single charge?
Yeah my bad, I poorly read the post I was replying to. I'll leave my comment, because maybe someone is hardcore enough to do that.
I do want to see how the advertised battery life stacks up against the real-world observation. It might be enough, it might not be, let's see :)
> I'm curious who needs more battery life than the iPhone...
You aren't curious at all. You have formed an opinion. :)
Apple recognizes the deficiency, hence they created the battery accessory which they would love to up-self.
Step 1: Reduce battery life
Step 2: Sell battery accessory, profit.
I already carry a power bank with me when I know I will stay long away from home. So in some way, one does not need to pay apple for that. I also know people who carry some monster phones with them with huge batteries that last for several days, but I would rather carry a power bank than forcing the extra weight in my pocket.
Also, with android you have more options to optimise for battery life (eg low refresh rate and resolution) that are great if this is what you want to optimise (and did this for some time), but apple would never sell an iphone like that, and also ime these are becoming rarer in the android market too. If the sole alternative is just bigger batteries, I would rather not have this bigger battery attached to the phone all the time even if this is suboptimal for some other reasons.
Two things can be true at the same time
I can have an opinion that phones have sufficient battery life AND be curious what kind of person needs more than the provided battery life
The example of someone hiking so far does not make sense since a phone is idle when hiking and will last the entire time easily
In a hike you probably want to use your phone to look up the map/gps location, take photos etc. Ime iphones are struggling with this use case a bit without a power bank. Putting them in low power and airplane mode, while using a lightweight app for navigation with downloaded maps helps a lot, though it is still not gonna take you as far as other phones with larger battery life. I would never go for a hike where I know I need my iphone without a power bank with me. But not doing these and using google maps to navigate will not take you very far into the hike at all.
I live in an area which has frequent power cuts. Having a larger battery would certainly relieve me of carrying power banks.