Apple has long been rumored to replace the iPhone 16 Plus with an iPhone 17 Air (or iPhone 17 Slim) next year, thanks to the Plus model having the most disappointing sales of the four models the company releases each year.
Last week a rumor claimed the Air would be 6 mm thick, and today it turns out that it’s going to be even thinner than that, courtesy of a new in-depth report about the upcoming device. Apparently, it will be between 5mm and 6mm thick. That’s seriously slim.
iPhone 16 Plus
For comparison’s sake, note that the iPhone 16s are 7.8 mm thick and the iPhone 16 Pros are 8.25 mm thick. Even the newest iPad Air is 6.1 mm thick, so the new iPhone Air would beat its namesake. On the other hand, the new iPad Pro is 5.1 mm thick, and Apple seems to be aiming for a similar profile for the slim smartphone.
Due to the extreme thinness, some things had to go: support for physical SIM cards, for example. There’s also a single speaker that doubles as the earpiece, since there’s no room for a second one at the bottom. The iPhone 17 Air will use an Apple-designed modem that is expected to be smaller and more power-efficient than the Qualcomm ones Apple currently uses. This will however lack mmWave support and will have slower overall data speeds compared to the Qualcomm chips.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the iPhone 17 Air will have a smaller battery than current iPhones – this means it will be smaller than the 3,561 mAh cell in the vanilla iPhone 16. As rumored before, today’s report reiterates the use of a single rear camera, housed in a large centered camera bump.
Previously rumored features for the iPhone 17 Air include a 6.6-inch screen, an aluminum frame, the A19 chip, Face ID, the Dynamic Island, 48 MP resolution for its single rear camera, a 24 MP selfie camera, and 8GB of RAM. It should land in September 2025 alongside the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max.
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