Apple’s thin iPhone 17 Air looks great. It’s also a terrible idea

Macworld

If there’s one thing that annoys me, it’s the way Apple describes its phones as being “7.8mm thin.” Not thick, like the way people talk in the English language, but thin. As if the 7.8mm part of the sentence isn’t already telling you that. I wonder what they’ll do when the new models come out? Perhaps they should go with “The iPhone 17 Air measures just 5.6mm dangerously fragile.”

That’s what we’re all thinking, isn’t it? Last week, two leakers showed off breathtaking early samples of the ultra-slim 17 Air, one calling it “unbelievably thin” and the other simply “crazy.” I can’t be the only viewer who immediately started thinking about Bendgate. And remember that the iPhone 6 Plus, the one that accidentally became Apple’s first folding smartphone back in 2014, was a practically obese “7.1mm thin.” The 17 Air is a whole new dimension of skinny.

The chances of another Bendgate, however, are… well, slim. For one thing, it happened more than a decade ago, and materials science has moved on (note the lack of similar reports since Apple released the 5.1mm iPad Pro last May). For another, the company’s reputation was damaged so badly that the fiasco and its lessons will be burned into corporate memory. Apple may have grown a little lax about quality control these days, but it’s highly unlikely to drop the same ball in the same way all over again.

My worry about the iPhone 17 Air, then, is not that it will bend (although I won’t be storing it in my back pocket). My worry is all the other things we have to sacrifice in order to achieve that preposterously slimline chassis, and the lack of real functional improvement we’re getting in return.

Going for the slimmest iPhone Apple has ever released means, as far as we can surmise at this point, accepting the following compromises:

A standard processor rather than Pro

A “budget” single camera (compared to two on iPhone 17 and three on 17 Pro)

Mono speakers rather than stereo

Lower battery life

A Pro (or near-Pro) price

By the time the 17 Air launches, we may find that there are more limitations. Maybe it won’t have MagSafe like the iPhone 16e. But the single biggest issue is likely to be the battery.

Unlike a tablet or a laptop, whose roles are limited and frequently semi-stationary, a smartphone is on duty all the time and in all places. It does everything, and carries virtually all of its owner’s important data, apps, and ability to communicate. A smartphone, therefore, lives and dies by its battery performance.

The 17 Air’s battery life, unfortunately, is going to be worse than any other iPhone 17, simply because there won’t be room to squeeze in anything more than a smaller-capacity cell. We don’t yet know how bad. Apple may perform miracles by using the very latest battery technology to keep it within touching distance of the iPhone 17. But this is unlikely and would, of course, mean jacking up the price still further.

A tech product is a delicately balanced mathematical function. If you change any of its countless variables, something else (speed, size, battery life, price) will react to compensate. And if you go crazy and push a variable to its absolute maximum or minimum, the entire system goes haywire. You can’t just say you want a super-thin phone; what you have to say is that you want a super-thin phone and are prepared to pay for this with substandard performance elsewhere.

Compromise is frequently necessary, and often a good thing. The key is to make the right compromises: to accept limitations in the areas that aren’t important to your needs. For me, losing the USB-C port would be a good compromise because of the improvements it could buy me in other areas. But by any metric of usability, iPhones are already thin enough. Nobody complains that their iPhone 16e is too fat, and making them even thinner will bring vanishingly small improvements to the user experience. Battery life, on the other hand, is an active pain point—if not at the time of purchase, then later in the device’s lifespan. It makes no sense to buy thinness and sell battery life.

If you gave me the choice, in fact, I wouldn’t buy an iPhone 17 Air. I’d buy an iPhone 17 Chunk with a Pro processor and two-day battery life that’s a mere 10mm thick. Sorry, “10mm thin.”




Foundry

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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Podcast of the week

The smart home market seems like it’s an ideal fit for Apple, but what does the company have to show for its efforts so far? On the latest show, we’re talking about Apple and its approach to the smart home—what it does now and what we could see in the near future. That’s all in the new episode of the Macworld Podcast!

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, YouTube, or our own site.

Reviews corner

Resident Evil 3 on Mac review: Time to meet your Nemesis.

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Video of the week

Last week Unbox Therapy posted a “hands on” with the iPhone 17 Air! Wow. Except, of course, that wasn’t quite accurate: it’s actually a prototype supplied by an anonymous third-party manufacturer. Still, a thoroughly interesting video and well worth a watch.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters, including our new email from The Macalope–an irreverent, humorous take on the latest news and rumors from a half-man, half-mythical Mac beast. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, or X for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.