Like Samsung and its Galaxy S25 Edge, Apple will reportedly chase a thinner phone design when it releases the much-rumored iPhone 17 Air later this fall. A likely replacement for the iPhone 16 Plus, the Air could deliver a thinner phone to the iPhone 17 lineup, but not without making a few key compromises.
That’s what regular leaker Fixed Focus Digital claims in a Weibo post, anyway. The leaker says that the iPhone 17 Air will be very similar to the upcoming iPhone 17 Pro, but with three big sacrifices in the name of a thinner phone.
“It has almost all the configurations of the Pro, but it cuts one core in the GPU part, and the screen and battery are not as good as the Pro,” Fixed Focus Digital wrote in the machine-translated post, adding that they were “quite optimistic” about the iPhone 17 Air.
What this means is that the iPhone 17 Air will still feature an A19 Pro chipset, as we expect to see in the Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, but that it will have five GPU cores instead of the six found in the Pro models’ chipset. The Air would still be more powerful than the standard iPhone 17, which is supposed to have a standard A19 processor.
Battery & screen sacrifices
Fixed Focus doesn’t specify, but they also mentioned that the screen and battery are supposed to be steps back from what the iPhone 16 Plus offers..
Current rumors have the iPhone 17 Air featuring a 6.6-inch OLED display, a skosh smaller than the iPhone 16 Plus’ 6.7-inch panel. The same leaker previously claimed that the Air would have a 120Hz screen but not a ProMotion display, so it won’t have a variable refresh rate.
A thinner phone usually means a smaller capacity battery — that’s one of the compromises Samsung had to make with the Galaxy S25 Edge. But Apple may go even smaller with the iPhone 17 Air’s power pack as reports claim the phone will either feature a 2,800 mAh battery or a 2,900 mAh cell. Either outcome would be smaller than the 3,900 mAh battery in the S25 Edge.
The iPhone 16 Pro was able to fit a larger 3,582 mAh battery in the phone. We haven’t seen many rumors on battery size for the iPhone 17 Pro, but it could rely on better power efficiency to get more life out of the battery.
That’s not all
Even compared to the standard iPhone 17, the Air model is expected to have a more limited camera setup. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes the Air will only feature a single 48MP rear lens, and leaked renders of the iPhone 17 Air seem to bear that rumor out
In contrast, the standard iPhone 17 should have the same 48MP primary lens and a 12MP ultrawide as the iPhone 16. Meanwhile, the Pro models could feature an upgraded 48MP telephoto lens in their rear camera array.
Add it all up and it feels like the iPhone 17 Air is making a lot of major compromises to reach a very specific aesthetic over actual performance. Even so, Fixed Focus Digital believes the phone will be a hit, so it will be interesting to see how people respond to iPhone 17 Air when it arrives. That could be very soon as the iPhone 17 series is likely to launch in September — just a few weeks from now.
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