Rumors have been appearing for months about how thin the iPhone 17 Air will be, but now they also give an idea of what that will look like.
The iPhone 17 Air will be thin and it will look like this
The iPhone 17 Air replaces the iPhone 17 Plus and appears alongside the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max. We have known for some time that the iPhone 17 Air will be very thin. Opinions are divided about how thin exactly. Most rumors now assume 6 mm. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo even expect a thickness of only 5.5 mm.
With a thickness of 5.5 mm, the iPhone 17 Air will be the thinnest iPhone yet. At the moment, this is still the iPhone 6 from 2014, with a thickness of 6.9 mm. A thickness of 5.5mm would be about 30 percent thinner than the iPhone 16, which is 7.8mm thick. And it would be 33 percent thinner than the iPhone 16 Pro models, which are 8.25mm thick.
The Air replaces the mini and the Plus
The iPhone 17 Air will not differ much from the 13-inch iPad Pro that was released last year. This iPad Pro is also super thin, with a thickness of only 5.1 mm. In fact, it is Apple’s thinnest device yet.
Apple hopes a super-thin design will appeal to people more than the iPhone mini and Plus models. Neither of which sold as well as the standard iPhones and the Pro models. Apple discontinued the 5.4-inch iPhone mini after the iPhone 13 mini. The iPhone 16 Plus will probably be the last Plus model.
Kuo says the iPhone 17 Air will be 5.5mm at its thinnest point, so that implies we can expect a camera island. Apple plans a single 48-megapixel camera on the back, due to limited space in the case.
Thinner but not more expensive
The first rumors about the iPhone 17 Air suggested that the thin iPhone would be more expensive than the Pro models, but that does not seem to be the case. It will be a mid-range model in terms of size and functionality, with a 6.6-inch screen and an A19 chip. That chip is not as fast as the A19 Pro that is expected for the iPhone 17 Pro models. The iPhone 17 Air will also get Apple’s own modem chip, which won’t offer the fastest mmWave 5G speeds.
Kuo assumes 5.5 mm, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said in December that the iPhone 17 Air will probably be 2 mm thinner than the iPhone 16 Pro models. That means a thickness of 6.25 mm. A thickness of 5.5mm is closest to the iPad Pro, but even at 6.25mm the iPhone 17 Air will be the thinnest iPhone yet.
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