After the sales disappointment of both the iPhone mini and Plus lines, Apple may be hoping to turn things around with 2025's heavily rumored new non-Pro model.
The iPhone 17 Air, a super-thin handset with just a single camera, is seemingly set to replace the iPhone 16 Plus in the lineup. But a new leak suggests that Apple's new offering may not look all that different at a glance, after all.
On X, the leaker @OreXda posted a list of purported specifications for both the iPhone 17 Air and iPhone 17 Pro Max. They’re mostly pretty familiar, for anybody who’s been tracking whispers about the upcoming handsets, but the former’s screen size is somewhat surprising.
At 6.7 inches, it’s just 0.2 inches smaller than the upcoming Pro Max — a handset that many people find too large to be comfortable.
pic.twitter.com/JL27Do53HXMarch 8, 2025
While it may make the phone impractical for those who prefer smaller screens, it actually makes a lot of sense. A wider screen creates more of a footprint for a wider battery — and that could be all-important when Apple is sacrificing the ability to make the cell thicker for aesthetic reasons.
This actually isn’t the first time we’ve heard the 6.7-inch size mooted — and crucially, it’s just a rounding error away from the 6.69 inches of the iPhone 16 Plus. So viewed from the front, you might not see a great deal of difference in this year’s lineup of iPhones compared to last year’s.
Viewed from the side or behind, of course, it’ll be all change. The iPhone 17 Air is tipped to be just 5.4mm thick, and it’ll only have one rear camera — one less than the standard iPhone 17, and two less than both the Pro models with their own unusual-looking new lens layout.
Elsewhere, @OreXda’s specs are pretty familiar. A September 2025 release date is tipped — unsurprising given nearly every numbered Apple handset in the last decade has been released in September — and expandable storage is marked with a “no”.
Again, that’s pretty obvious: Apple has never included expandable storage on its phones or tablets, and introducing it on a handset where space is at an absolute premium would be a strange place to start. Still, that may make the base storage of 128GB feel a little stretched (the Pro Max is listed as starting with 256GB).
The screen is listed as OLED with a resolution of 1,290 x 2,796 — slightly smaller than the 1,320 x 2,868 listed for the Pro Max model thanks to the latter’s 0.2-inch larger panel.
Camera resolution is listed as the same for both, with 48MP rear and 12MP front cameras, but that’s extremely misleading, given the Pro Max will have two more on the back, with the telephoto lens tipped to hit 48MP this time around.
We’re still six months away from the iPhone 17’s launch date, though Apple fans have been treated to a flurry of launches in the last couple of weeks.
The iPhone 16e was last week joined by two new iPads and the M4 MacBook Air.
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