The iPhone will soon have an “Air” model of its own, nearly two decades after the late Steve Jobs—a visionary and marketing genius par excellence—introduced the now iconic branding to the world. It will be part of the upcoming iPhone 17 series, due for release later this year, according to online reports.
The iPhone 17 Air, or whatever Apple decides to call it eventually, will join the Mac and iPad to have its own dedicated Air branding. It is expected to launch this fall, sometime in September, if Apple sticks to its traditional launch cycle. The MacBook Air, launched at Macworld conference San Francisco in January 2008, was the first Apple product to have the Air branding. Steve Jobs had famously pulled it out of an envelope to show off how thin it was in a market dominated by chunky laptops.
The branding has since found its way to the iPad, although the very recent iPad Air with M2 chip—that is available in two sizes—is no longer its thinnest tablet. It has been superseded by the seventh-generation iPad Pro with M4, which is even thinner, with the 13-inch model coming in at just 5.1 mm. Still, the iPad Air serves as a nice middle ground with premium features and a relatively more affordable price. Maybe that’s what the Air stands for today. But we digress.
The iPhone 17 Air is gunning for the thinnest iPhone crown being 2 mm thinner than current iPhones, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The thinness could pave the wave for foldable iPhones and iPads, in which case, it’s destined to be the ultimate test ground for Apple’s future roadmap. Gurman has shared another big hardware nugget. The iPhone 17 Air could be among the first wave of devices to feature Apple’s in-house cellular modem, codenamed Sinope. Apple has been working on it for a while with an aim to reduce its reliance on Qualcomm. The modem is expected to make its debut inside the budget iPhone SE, sometime in Spring.
Apple is also reportedly working on its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, and we might see them in action on the iPhone 17 series, though whether the iPhone 17 Air would get them too, remains a mystery.
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