The biggest draw this year could be a rumoured “iPhone Air”, a phone slimmer than what Apple has sold before and taking its name from the company’s slender laptop, MacBook Air.
Apple would need to iron out how to pack batteries and cameras into a thinner device, analysts said, and seek to price it between the base iPhone 17 models and more expensive Pro models to attract a large number of customers.
Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester, said a slimmer iPhone could spur upgrades. “It’s been a while since we have seen any meaningful update to the form factor of the device beyond tepid incremental changes, and the novelty of the Air will likely induce many 14, 15 and even 16 iPhone users to migrate up,” Chatterjee said.
The slimmer phone could also be a stepping stone towards an iPhone that folds out flat like a book and would act as a platform for an upgraded Siri, neither of which are likely to arrive until next year, analysts said.
Samsung Electronics is on its seventh generation of folding phones and Alphabet’s Google is on its third, yet Chatterjee estimated they were less than 2 per cent of all phone sales and would not grow beyond 5 per cent “any time soon”.
