Next fall, the iPhone 17 series will launch, with major overhauls across the range. A recent report about the super-slim model, nicknamed the iPhone 17 Air, had lots of details about a phone that will look different from any previous iPhone. But there were also nuggets about how the rest of the series will be different.
First of all, there’ll be no more titanium Pro iPhones, according to a report in The Information. This may come as a surprise, given that titanium was only introduced in 2023 with the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, and was a very big deal.
The report says that the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max will, “all switch to aluminum frames from stainless steel and titanium.”
I don’t quite buy this, not least because there are no stainless steel iPhones in the current range.
The report says that there will be big changes to the way the iPhone looks at the back on the Pro models. “The back of the Pro and Pro Max models will feature a new part-aluminum, part-glass design. The top of the back will comprise a larger rectangular camera bump made of aluminum rather than traditional 3D glass. The bottom half will remain glass to accommodate wireless charging, two people said,” according to The Information.
It’s not clear if the shape of the camera panel will change—it’s a rectangle now, of course, if a squarish one. But placing the cameras in a metal background rather than glass is a distinctive update.
And, as the report says, has implications for wireless charging, which is why it suggests that the bottom half will be glass as now.
All of which is also surprising because it’s hard to see how you can achieve the seamlessness Apple likes so much with two different materials in play.
The first iPhone in 2007 was mostly aluminum but with a bottom area that was plastic, and that looked good, but industrial design has changed a lot in the last 17 years.
In all, I’m not convinced that this is how Apple will go. But the time these things take means the company will have pinned down its design decisions, or will be about to.
