The next iPhones are less than a month away. A recent report that seemed to relate to the iPhone 17 Air has now been updated to indicate that no, it’s about the iPhone 17 Pro, after all. But there’s something much more interesting hiding in the shadows of the new story.
You can read my original story here, but the new update includes something that no iPhone has ever had before: different battery sizes for the iPhone based on where it will be sold.
The news came from prolific leaker Majin Bu, who perhaps spoke too soon with their latest leak, which claimed to show the battery for the upcoming slim phone, nicknamed the iPhone 17 Air. They’ve now had to correct what they said.
“Due to a miscommunication with my source, the information I reported yesterday is incorrect,” Majin Bu has now admitted on X. Instead, they’re directing readers to their latest post.
In a scorched-earth policy, the original post now links instead to one headlined “iPhone 17 Pro: Unveiling the New Battery with Steel Case,” which reveals that the information was referring to quite a different phone, the iPhone 17 Pro.
The new post does not mention the mistake and indeed the word Air never appears in the story. Some of the new story is similar to the original except there’s no longer any reference to the capacity of the new battery.
Instead, there’s an arguably much more interesting: that the L-shaped battery will come in two different versions.
As you will know, U.S. iPhones no longer have physical SIM card trays. Until now, that extra real estate has been filled by a spacer. According to this updated report, for the very first time, Apple will make two different iPhone batteries: one for the U.S. market and a smaller one for international territories (which Majin Bu refers to as the Chinese version, though it’s not thought that the eSIM only option for U.S. iPhones is about to be replicated anywhere else.
“The version for the U.S. market is wider, designed without the need to accommodate a physical SIM. This layout maximizes internal space, with a battery extended in width for optimized capacity without compromises,” the new report says.
Which means, you’ve got it, U.S. iPhones could have longer battery life than other countries’ models. By how much, we don’t know, but every extra bit of battery size is to be welcomed.
