Also -
Can anyone imagine what the impacts might be if Apple “Sherlocked” iFixIt and reviewers, and did teardowns, battery tests, etc. themselves?
As well as opening up liability and warranty issues when users consider those as 'instructions' to disassemble apple devices, it could also be seen by courts in some countries as publishing the design and internal details which would weaken Apples IP protections in some places.
I sincerely doubt it matters in term of IP/patents. Apple might not want to deal with any of the press that could come with it, and for a corp doing nothing is cheaper that doing anything. IMHO the loss on Apple Store revenue ans hgiving je image of a brand you can tinker with outweigh any legal part.
Apple should provide teardowns, but that would only minimally impact the ecosystem IMHO.
> reviewers > tests
Would you trust a company's own product reviews and tests ?
Apple tells us what they want and nothing else. They don’t tell us how much RAM there is or intimate details of the processors or battery size or lots of other things.
They much prefer “here’s magic, check it out” to “here’s tons of gory details”.
Doing teardowns like this would directly contradict that message.
Modern phones (especially iPhones) are worthless on the aftermarket so they're not as strong targets for theft.
(this is not to say that phone theft doesn't happen, in fact, it's pretty rampant in the UK, but they target people using their phones in the hope they're unlocked so they can be resold as entire units: components are useless).
Of course they could just be being stripped for parts, which is probably hard for most places to do at scale and Shenzhen could also deal with.
I'm sceptical that the idea of stealing while unlocked really stacks up. It seems it would be hard to keep it unlocked after an e-bike snatch. Then thief would have to stop and reset the Apple ID password before the phone locked (presumably with the access they have to the owners emails), and factory reset the phone before the owner got access to their Apple ID again.
Of course I have no first hand knowledge myself- but he definitely gave me the impression that they were functionally useless aside from their components.
So despite the meme that stolen iPhones are "worthless" while locked, the presence of large buyers with demand for unlimited quantities of locked iPhones means that the fence value at the lowest level of the food chain is still more than enough to incentivize rampant theft (even if it were only like $50 to a thief for a $1200 phone, that is worth $200 to a Shehnzen buyer).
I'm making the numbers up, but the point is that even if iCloud activation lock and serialization destroys the vast majority of the phone's value it's not enough to truly discourage theft rings selling to wholesale buyers overseas. It just put the humble local neighborhood thief or opportunist reselling on eBay out of business, with the vacuum quickly filled by organized crime.
In a world where most people don't carry around cash or valuables that's the best a street level thief is going to do unless you run into the odd person with a Rolex or jewelry with rare actual pawnable value, and it's a bottomless crime of opportunity in a big city or festival/concert/etc so adds up quickly.
Tangentially, it is utterly trivial to completely bypass Apple MDM, in a manner that breaks nothing, and survives OS upgrades, minor and major. Just requires the right combination of three DNS names at one point of install, and no internet at another, and you will get a completely de-fanged Mac. The only time you need to repeat the process is if you completely erase the SSD.
But no idea how stable/reliable this it.
At this point, I've seen no evidence that FireBeyond's extraordinary claims have any merit.
I have Find My running on this computer (which is unlocked) now. I've upgraded from Monterey to Tahoe without issue (startup that went AWOL).
However, you touch on two things - 1) I have no idea (and doubt) that this would bypass a device that has been locked, and 2) newer versions may not be as vulnerable. This computer is an M1, and Monterey can be made to go through a full install process without internet access, as described, but newer versions will not (or they may, but I couldn't find a way to force it with Sonoma or later). That means if I do an erase, I have to do a new Monterey install, and then upgrade (but nothing untoward there, don't have to do iterative updates).
You can replace almost any part on an iphone, but if it isn't an Apple part its functionality is reduced. The only people that care are people reselling iphones with substandard parts.
So if i replace the part with perfectly good components, from other iphone, it won't complaint, right ?
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/22/hands-on-with-new-iphones-el...
3D printing is really unsuitable for mass production due to being so slow and therefore expensive.
I wonder what properties this port has that apple didn't feel they could achieve any other way?
> and titanium is prone to catching fire during machining (so the work piece usually needs to be submerged during)
Using spray or mist coolant is common in machining anyway for hard materials. Also titanium fires can't be put out with water. That said Ti is not magnesium and does not burn readily: you have to be both unlucky and incompetent.
They may be just buying out all of the worldwide (China-wide) available capacity. Perks of sitting on an impossibly large pile of cash I guess. Still, impressive.
Not sure which method Apple uses (must be really advance one), but 3d printing can be fast if you want.
SoC with TSMC A20 or A14, N2 and C2 ( I expect the two will merge into one at some point ), Tandem OLED, all with better Energy efficiency, Silicon Carbon Battery with double energy capacity. All of these tech are here or ready within next 3 - 5 years. It is more of a question of whether Apple is willing to pay for it to be mass produced.
With the energy efficiency gain and battery improvements I could see iPhone Air getting double the battery life. It would be better than even today's iPhone 17 Pro Max in 5 years time.
This opens up the door for iPhone Air Mini. I say mini but it will probably still be 5.9", but weight the same as iPhone Mini ( I assume that is something Apple will market it as ).
The only thing I wish and I dont know if it is feasible, is the Camera lans to be the same as back of the bump without much loss of photo quality. And I am willing to pay extra $100 to $200 for it. I just dont know if the tech is here in the near future.
(Which is technically in line with you saying “17 series”, since there’s no number in the Air’s name. But your comment makes no sense unless you thought the Air was included in that, and so…)
See: https://www.telegraphindia.com/gallery/at-5-6mm-ultra-slim-i...
This is the only time I've considered sim tray removal acceptable, because there's physically no where for it to go.
This directive applies EU-wide for all devices sold after 31st of July 2026. Some countries have earlier deadlines, e.g. devices sold in Germany after 20th of June 2025.
I'm glad that they didn't try to delay it for the better part of a decade like they did with USB charging ports.
Almost every time they do this stuff, it's because the EU is forcing them.
This creates a foldable with no durability issues and no “crease” problems. Also the two halves of the display could be on the outside when folded, avoiding the need for a third display and getting a rear display for free. I would buy 3 of these.
I don't even know if that affects my opinion of whether you'll be right or not, because putting glass on the back is definitely more fragile than machining the phone out of a solid block of aluminium. Am I remembering this incorrectly? Was that the unibody MacBooks? Regardless, I found the aluminium backs a lot less fragile, but we all gave them up pretty easily for wireless charging.
Is there something equivalent to longbets.org, but for bets which are about matters that aren't important to society? I'd take you up on the bet - not because I think you're wrong, but because I think it's fun and fairly harmless gambling that is unlikely to lead to either of us developing a habit - but has easily sending small amounts of money internationally been solved yet?
I'll bet $10 it hasn't! That I can't send $10 from one country to another, without paying fees that are a significant proportion of that amount, or needing to put an unreasonable amount of effort into setting up an account with a 3rd party service or doing the transfer with that service.
And the two bets above are a bad look, so I'll also bet $20 that you can't get me doing any more gambling by the end of the day.
The most popular betting website is Polymarket. Payment is via crypto. The fees aren’t super high. The typical user is more likely to lose money by making bad bets. If you don’t want to spend money, there’s Manifold.
I'd take you up on that bet! I'm not sure what an envelope costs, but probably less than $0.1 if you buy more than one, then add a stamp (usually around/below $1 in most places in the world AFAIK, even for international destinations).
Please send the $10 in an envelope to Oranjerie 114, 7311 WP Apeldoorn, Netherlands whenever you can :)
I think the post offices where I am only sell the envelopes in bulk, and buying a pack will probably add an unreasonable 20% - 30% of the amount, but I'll concede that most people will probably have an envelope from a bank and a glue-stick lying around.
This is very off-topic, but sending something to an address which I can't tell is complete, without a name, has reminded me of something I find interesting.
A few years ago, my mother received a postcard from a friend who didn't have her address handy. She sent it with just my mother's name (first and last), the city, and country (New Zealand). It took some time, but it reached her! In NZ, "city" is used for some pretty small places - the population is only around 70,000. But I'm still very impressed with the effort to deliver that to her. Especially for a postcard - even internationally the postage on those is not a lot!
Of course, if not stated I suppose it would be reasonable to assume international bets are are in USD, but it's close enough, and this feels like it's only just holding up anyway.
And most importantly, I think sending $8 is funnier than sending $10.
It has been solved, but the hacker news hivemind hates the solution. Sending USDT on Ethereum chain costs 25 cents usually.
If I have to start and end with USD which is what anyone interested in other three functions of money want, there is USD -> USDT and back to USD costs, and depending on geography there may not be cheap or legal way to make that trade, which means it is going to be far more expensive than just the $0.25 "gas" fees.
I often hear this has been solved with additional layers, and I see that you mentioned Ethereum instead of bitcoin. Is that significantly easier? $0.25 is not bad for $10, so the fee seems fine. I'm accepting money in an envelope as a solution, and that costs more, but I'm keen to hear whether this would have been easier.
For the foldable phone, it may just have to do with aesthetics.
A hinged iPhone seems totally in the cards.
> MacBooks
Laptops have been a thing since the 80s.
Apple has seriously good engineers to be able to make that happen in a device that's so thin.
And what did Apple do? Build thinner phone with an external battery pack.
(Yeah that phrase has unfortunate Mao-era baggage, but personally I really just want the mini series back—which many also consider to have too little battery capacity—so I feel encouraged by Apple broadening the iPhone lineup.)
But I agree this iphone air as a product is kind of weird. Similar to the original macbook air maybe? Ahead of its time but a bit limited by today’s tech. A peek at the future…
Other users want a lighter phone (decent amount of iPhone mini fans) and that’s what the air achieves.
This group is adequately served with an external battery pack.
I'm pretty pissed at them (again). Over the last couple of years, we've seen significant gains in battery capacities for the first time in more than a decade — you can now buy “standard” thickness phones for sane amounts of money with 6-7.5 A·h batteries, and I expected to see 8 A·h shortly. Two times the capacity of just a few years ago with the same volume and for the same amount of money.
What does Apple do with these gains? Crap out a new thinner phone, of course. Now other manufacturers will follow suit, just like they did with the 3.5" jack, and we will be back to square one.
Not once do I remember thinking "I would like this phone to be thinner", yet I wish that this thing would have a bigger battery almost daily.
Thanks again, Apple.
Their numbers do look awful on paper. Battery capacities tend to be a lot lower than Android phones. OTOH, Android phones consume far more battery, so comparing raw numbers isn’t really a fair comparison.
They know however that battery failing is the first thing pushing consumers to change phone and being Apple they always have to take the most anti consumer stand possible.
Admittedly it’s a less of a problem that it used to be. Outside of the Air their batteries are still not state of the art but they look less punny than they used to.
Because your comment is entirely missing the point at the moment.
How long the battery lasts, for it’s weight, is pretty much the only point of a battery.
It’s also not cheap at all especially if you don’t pay their extortionate extended warranty fee which should be included from the start.
The spare parts are readily available through their parts portal.
And it cost less than $100 to get the battery replaced on any iPhone as far as I’m aware at an Apple Store without a warranty.
The air is not for you.
Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge was first with a thinner phone (and some Motorola that most people have probably never heard of?). But it is also quite misplaced, since they just released the 27 Pro, which moves the (stacked) logic board close to the camera to be able to fit a larger battery, going from 3582 mAh in the 16 Pro to 4252 mAh in the 17 Pro (both US eSIM capacities, 18.7% more!). But they also used the space to add a vapor chamber for better sustained performance.
The Air is just a different market. The Air and Pro optimize for almost the opposite:
- Thinness vs. battery life.
- Thinness vs. an additional GPU core.
- Thinness vs. sustained performance.
- One back camera vs three back cameras.
I like this year's line-up because there is much more choice: getting the absolute thinnest phone, getting an absolute performance monster with a large battery and plenty of cameras, or getting a great middle ground, which is almost as light as the thin phone, but has longer battery life, and one more camera, and no lousy 60Hz display this year.
Are batteries no longer paired with the device? I thought that any battery replacement needs Apple's blessing via their servers, otherwise the phone will claim it's non-genuine.
Also, the phone has always functioned with an aftermarket battery, just with a warning, so the iFixit statement could still be true in that situation too.
I’m curious who they talked to. I’m no expert but this photo [1] looks like laser sintering. It’s got the telltale melt pools and the laser scanning direction from hatch passes
Maybe Apple has figured out economic electron beam melting at scale?
[1] https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2025/09/20111617/USBC-...
Obviously not DED or binder jetting, and anyone who knows metal printing would see that instantly. DED has the resolution of a hot glue gun, laying down thick beads of molten metal that could never produce such a fine, intricate lattice - it's built for large-scale, rapid deposition, not delicate internal structures. Binder jetting is even more of a non-starter; you're essentially gluing powder together and then sticking it in an oven to sinter. That process leaves behind a distinctly porous, slightly grainy microstructure because the particles are fused, not fully melted, which looks nothing like the smooth, continuous, and fully dense solidified strands you see in this micrograph. This image screams high-precision, localized melting, which is the exclusive domain of powder bed fusion techniques like SLM or DMLS.
Edit closed surface finish I’ve seen is indeed of a Laser Assisted DED here is a research published this year https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221486042...
Just because Apple is using space-grade titanium (likely Ti-6Al-4V) for the new Watch case doesn’t necessarily mean the same material or process is being used for the USB-C housing. As mentioned in the video, the scratch resistance of the watch case appears to be higher than that of the USB housing. This could be due to differences in surface finishing, post-processing, microstructure, or even different base materials. Scratch resistance generally correlates with hardness, which in turn scales with yield strength of the material.
Regarding the manufacturing method, based on the sectioned images and visible layer patterns, the USB housing does appear to be additively manufactured, likely SLM or DED, not binder jetting. However, those optical images alone don’t provide enough evidence to pin the exact AM process used. The visible "fish scale" surface texture could result from either Directed Energy Deposition (DED) or Powder Bed Fusion (PBF/SLM) since fish scale morphology is a result of remelting of the previous deposited tracks. Without cross-sectional images showing the interface between the housing and the substructure, it's hard to tell whether the part was printed directly onto the assembly (DED-fashion), or printed separately (SLMEd) and then soldered on. Even some additional simple SEM images that reveals the microstructure at 50 micron scale would give more information since DED and SLM have inherently different cooling rate that gives different grain morphology and pattern in sub-micron scale.
Worth noting that while DED has advanced enough to achieve relatively fine resolution today, DED Titanium typically exhibit higher ductility and lower strength/hardness compared to PBF, due to its beta-phase dominated microstructure as opposed to the alpha dominated structure + martensitic phase in PBF. A scale bar on the optical images would’ve helped estimate melt pool size or hatch spacing, giving more insight into the process used. As it stands, we can speculate, but more detailed characterization is needed to be 100 % sure. Cheers
To sum up, it uses an inkjet to spray binder to metal layer by layer.
Oh what a dream…
In fact an increasing number of people seem to want 2 large screens in their phone.
People want larger batteries and screens than small phones can offer.
(I was in camp 'small phones', but gave up when my 12 Mini had its best time.)
Same with the camera, and that’s why the bump will exists for a long while.
It doesn't seem to have been a priority for them, but we'll have to see if this shows up in their marketing.
Been awhile, since I looked at that (I'm still using a 13).
Mostly though I agree it’s pressure from California and the EU and such to make things more repairable.
That's it. That's the post
It more than exceeded my expectations in this regard while also being _shockingly_ light.
I have not been this excited about an iPhone since the X, and I felt like the hype was warranted.
This phone is a masterpiece. It is finally a worthy successor to my Minis.
It's much larger in every dimension that this mini lover cares about.
The Air feels good in the hand, albeit in a different way.
The Air is 2mm thinner than the Mini while being only 20g heavier (which you don't feel given that the phone is larger and the weight more evenly-distributed). This, to me, is a bigger deal than having a small phone.
The weight and thickness of the Pros that came before this were big factors driving my hate for large phones. This phone's ergonomics have, so far, made interacting with its large screen very tolerable (for me).
Between this, a better virtual keyboard experience (by dint of having a bigger screen and iOS 26 improvements) and the 13 mini's aging processor (which makes its already-challenged battery life even worse), the decision to upgrade both of my Minis was effortless.
i went to bed last night with 70% charge remaining. that included about 1.5hrs of voice calls, some texting, some doomscrolling, and a bit of youtube - a pretty normal day of phone usage for me.
And to not put your phone on the camera lens, I would put it in a case that is as thick as the thickest glass part, which looks not that slim.
IE the idealized hourglass 36-24-36 is considered thinner than a woman at 34-30-34.
Also, the numbers are top to bottom so IMO the phone would be 48-24-24, a rather absurd proportion for a person and possibly why phones seem so ugly these days.
I think for people thin is mostly in reference to volume for a given height. But there’s a bunch of related factors involved like weight and clothing sizes which keeps it relatively ambiguous.
(Their dimensional volume is close, and their weight almost the same.)
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