Every September, the world gathers, virtually or otherwise, to watch Apple unveil its latest pocket rectangles with the suspense usually reserved for coronations or space shuttle landings. This month’s proclamation: behold the iPhone Air, Apple’s thinnest smartphone yet, with a super-sized price tag of $2149. It’s like a normal phone, only skinnier. I half expected it to float away when Apple boss Tim Cook held it up.
This phone is only 5.6mm thick. But what’s remarkable isn’t so much that achievement as what the engineering accomplishment represents: the end of the line. Squeezing a little more physical thinness out of the humble phone feels like the last trick left in a format that has otherwise stopped surprising us.
It has never been easy to make a smartphone thinner without it bending like a chocolate bar left on a dashboard. You may remember “Bendgate” back in 2014, when some owners of the newly released iPhone 6 found it developed a slight curve after placing some pressure on it, such as slipping it into a tight jeans pocket.
It was a reminder to Apple’s engineers that we don’t live in laboratory conditions; we live in the real world where people sit on their phones, drop them in toilets or wedge them in awkward car cupholders. Every fraction shaved off thickness decreases the margin for error in these daily indignities. The iPhone Air is so thin it can’t even accommodate a SIM card, instead using an embedded eSIM.
But will its “grade 5 titanium frame” do enough to protect its high-spec innards? We’ll see that tested now that the iPhone Air is available.
More significant was the Ozempic-style treatment Samsung gave its foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Z Fold7, which went on sale in July. This was an update of a phone that, in its first incarnation, delivered a luxurious amount of screen real estate when unfolded but was always too chunky to pocket.
The first few generations of folding phones felt like prototypes that escaped the lab: bulky, fragile, faintly ridiculous. But the Fold7’s thinness actually changes the experience. Closed, it no longer feels like two phones duct-taped together. Open, it feels lighter and closer to something you’d actually want to carry around. Here, thinness matters in a transformation sense: it rescues the foldable concept from novelty status – if you can afford the $3249 price tag.
Will we see regular smartphones get even thinner? Probably, but it’s the swansong of the modern smartphone era. Phone-makers are already working on new formats, smart glasses, mixed-reality headsets, perhaps even unobtrusive wearables that make carrying screens redundant altogether. Yes, smart glasses remain clunky and socially awkward. Yes, nobody wants to look like they’re auditioning for a Black Mirror reboot while queuing at the supermarket. But the same was once said of early cell phones, those brick-like Nokias people mocked before everyone began to carry one everywhere.
I’m ready for a pair of smart glasses, which isn’t particularly adventurous as I already wear a pair of dumb glasses during my every waking hour. Meta, which developed a basic pair of smart specs with sunglasses-maker Ray-Ban, will probably get there first because it has no smartphone empire to protect. But Apple will do smart glasses better, building on the design excellence demonstrated with its Vision Pro headset. Expect to be wearing smart glasses in three or four years’ time.
Soon after, we’ll look back at these wafer-thin slabs with affection and mild disbelief. “Can you imagine,” someone will say, “we actually carried giant glowing rectangles to talk to each other?” Someone else will reply, “And they weren’t even holographic.”
Until then, enjoy your thin phone. Just don’t sit on it.
