Take

Everyone's prognosticating a new iPhone model this year - iPhone Air (this year, iPhone 17 Air), which supposedly slims down the iPhone 16 Pro by about 2 mm, which is around 20-30% slimmer.

This seems like an exercise in one of Apple's follies, in driving an acceptable thickness and weight to anorexic proportions, excising features and flexibility for a marketable measurement.

Although this is not necessarily out of character, and although the side-effects of such efforts can pay dividends up front, I don't think the Air is the point of the work.

A foldable iPhone is a similarly rumored device, and foldables are, by their nature, slim. A foldable iPhone not only has a double folded up thickness (and more, considering that some sort of gap has to be accounted for), its internal construction has to allow at least some of the area to fit screens on both sides of the device. This means duplication of the touch sensing substrate, glass and the many layers required for the display, as well as the driving components. (But let's allow that the back of iPhones already do have glass on them.)

If "all" Apple can do is produce an 8 mm iPhone, while some components can be spread out over both layers of the foldable sandwich, the margins for fitting everything in the worst case zone are tighter than ever.

So, while I don't necessarily agree with the consequences of the inexorable march towards new frontiers in terms of super-slimness that no one asked for, the ergonomic benefits of a larger display in a "small"-ish footprint are interesting enough that pursuing it may be necessary to avoid a relative brick.