Smartphones were bound to get boring. Eighteen years after the introduction of the original iPhone—the glass touchscreen that truly changed everything—there’s very little with new phones that will get people camping out just to be the first to get The Next Big Thing. Foldable phones have tried to rekindle some of that old excitement, but they’re still too expensive. So phone makers are trying something new: super skinny phones.
Both Samsung and Apple will be launching extremely thin phones by the end of this year. Samsung already announced its Galaxy S25 Edge, and Apple, the copious leaks plastered all over the internet strongly suggest, will release what everybody’s calling the “iPhone 17 Air” alongside its stable of regular and pro-tier iPhone 17s.
Numerous leaked images of dummy units reveal the S25 Edge and iPhone 17 Air to be barely thicker than the USB-C port. Prolific phone leaker Evan Blass shared last week that the S25 Edge measures only 5.8mm thick and weighs 165 grams. Several well-known Apple leakers, including Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, and YouTubers such as Unbox Therapy, all corroborate that the iPhone 17 Air will clock in somewhere around 5.5mm to 6mm thick. YouTuber Sam Kohl, who runs the Apple Track channel, has an extensive video showing off a dummy model for the iPhone 17 Air and how it compares to the rest of Apple’s family of iPhone 17 devices slated for launch in September.
Take a look at the sides of the iPhone 17 dummy — the Air model is unbelievably thin. pic.twitter.com/ixadQHuxK5
— Sonny Dickson (@SonnyDickson) April 24, 2025
Had phones stayed skinny like they were way back with the iPhone 6 released in 2014, and had bendgate never happened, nobody would be making such a hoopla over thin phones. But that’s not what happened. As phones got bigger screens, cameras upgraded from single lenses to dual or triple ones, and apps (especially 3D mobile games) needed more powerful chips, there was only one way to make them last a whole day, and that was shoving a bigger battery inside. The downside to longer-lasting but physically bigger batteries is that phones ballooned in thickness to fit them.
Phone makers gave the people exactly what they voted for with their wallets—phone addiction be damned—and now they’re trying to sell lesser phones just for the sake of slimness. Is anybody really asking for a phone that could snap in half like a candy bar if you grip it too hard or slip it into a pair of tight jeans? Even a guy like me who hates how impossible it is to one-hand my iPhone 16 Pro and would greatly appreciate a thinner and lighter iPhone is wondering whether the tradeoffs will be worth it.
A thinner phone means a smaller battery. You also get fewer rear cameras, as evidenced by the S25 Edge and leaked iPhone 17 Air’s single lenses. Technology has come a long way since bendgate over a decade ago. Chipsets are more efficient and less power-hungry, so you don’t need massive batteries for phone basics like doomscrolling on TikTok, email, and web browsing. And you can now get a lot out of a single camera lens—like multiple focal lengths that simulate different zoom levels by cropping in—if the sensor has lots of megapixels. But I worry that the the mass and weight loss may not be worth these compromises. At the end of the day, both Samsung and Apple’s skinny phones will still have big honking screens roughly measuring 6.6 inches, and they won’t fit in any pair of reasonable pants pockets. Sorry, dude who only owns one pair of jeans and has the outline of their phone permanently imprinted into the front pocket!
The initial media and influencer buzz will treat these phones like they’re the Second Coming of Jesus, but after the frenzy subsides, will anybody care? Will the sales numbers bear out any demand for super-thin phones? We won’t know until hindsight, but if rumored prices end up being correct, they might be a tough sell. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes Apple could sell the iPhone 17 Air starting at $900, which would only be $100 more than the iPhone 17 and $100 less than the iPhone 17 Pro. That’s also only if Apple sticks to the pricing for the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro and doesn’t increase prices because of tariffs. Other rumors have suggested Apple could sell the iPhone 17 Air for more than the smaller iPhone 17 Pro. Meanwhile, Samsung’s S25 Edge could be very pricey, too. A leak reportedly from Samsung itself suggests the skinny device could start at around $1,200. How willing will people be to pay up just to show off they have the thinnest Samsung Galaxy or iPhone 17? In this economy and with tariffs threatening consumerism as we know it? Good luck, guys. Also, slap a case on the thin iPhone, and you’re back to having a regular-thick iPhone with none of the better features.
I think I’ve made my point. But let’s say that both these skinny phones are recession-proof and they’re a hit. I still think that phone makers should prioritize more meaningful features instead of simply pushing out outrageously thinner ones. How about Apple shipping the awesome anti-glare displays—the same ones that Samsung’s been using in its Galaxy Ultra phones—that greatly cut down on reflections outdoors? Apple was supposedly going to give the iPhone 17 Pro screens this tech but scrapped it for some reason. Or how about cameras that actually blow away the ones from Chinese brands like Oppo and Xiaomi? (Americans have no idea how much better the cameras are on phones like the Oppo Find X8 Ultra and Xiaomi 15 Ultra.) Or how about ridiculously fast wired charging that can take your phone from 0% to 100% in 10 minutes? There are just so many ways that phones from Apple and Samsung have been leapfrogged by other brands, especially ones that don’t sell their devices outside of China or Asia, that the last thing anybody needs is a Really Thin Phone.