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I am excited about the foldable iPhone, but the Air's heat management worries me.
Nirave Gondhia / Digital Trends
When Apple revealed the uber-slim iPhone Air earlier this year, it elicited many hot takes, claiming that the company is back in top engineering form and that it was a glimpse of the things to come. Well, it seems the iPhone Air is, quite literally, a “non-sandwiched” view of Apple’s highly anticipated foldable smartphone expected to arrive next year.
The big picture
So far, media reports and industry analysts have predicted that Apple’s foldable iPhone will be quite slim, feature a flexible panel that spans roughly eight inches diagonally, and that it will solve the crease (aka vertical groove) problem to a large extent. It seems the phone will also borrow heavily from the aesthetics and engineering of the iPhone Air.
This is what Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg wrote in the latest edition of his PowerOn newsletter:
“As for how the foldable iPhone will look, I am increasingly told that users should imagine two titanium iPhone Airs side-by-side. In other words, it’s going to be super thin and a design achievement.”
Antonio De Rosa / BehanceThe prediction from Gurman is pretty interesting. On one hand, it is a sign that the foldable iPhone’s engineering is going to be impressive, at the very least. But if Apple is indeed chasing a super-slim chassis for its debut foldable phone, I am somewhat concerned about the thermal situation.
The big concern
Let’s not forget how the Titanium-made iPhone 16 Pro fares worse than its aluminum-made predecessors at heat management. Here are a few of the anecdotes about the iPhone Air and its warming problems:
Nirave Gondhia / Digital Trends“In practice, though, the iPhone Air would still get really warm during the simplest of tasks.” – The New York Times.
“The lesser A19 inside the iPhone 17 scored higher in benchmark tests and didn’t run as hot as the A19 Pro in the iPhone Air. Mind you, all of these iPhones still got hot.” / “That extra heat throttled performance a tiny bit, making the game a little more stuttery than on the Pro Max. Another Geekbench test also showed the Air scoring lower than the iPhone 17.” – WIRED
“A short Diablo Immortal session warmed up the phone considerably, but not enough to impact performance.”- The Verge
On the positive side, we already have devices such as the Oppo Find N5 and the Honor Magic V5, which don’t exactly get toasty despite being astonishingly slim. Let’s hope Apple makes the best out of the increased surface area on its foldable phone and redeems it from the heating woes on the iPhone Air.
Nadeem is a tech and science journalist who started reading about cool smartphone tech out of curiosity and soon started…
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