My guess is that no one is asking for it purely out of a need to have a smaller phone (sorry iPhone mini fans), but the overall trajectory of phone design plus a need to drive up the base price might make this a happy confluence that also lets Apple dodge another year of “the iPhone is boring” headlines.
If Apple is working on a foldable phone, they won’t have just been sitting back and waiting on Samsung making a screen that doesn’t have a crease, they’ll have been working on squashing the internals of the device over a wider surface area and making it all thinner.
But what if the folding screen technology isn’t ready for a few more years and Apple has shuffled around the internals and has a super thin phone chassis ready to go? All the processor shrinking for the M4 / A19 will have had knock on effects on battery usage and heat dissipation too.
So why not bring out a thinner iPhone 17? Physics will mandate that they can’t do much about matching focal lengths from the previous zoom cameras, but the tetraprism lens design may be useful in making the standard lens as good as a current iPhone while being significantly thinner.
Whether this will be the new standard iPhone, or a special edition due to cost or compromise though may also be influenced by the new iPhone SE in 2025, that is allegedly so good you won’t be quite so tempted to buy what would be an iPhone 17 that isn’t very different from the 16.
That would then bump up the cost of the standard, thinner iPhone 17, which would presumably satiate the capitalism gods, so unless the price is much higher than the current iPhone, I’d guess that’s the route they’ll go down.
That would leave the Pro models free to have massive screen, battery and photographic advantages and differentiate the range into three sizes.
Then we’ll get the iPhone/iPad hybrid when the screens are good enough.
But who knows? The Apple Watch 10 was rumoured to be thinner and larger, and while that’s technically true, it wasn’t so noticeable that it was enough reason to upgrade on its own for, so maybe a 2% shaving on thickness is all we get and we’ll get the “iPhone is boring“ headlines again, but I’m hoping not.