The iPhone Air is definitely a testing ground for folding phone technologies.

As in, it will accidentally fold in people’s pockets?

phot0nic 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Seems like the harder part would be getting the folding piece down - foldable is going to have much more volume for components than the air; but I'm sure getting it as thin as it is was already challenging

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BrawnyBadger53 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At first I thought I disagreed because they put the glass on the back but on further thought, I agree because they put the glass on the back.

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tra3 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How so? That would be great either way.

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Tankenstein 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Foldables need to have very thin construction as when folded, you essentially have two phones on top of each other. There's speculation online that the air was launched off the back of their internal foldable R&D.

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simmerup 3 days ago | parent [-]

Which is mad becausw the Chinese are already making super thin foldable phones for consumers

Another area where we're falling behind in tech

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dmonitor 2 days ago | parent [-]

That's just par for the course with Apple. Late to the party, but they tend to nail it when they show up

	▲	mrheosuper 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Like AI ?

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naravara 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They stacked almost ALL the actual stuff, like the camera system, SOC, etc. inside that little plateau and the rest of the slab is basically just display and battery. If I was going to make a clamshell phone, experimenting with miniaturizing and arranging the whole thing into a small corner of the footprint would be where I’d start.

If you scroll halfway down the press release page you can see an image of the internals https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-iphone-ai...

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doctoboggan 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Presumably because a folding phone needs each half to be quite thin to still produce a reasonably normal phone thickness when folded.