iPhone 17 Slim tipped to be the thinnest iPhone Apple’s ever made

It looks like the iPhone 17 Slim, aka the iPhone 17 Air, is going to be an impressive feat of engineering.

The phone is reportedly just 6mm thick. That's not just considerably thinner than any of the current iPhones – it's roughly three-quarters of the thickness of the iPhone 16 Pro – but thinner than any other iPhone ever made. The previous record holder, the iPhone 6, was positively porky by comparison at 6.9mm.

That's according to Apple analyst Jeff Pu, as reported by MacRumors: "We agreed with the recent chatter of an 6mm thickness ultra-slim design of the iPhone 17 Slim model," he said.

How thin is the iPhone 17 Slim?

When phones are already thin, even a millimetre makes a very noticeable difference.

The current iPhone 16 is 7.8mm, as was the iPhone 15. The Pro and Pro Max versions of both phones are much thicker at 8.25mm. I remember being amazed by how thin the iPhone 8 was – that was 7.3mm, a whole 1.3mm thicker than the iPhone 17 Slim will reportedly be.

Although this rumoured phone will be the thinnest iPhone ever, it won't be the thinnest portable device. If you exclude the iPod nano, which is long gone, the slimmest Apple product is the 13-inch M4 iPad Pro. That comes in at a barely-there 5.1mm, which is almost thin enough to cut cheese.

The iPhone 17 Slim can't quite reach those levels of thinness because it doesn't have the same surface area to work with. The iPad Pro has over 13-inches of diagonal space to fit its components into, which is a tough enough challenge; even the biggest iPhone 17 has a fraction of that space in which to fit the chips, the camera components and most of all, the battery.

We're expecting the iPhone 17 Slim to come with an A19 processor and a 6.6-inch display. It's wideyly thought to launch in September 2025, as most generations beforehand.