r/apple • u/Furkansimsir • 3d ago
iPhone 17 Design to Feature Smoother Edge-to-Rear Material Transition Rumor
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/01/06/iphone-17-design-smoother-edge-to-back/105
u/ReveriesinBlue 3d ago
Off-topic, but if they decide to implement the horizontal rear camera, I genuinely hope they opt for the Google Pixel protective glass over the camera modules style for a uniform appearance, rather than individual looking modules.
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u/qaf0v4vc0lj6 3d ago
They have to stand out somehow. The three cameras are part of the iPhone branding.
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u/ReveriesinBlue 3d ago edited 3d ago
It won’t work well with a horizontal camera setup in my opinion. I prefer uniformity, and I’ve gotten over it before, but it’d be weird unless they cover the camera modules with protective glass. It’s not the end of the world, but if they’re doing a horizontal setup, they should prioritize uniformity over brand recognition since it won’t look right here.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t buy phones for looks, and I end up throwing them into a case anyway. But if I walk into a store and see that on display, my first impression would be “Wow, that looks terrible.” But if the phone works well, then I’ll get past it quickly. Just a first impression thing.
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u/Wizzer10 3d ago
The rumour is for a wider camera module but still in the triangular arrangement. I agree horizontal cameras would look weird.
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u/Acceptable-Piccolo57 3d ago
The pixel “bar” looked great, I was hoping apple would copy it, but I can’t see these renders being accurate
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u/ReveriesinBlue 3d ago
If Apple adopts this horizontal design, I hope it resembles Google’s approach rather than these renders.
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u/DaringDomino3s 3d ago
I can’t see them doing three in a row horizontally unless they are giving up on spatial video or they rotate the lenses so that spatial video records horizontal while the phone is held in portrait.
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u/0xe1e10d68 3d ago
Me personally I like it exactly as it is shown in that concept image
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u/ReveriesinBlue 3d ago
Fair. I prefer uniformity. It would be bizarre if they made it look like these images. But it doesn’t matter. I buy a phone, put on a screen protector and case, and forget its appearance until I remove and clean the case. As long as it works well, I’d buy it, even if it initially doesn’t look great, and I don’t think the renders above looks great.
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u/Bl4ckX_ 3d ago
Those horizontal cameras look like it’s going to be a nightmare keeping your fingers out of the pictures you take.
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u/Wizzer10 3d ago
The horizontal cameras have not been rumoured, that’s an entirely speculative choice by the creator of the render.
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u/ladydeadpool24601 2d ago
Having used the recent pixels, it’s actually a nice finger placement when taking a picture. The forefinger up against the bottom of the pixel camera makes taking a picture more comfortable.
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u/delebojr 3d ago
Dang, that concept is U G L Y
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u/PeaceBull 3d ago
Ah yes the cycle of new model rumors
Vague Reports of model changesClarified reports of model changesPeople start making renders off of reports (in hindsight they usually misinterpreted key aspects of the leaks)- Commenters hate the look (where we are)
- Factory part leaks
- Commenters get more confident about hating it
- Warehouse leaks
- Commenters get more confident about hating it
- Apple event release
- Animosity dissipates
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u/BosnianSerb31 3d ago
Don't forget that much of 6 is seeing a factory part similar but not the same scale as the leaks and renders, so no one actually knows what it looks like until the phone releases but their expectations are set by a guy spending a day in blender lol
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u/SufficientStrategy96 3d ago
I love how light the non-pro phones are so I’d totally be happy with aluminum
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u/Atraac 3d ago
I'm on 13 Pro and i still don't see a single reason to change for newer one. There's virtually zero progress.
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u/Maddbass 3d ago
USB-C hits hard for me.
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u/Youbettereatthatshit 3d ago
I had the 13 pro with 78% battery life. Part of me wanted just a new battery, but God it’s nice to really only have USBC. iPads, iPhones, Remotes, PS5 controllers, random massage gun all being able to be charged by the same cable…
Living in the future. Just happy the EU forced Apple.
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u/flatbuttboy 3d ago
Honestly, nothing of mine uses USB-C to charge other than my MacBook, which needs a different adapter anyway, having a USB-C iPhone would be inconvenient
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u/PM_ME_Y0UR_BOOBZ 3d ago
When you get to 2020 levels of technology in your home, it’ll be convenient.
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u/flatbuttboy 2d ago
Yeah but, I am, it’s just that my AirPods Pro 2s use lightning, my iPhone 12 uses lightning, my watch uses a wireless charger(USB-A) and the only other charger I need is the USB-C for the MacBook. I have enough devices, I have recent enough devices especially but not one needs them
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u/munchingzia 3d ago
Same. At this point im actually getting irritated that the software experience is getting WORSE with each update
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u/lordorbit 3d ago
I have actually decided to stop with updates on iOS 18 on my iPhone 13 Pro. I dug up old iPad 3 that was never updated from some old iOS and was actually faster than my newest iPad on latest iPadOS.
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u/cultoftheilluminati 3d ago
Looks like people are finally waking up to the fact that updates actually are making older phones worse. I’m happily sticking it out on iOS 17.0 with TrollStore on my 14 pro. Apple would have to give me a lot (unrestricted side loading for one) to even get me to start thinking about updating off of this version.
It’s much more obvious on Apple watches when this happens because of the relatively low performance and has been quite well known watchOS community at least, where older watches practically become unusable when updating to the last supported firmware. See the experience of people using series 4 watches on watchOS 10.
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u/Kimantha_Allerdings 3d ago
FWIW, I upgraded from a 13 Pro in September for the 16 Pro.
It's not a huge, huge upgrade by any means, but there are things you will notice. The screen is notably larger without the phone itself feeling larger, and the dynamic island is less intrusive than the notch. And it's noticably lighter, too. I don't know what the actual weight difference is, but you will definitely feel it. It feels faster and more responsive, too.
That's why I have a 3 year upgrade cycle - it's long enough that it feels like an upgrade, but it's short enough that you actually get a non-insulting amount of money back when you trade the old one in.
So not quite zero progress, but you're right that there's no particularly compelling reason to upgrade. There's nothing wrong with the 13 Pro, and you're not missing out on killer features or spec upgrades or anything like that. It's just that there is enough difference that if you were to upgrade it does feel like you've got something new and shiny rather than something exactly the same.
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u/donkeykink420 3d ago
How‘s the difference in battery life between those two? Decided to go 16pro over a cheaper, older one or the base 16 for that but I doubt it‘s actually as much a difference as apple or salesmen would want you to believe.
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u/Kimantha_Allerdings 3d ago
My battery had started failing on my 13PM when I traded it in, to the point where I actually had to have it replaced before I could trade it in. So I can't actually answer that, I'm afraid.
Both phones easily lasted a day when they were healthy, so neither is anything I actually noticed until the last few days of my 13 when it started noticably dying.
That said, I have Apple Intelligence turned off. I imagine having it turned on would noticably affect the battery life. So my answer now could be very different to my answer in a potential future where Apple Intelligence actually becomes decent.
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u/alimighty1 3d ago
13 pro: 7.16 oz / 203 grams 16 pro: 7.03 / 199 grams
13 pro max: 8.39 oz / 238 grams 16 pro max: 7.99 oz / 227 grams
Just in case anyone, like me, was interested. For me the biggest savings will be going from a pro max to the regular pro when I upgrade, now that the camera is the same I don’t feel bullied into getting the max anymore.
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u/alimighty1 3d ago
13 pro: 7.16 oz / 203 grams 16 pro: 7.03 / 199 grams
13 pro max: 8.39 oz / 238 grams 16 pro max: 7.99 oz / 227 grams
Just in case anyone, like me, was interested. For me the biggest savings will be going from a pro max to the regular pro when I upgrade, now that the camera is the same I don’t feel bullied into getting the max anymore.
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u/Kimantha_Allerdings 3d ago
Ah, FWIW, I should say that I was talking about the Max in both cases. So 11g, which doesn't seem a lot on paper, but which you can definitely tell when you're holding it.
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u/_HipStorian 3d ago
It really depends on what you use your phone for. I upgraded from the 13 Pro and having Log recording capabilities, USB-C / Thunderbolt connection and the memo layering feature has helped a lot with earning me some money these last couple of months.
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u/PeakBrave8235 3d ago
I do, and one of them is the fact that newer models are satellite phones.
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u/Atraac 3d ago
Well that's awesome for you but satellite emergency sos features are not even available in my country.
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u/PeakBrave8235 3d ago
Maybe one say they will be? They’ve expanded a lot all over
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u/roman030 3d ago
and you'd buy products solely on the premise that things might be available some time?
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u/PeakBrave8235 2d ago
He made a claim that iPhones haven’t inteoduced anything new and i refuted that. That’s all I was saying
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u/sevaiper 3d ago
All phones will be satellite phones soon
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u/BosnianSerb31 3d ago
Geostationary sats are far more expensive to launch and LEO like starlink is cheap and fast but requires active tracking because the satellites zip across the horizon in very short time
I can see standardized satellite emergency services and messaging when the internet is unviable but not a replacement of our existing cellular network
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u/griwulf 3d ago
Better battery, better camera, better chip, and since you're on 13P, you don't have the new (better) notch either. You see "virtually zero progress" because older iPhones get pretty much the same software features and updates as the new ones, except for the AI features which not a lot of people care about anyway. The design hasn't changed much either. So they basically look and feel the same. That said, the experience is objectively better but it may not be compelling enough for you to upgrade from 13 Pro of course. But I certainly would.
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u/leopard_tights 2d ago
The experience in the real world is maybe 15% better for the vast majority of uses and people.
I had to use a second phone line for a while and put the number in my old iPhone 8 plus and I swear it was just fantastic. At no point did I sigh because it was slow. The biggest difference was night photos, which is the one thing that got a massive boost a couple of years ago. Photography in general is what you'll notice in these 3+ years upgrades. The reality is that iPhones have been very very good since the 7, before that the leaps on hardware were much bigger. It doesn't matter how big they are anymore because it just doesn't translate into real world benefits. Normal apps can't open any faster.
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u/Chronixx 3d ago
13 Pros were and still are fantastic iPhones, among some of the best ever made. That being said, virtually zero progress is a bit of an exaggeration lol
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u/Panda_hat 2d ago
You don't want multiple gigabytes of your storage taken up by AI features that don't work or you will never use?
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u/DefinitelyNotDEA 1d ago
I have a 12 pro and I feel the same. Obviously there have been upgrades, but there's nothing compelling enough to buy a new phone, especially when mine is working well. In recent years, progress has been slow for iPhones, and most phones in general.
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u/ZQ04 3d ago
I have the 14 Pro and the only thing I really want is USB C so I can have one cable for everything. It’s not worth a whole new phone though and I’ll probably keep this until the 18 series, maybe even longer.
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u/Opposite-Knee-2798 3d ago
You don’t have devices with micro USB??? I have a bunch of them.
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u/Anora6666 2d ago
I have very few micro usb devices left. Honestly just a kindle that I use relatively regularly. Maybe an xbox controller somewhere. But that’s going to be upgraded soonish. The only devices that use lightning for me are airpods and airpod pros that I honestly mostly just charge by induction at this point
I went from a 14 pro to 16 pro mostly to preserve the value and to utilize apple card installments. It’s essentially a free upgrade for me because my work pays enough for my service and acmi for my cell.
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u/ZQ04 2d ago
I keep a few micro cables for the odd power bank or random Amazon appliance that uses it but all my main tech besides the phone is USB C. I think we’re definitely in the ending stages of the transition to C, a lot of my new stuff uses it and I haven’t bought anything recently that’s still on micro.
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u/AppointmentNeat 3d ago
There isn’t a reason to update unless you want Ai. Phones have plateaued. The most you’ll get is spec bumps every year.
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u/Portatort 2d ago
USB-C, Action Button, Dynamic Island.
USB-C really is enough all on its own tbh.
Although yeah, your phone is only 3-4 years old, absolutely no harm holding onto it another 2-5 if you’re happy
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u/kadinshino 3d ago
100% sold if it feels like the iphone 11. otherwise skip then i wont have a phone ocne it dies.
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u/amogl 3d ago
If they repositioned the cameras like in the mockup, surely that means they wouldn't be able to capture landscape spacial video? Isn't that why they repositioned the cameras on the iPhone 16?
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u/brekky_sandy 2d ago
If this ends up being the camera array, you can just take spatial video in portrait mode. I’m guessing they’ll do some cropping or camera magic to capture a landscape recording.
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u/Error-404_NotOnEarth 3d ago
They are probably doing this to relaunch the premium Titanium or Steel finish again in iPhone’s 20th anniversary. So downgrading the 3rd last iPhone before iPhone XX.
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u/ZachMatthews 3d ago
Those camera bumps are an aesthetic failure. They really ought to just make the phones thicker with more battery so they can lie flat again. No one cares if a phone is as thin as a Triscuit. Or, alternatively, just admit that everyone is getting a protective case and no one cares what the back metal looks like. I don’t even remember what color my phone is.
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u/Wizzer10 3d ago
This “make the battery thicker to match the camera bump” idea that gets thrown around on Reddit is nonsensical. Normal people don’t want 300g phones.
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u/BosnianSerb31 3d ago
And it makes the device substantially thicker overall as most users use cases.
iPhone with 2-3mm worth of case to make it level with the camera bump? Now on the thicker phone proposal you need an additional 3mm of case for the same protection.
So it's not even "make it level the thickness won't matter because of the bump already being there", it's "make it level and those who use cases now have a phone that's a shitload harder to pocket".
Just get a big chunky battery case if you don't care about the thickness of your device smh
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u/NeoliberalSocialist 3d ago
People love thin phones in normal circles. Nerds like us talking tech on reddit are a different, more niche consumer group.
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u/BosnianSerb31 3d ago
The biggest thing is that the thicc level phone idea doesn't consider that everyone uses a case. So making the phone as thick as a protective when naked makes it extremely chunky if you want the same level of padding on the theoretical phone.
The counter is to build an iPhone that's like a tough book but that fails to consider how fucked up both cases and rugged devices get. And replacing a destroyed case is way easier and cheaper than replacing a destroyed chassis.
Ergo, a solid glass sandwich device to enable wireless charging, a metal chassis, and a protective case is the best mix of size, feature set, protection, and modularity for 99% of users.
Everyone charges their phone at night anyways, everyone else can carry a power bank and use low power mode. Mine can go a week in that state without touching a wall outlet.
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u/kshiau 3d ago
Been rawdogging my deep purple cause the color is great to look at
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u/ZachMatthews 3d ago
Hahahah - the only reason not to have a case is if you have a wild lookin' phone.
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u/querythoughtss 2d ago
I want to upgrade this year, I just hope it’s not that ugly in the picture shown above. I wouldn’t mind the same design as last year but even thinner bezels and a slightly smaller Dynamic Island. I’m not asking for much.
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u/IAmTaka_VG 3d ago
This rumour is 100% not true. You can’t have the cameras aligned like that and record spacial video.
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u/gabriel197600 2d ago
I saw a YouTuber camera specialist say If all cameras are 48 Megapixels it would allows the cameras to be linear instead of stacked. The no idea of he’s right or not, but perhaps?
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u/IAmTaka_VG 2d ago
I just don't see how they're going to reproduce the 3d spatial effect not offset. It's literally why he we have two eyes and they are positioned horizontally not vertically.
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u/Alarmed_Influence_21 3d ago
Well, I’m rocking the iPhone SE, which is rounded like the old 8 was, and it’s a nightmare without a case on it, because of the rounded edges. I really like the squared off sides for gripping my phones.
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u/Whit3boy316 2d ago
Can we make it less heavy? I’m kinda jealous of seeing Samsung with 3 cameras and weighing so much less.
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u/Aion2099 1h ago
This has got to be the least important feature detail of an upcoming phone ever. A smoother edge? Wow, sign me up!
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u/Far_Run8614 3d ago
The horizontal camera is so bullshit, particularly because they’ve just added the video mode for the Apple Vision Pro. I doubt that they’re going to rearrange the cameras in such a way so that the camera mode is completely useless, even though no one uses the Apple Vision Pro
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u/shivaswrath 3d ago
Titanium has been awesome on 15PM. Strong and light, does get hot to touch when fast charging but dissipates easily.
Aluminum will be a rough step back.
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u/Hawker96 3d ago
For the love of God make the cameras flush with the phone. I’m so sick of the gigantic cameras!!! We don’t need 946MP sensors on a cell phone.
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u/Wizzer10 3d ago
Outside of Reddit people actually like having good cameras. I don’t think you recognise the sacrifice you’d be making in quality to have flush cameras. Even the rumoured ultra-thin iPhone 17 Air isn’t expected to have a flush camera because a camera module that small would just be so much worse than what people expect from a high end or even midrange smartphone camera.
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u/Portatort 2d ago
If we can actually address the content of the report for a second
Yes this is about as dull and uninspiring as this kind of news could ever be
But the lip between the case and the back on the 15 and 16 pros is noticeable.
Sharp almost.
I wondered if j had a bad unit when I unboxed my 15 pro
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u/ExactBee201 3d ago
iPhone 16 is my next year phone .. always stayed 1 or 2 models behind on the hardware lol (With the exceptions of XS and 14)
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u/OhOkYa 3d ago
It’s sad that these are the details we’re supposed to care about. Apple doesn’t need to introduce new models every year, truly. Give us a new iPhone every 3 years and make it an EVENT again.
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u/PeaceBull 3d ago
How is them releasing iterative updates every year and you buying 1 out of 3 phones drastically different than them arbitrarily releasing 1 phone every three years?
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u/Wizzer10 3d ago
I am continually amazed by the business skills of Reddit commenters. iPhone sales would collapse if Apple was still selling a three year old iPhone for the same price as a newly introduced Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel. It would be cataclysmic for iPhone revenue, the brand would never recover.
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u/BosnianSerb31 3d ago
It's not the old days where cellphones had monumental changes every other release(back in the 4, 4s, 5, 5s) days, because the technology is close to as perfect as one can get when trying to make something satisfactory for as much of the population as possible.
Everyone will always have their own opinions on what should be done to make it perfect but one persons idea of perfection is another person idea of ruin. So it's made for the LCD.
I miss it too, but it really isn't gonna come back.
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u/igkeit 3d ago
If they truly go back to aluminum for the Pro models I wonder how they will sell this downgrade. They boasted about titanium being more premium etc just to go back to aluminum?