- New claims emerge about Apple and Samsung’s rumored super-thin phones
- The devices will reportedly have only a middling battery life
- Battery life could suffer if the thin chassis can’t adequately dissipate heat
There’s been much talk in recent months about the so-called iPhone 17 Air, a seriously slimmed down version of Apple’s flagship phone. And Apple’s not alone, with Samsung reportedly working on a Galaxy S25 Slim phone to rival Apple’s offering. Yet both devices could come with a notable downside, and it’s all thanks to their form factors.
According to leaker Digital Chat Station on Weibo (via Notebookcheck), both the iPhone and the Samsung phone will be around 5-6mm thick. Compare that to 7.8mm for the iPhone 16 and 7.6mm for the Samsung Galaxy S24 and you get an idea of how much thinner the new phones will be.
But all that slimness comes at a cost, says Digital Chat Station. According to its post, that cost will make itself known in the devices’ batteries, which will have capacities of 3,000mAh to 4,000mAh.
On first blush, that might not seem like much of a problem – after all, the batteries in the iPhone 16 and Samsung Galaxy S24 already fall within that range. But the issue here is that the thinner bodies of the upcoming phones could make heat dissipation much trickier.
Heat can negatively affect battery life, so if the super-slim chassis retain more warmth than their regular-sized siblings, it could mean you find yourself reaching for the charging cable a lot more frequently.
Feeling the heat
Part of the problem is the high-end chips we’re expecting to see inside these phones. The iPhone 17 Air is rumored to get Apple’s A19 chip, while Samsung’s S25 Slim could be outfitted with the Snapdragon 8 Elite. While these chips are incredibly performant (or are expected to be, in the case of the unreleased A19), keeping them cool in such thin devices could prove to be difficult.
That said, both Apple’s chips and their Snapdragon rivals are known to be very efficient and able to output strong performance without getting unreasonably hot, so the battery impact might not be as bad as feared. For one thing, it seems unlikely that Apple would release a phone that doesn’t have what it calls “all-day battery life” such is the prevalence of that phrase at Apple’s recent launches.
Still, we expect that the thinner cases will bring with them all sorts of engineering challenges, including heat dissipation and its impact on battery life, so we’ll have to see whether there’s a noticeable deterioration when the phones launch this year.
And there’s one other interesting outcome we might see from the release of these devices: they could spur other phone makers into boosting their own products’ battery capacities. Digital Chat Station notes that some manufacturers of Android phones are thinking about releasing phones with battery capacities of 5,000mAh and higher. That means if battery life is important to you, it’s worth keeping an eye on phone launches over the next 12 months.
