Apple's VP of hardware breaks down the new iPhone Air - "It WON'T break in your pocket!"

Yeah, I think the iPhone Air is something that we've been thinking about for a while. We wanted to build a product like this, but to do it, we wanted to make sure that it was a great iPhone, like a great premium, kind of pro-quality iPhone, which means great battery life, great performance, great cameras—all the things you'd expect from an iPhone. And it's taken a while to kind of develop the technologies that could make that happen. And so some of the key technology that enabled it, first and foremost, is Apple silicon. We have our A19 processor, but now we also have C1X, a cellular modem, which is an Apple-designed modem, and we introduced N1, which is our Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip. So having all that silicon in-house, our silicon team—they're so amazing in what they do, and they're always focused on efficiency, power efficiency. And so by making incredibly efficient silicon, the system just takes less power, which is great for battery life, which obviously is a challenge when you're dealing with a thin phone. The other thing we've been working on for years, and you see the work of it in the Apple Watch and in AirPods, is just miniaturization in general. And the iPhone Air has the most densely packed main logic board that we've ever had in an iPhone. And so what that allowed us to do is really cram all of that electronics up here in the plateau area. And so if you look at a shot of the inside of the phone, it's almost all battery for the rest of the phone. So that's enabled it to be really thin and have great battery life. But then, of course, if you're going to build something this thin, it also has to be really durable. And so the work that we've been doing over years in materials has enabled that. So we have this titanium frame which is incredibly strong. We have for the first time Ceramic Shield on the back of the phone, which is incredibly durable and helps to the overall kind of strength and toughness of the phone. And then we have Ceramic Shield 2 on the front, which gives us three times better scratch resistance than our previous Ceramic Shield. So altogether, despite the fact that this phone is so light and so thin, it's actually more durable than any previous iPhone. And so we needed all those pieces to come together so that this could be the year of the iPhone Air. I mean, I think it's one of those things—the pictures and video don't really do it justice. I think you've got to see it in the flesh before you kind of believe it, really.

I think it's everything I just walked through. It's building—there were so many different technologies that had to come together to make this happen. And if you were missing one of them, you wouldn't be able to do it. It's the materials, it's the efficiency of Apple silicon, it's the processing design. And the Ceramic Shield, the plateau here is very different than anything we've done in the past in that we're actually milling out the inside of it. So, this is a cavity in here where we can put much of the electronics. So, having the ability to kind of take the Ceramic Shield and shape it in that way and mill it in that way all required a bunch of innovation. So, it was really all of those pieces coming together to make it possible.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, from the beginning, we do so much testing on our phones before we ship them. I mean, before we ship any particular iPhone, we've tested over 10,000 of them, and broken many, many thousands of them in that testing to find the weak points and figure out how to make them better. And our test suite is really broad and is based on real-world usage. So, we see what happens in the field and we build tests around that. And so, we have a spec for bending based on years of shipping phones and knowing how strong they need to be. And the iPhone Air actually exceeds that spec.

Totally. So, we've been pushing on eSIM for a long time. In fact, that's how an Apple Watch works, and iPads use eSIM, and we've been doing it in phones for quite some time now as well. And I mean, as an engineer designing these products, the SIM actually is just very painful to me because it's a large piece of plastic that doesn't need to be that big and it takes up a massive amount of space in the product. And so as we were designing this product, there was just no way we could afford to have that wasted space. And so we said this has to be eSIM, completely. That's the way we're going to do it. We're going to continue to push eSIM because we think it's the right technology. And in parallel with all this, we've been working over the years—it sounds like you've experienced it—working with all the carriers throughout the world to really optimize the systems, getting up and running. And I think the experience is actually really, really good. It's super easy for travel. You can get your SIM before you even leave on your trip. It's all upside and we just need to kind of continue rolling it out.

It's the right thing and we'll continue to be pushing hard on the standard.

That's great. Yeah, well, we're happy to make you happy with it. But no, I think we're always pushing the envelope on our pro products, right? And then looking for opportunities to bring the features that kind of resonate with the most people and bring them down to the other products. And so, iPhone 17, it was just a big leap like you said. It got that ProMotion display. It also got Ceramic Shield 2 on the front. And actually, one of the things that we're really proud of and excited about is that Center Stage front camera, which is on all of the new phones, and is an amazing experience for taking selfies. You can hold the phone in portrait the way you naturally want to do it and you can still take landscape pictures. I think people are going to love it and it's great that that's there in the iPhone 17 as well.

Exactly. Yeah. I think this year for us was a really exciting opportunity to just rethink the iPhone lineup. And I think what we have is, as you pointed out, an incredible iPhone 17, something entirely new in iPhone Air. And then by pushing that way on iPhone Air, it allowed us to take the Pros—17 Pro and Pro Max—and make them even more pro, right? And better in performance and battery and all those things. And so it's a really strong lineup.

Well, I think we have an amazing design team that's always spending a lot of time on colors. And one of the things that was really special about this year is we took the iPhone Pro and we moved it from titanium to aluminum. And we did that because we felt—as you know, the way we always approach this is let's use the right material for the application. Aluminum has much better thermal conductivity, and as I said, we wanted to push on performance. It's a big win for that. It allows for lower weight and a similar size because lower density than titanium, which allowed us to pay into battery, which is also something we want to do. But one of the great things with aluminum is it takes color really well when you anodize it. And so the design team was super excited to come out with these new colors. We have deep blue, which is a gorgeous, gorgeous color, and then of course cosmic orange, and we have our kind of classic Apple silver. So we're really excited about the color range.

Absolutely. Because like I said, we wanted to push on performance. And if you think about performance in a phone, first and foremost is how good is your SoC? Good news is we have Apple silicon which is the best in the world and so that's amazing. But then it's also a question of how much can you pull—how effectively can you pull the heat out of the SoC when you're running under a heavy workload. And the vapor chamber is a big part of that. So this allows us to take heat and quickly pull it away from the SoC and actually transmit it into the aluminum. And so we're spreading the heat over a much larger surface area than we would have been in the past, which allows for 40% better sustained performance than the previous phones. And for a similar workload, it actually feels—it's just a lot cooler in your hand, which I think people are going to really enjoy.

Oh, yeah. So, this is a Ceramic Shield back here. And the reason we did Ceramic Shield here—because obviously you've got great protection from the aluminum around it—but it's also Ceramic Shield because it allows us to go thinner than if it had been glass, which of course then allows for more battery. But yes, you need an RF-transparent material here so that you can still have the MagSafe charging, and so that's a key part of it as well. Yeah.

I think actually the thing I'm most proud of is the lineup. Because like I said, we really have been thinking about this lineup for a while and this was our chance to kind of rethink the iPhone line. And so I look at it in its totality. iPhone Air was something totally new that we pushed in a different direction that it's been really fun since the intro. I've had the pleasure of watching a number of people experience it for the first time and it's like you said, you can hear about it, you can see pictures, but when you pick it up and you watch people pick it up and they look at it and go, 'Wow.' I mean, it's like such a common reaction. So, that's been really fun. But then that gave us the freedom to make the Pros even more pro. And then, as you pointed out, make the iPhone 17 so great. So, to me, what I'm most proud of is that we've been able to deliver this incredible line of phones. We think there's something great for everybody there, and I can't wait for people to get them tomorrow.

Cross-body strap and we have new cases. We have our tech woven cases which are really nice. The silicone cases, the clear cases, and yeah, the cross-body straps so people can wear their iPhone Air or iPhone Pro or iPhone 17. So it's going to be pretty cool.

Well, I think this is a different phone. And like I said, the fact that we are pushing one way with the Air allows us to be even more focused on making the Pros more pro. So those are different. But what I will say is when we develop technologies and we develop kind of expertise in one area, it tends to show up in other places. You know, I said before the miniaturization we've pushed so hard on in AirPods, that learning and that kind of engineering know-how, it was instrumental in driving some of these things on the phone. So it's often common with us over time to see kind of ideas pop up in different places as we take advantage of them.

It's actually not so bad. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here.