I had the privilege to interview John Ternus, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, and talk about the new ultra thin iPhone Air and its potential challenges, the iPhone 17 Pro (Max), which now introduces a new Vapor Chamber Cooling technology and the new AirPods Pro 3 design.
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Questions asked in this interview
8
0:08What were some of the main challenges you faced when developing such an extremely thin device?
Yeah, like as I said, the first time we met in London and I just knew I need to speak to this person one day in my life and this is the opportunity that we have. First of all, amazing accomplishment for what you guys have shown us today. I'm beyond excited, still a little bit shaky about all the wonderful products and everything that got announced. But obviously there are some questions that came to mind. Can you tell me a bit more? We have a new iPhone Air. I think a new generation of iPhones is on the horizon. What were some of the main challenges you faced when developing such an extremely thin device? Because now it's the thinnest iPhone ever.
Yeah. I mean, obviously we spend a lot of time thinking about how to miniaturize devices, right? That's what makes AirPods possible, incredible miniaturization. And so, one of the nice things for us on the hardware team, we're building the products, is we have this incredible hardware technology team. And obviously they build Apple Silicon which is incredible but they also help push and obviously we talked about today they expanded Apple Silicon to cover Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and of course cellular. And so by over time kind of developing these technologies that are super power efficient and miniaturizing other things we were able to realize this vision of this super thin phone. And so much work went into, I think you saw we have this plateau across the top made from the ceramic shield. And by packing everything into that plateau, and to do that, we had to create, for example, the main logic board is the most densely packed main logic board we've ever made in a phone. So, it's just all of these things had to happen so that we could then save almost all of the rest of the space for battery, right? If you're going to push that thin, you want to have great battery life. And this phone has great battery life. And so, you want to take advantage of all that kind of area below the plateau. So, it's really been a journey of developing the technologies that made this possible. And then once we have them, we could actually go and make this thing a reality.
Yes. All right. And then obviously I'm curious to know who do you think is going to be most interested in such a thin device? Because I personally I'm really doubting right now between getting a 17 Pro Max or an Air because of this form factor and it's so incredibly light. But can you tell me a bit more what you think? Is it going to be an appealing audience to this thinner device?
11 more exchanges in this transcript
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Ternus, J. (2025, September 12). SVP John Ternus Explains - iPhone Air & iPhone 17 Pro Max Challenges! [Interview transcript]. AppleDsign. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/724134/
MLA
John Ternus. "SVP John Ternus Explains - iPhone Air & iPhone 17 Pro Max Challenges!." AppleDsign, 12 Sep. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/724134/.
BibTeX
@misc{ternus2025_724134,
author = {John Ternus},
title = {SVP John Ternus Explains - iPhone Air \& iPhone 17 Pro Max Challenges!},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, AppleDsign. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/724134/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
