Apple is a company famous for their love of designs that are thin and light. And I would agree that this priority is justified. Perhaps nothing impacts your use of hand-held devices more than weight. The lighter they are, the easier they are to hold for long periods of time.
But in 2021, the iPhone has reached an interesting milestone. It’s actually been getting thicker and heavier for more years than it got thinner and lighter.
After the 2008 introduction of the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone was thinner every year until the 2014 launch of the iPhone 6. But then, things took a turn. Ever since 2014, the iPhone has been getting thicker and heavier with the iPhone 13 Pro Max taking the crown of biggest iPhone ever.
The growth in the size of the iPhone is a curious trend to watch when you consider that Apple hasn’t seemed to follow suit in any of their other product categories except the watch. With the iPad and the Mac, Apple has doggedly persisted with their battle to either reduce size and weight or at least prevent growth. So what is different about the iPhone?
It could be argued that Apple simply is giving in to popular demand for better battery life. But I think there is more to it than this. Apple isn’t the kind of company that takes the easier road because it’s faster. The jump in battery life from the 12 line to the 13 is massive. The efficiency improvements with the new chips and variable refresh rates are quite effective. It’s very possible that Apple could have kept battery life the same or maybe even had a small increase vs last year if they had kept the thickness and weight the same.
Increasing battery life via stuffing bigger and heavier batteries isn’t really Apple’s style. And yet, they are doing it every year. Why?
Many years ago I wrote a post stating that Apple’s push for thinner phones wasn’t just about aesthetics. It was about increasing screen size. The only way to offer a foldable phone was to learn how to make the two halves as thin as possible.
My theory is that Apple has an internal idea of what the theoretical phone thinness can be. Then they doubled it to mimic a phone folded in half. And this folded size and weight is the acceptable limit for how thick and heavy an iPhone can be.
What Apple is doing now is preparing the public for the eventual release of a foldable iPhone. The last thing they want to happen when they introduce their vision of the future is for the public to recoil in horror at the size and weight. And weight is the more important of the two. The smaller the jump in weight from the regular iPhone to the foldable one, the easier the upsell will be.
By increasing the weight of their phones every year, they are slowly getting the public ready for a foldable phone that is much heavier than the phones of 2014.
After the 2008 introduction of the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone was thinner every year until the 2014 launch of the iPhone 6. But then, things took a turn. Ever since 2014, the iPhone has been getting thicker and heavier with the iPhone 13 Pro Max taking the crown of biggest iPhone ever.
The growth in the size of the iPhone is a curious trend to watch when you consider that Apple hasn’t seemed to follow suit in any of their other product categories except the watch. With the iPad and the Mac, Apple has doggedly persisted with their battle to either reduce size and weight or at least prevent growth. So what is different about the iPhone?
It could be argued that Apple simply is giving in to popular demand for better battery life. But I think there is more to it than this. Apple isn’t the kind of company that takes the easier road because it’s faster. The jump in battery life from the 12 line to the 13 is massive. The efficiency improvements with the new chips and variable refresh rates are quite effective. It’s very possible that Apple could have kept battery life the same or maybe even had a small increase vs last year if they had kept the thickness and weight the same.
Increasing battery life via stuffing bigger and heavier batteries isn’t really Apple’s style. And yet, they are doing it every year. Why?
Many years ago I wrote a post stating that Apple’s push for thinner phones wasn’t just about aesthetics. It was about increasing screen size. The only way to offer a foldable phone was to learn how to make the two halves as thin as possible.
My theory is that Apple has an internal idea of what the theoretical phone thinness can be. Then they doubled it to mimic a phone folded in half. And this folded size and weight is the acceptable limit for how thick and heavy an iPhone can be.
What Apple is doing now is preparing the public for the eventual release of a foldable iPhone. The last thing they want to happen when they introduce their vision of the future is for the public to recoil in horror at the size and weight. And weight is the more important of the two. The smaller the jump in weight from the regular iPhone to the foldable one, the easier the upsell will be.
By increasing the weight of their phones every year, they are slowly getting the public ready for a foldable phone that is much heavier than the phones of 2014.
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