The iPhone is reportedly going skinny. But Apple’s bigger AI story still looks unfinished
qz.comSep 8, 2025
Apple’s “Awe Dropping” fall show is expected to replay the company’s careful hand: Polish the hardware, bundle the ecosystem, delay the hard questions
Wall Street already knows the cards on the table. Apple’s “Awe Dropping” show hits Tuesday afternoon — and the suspense isn’t whether CEO Tim Cook will pull a rabbit out of his sleeve; it’s whether Apple can turn an ultrathin iPhone silhouette, a cleaner camera story, a watch refresh, and a measured serving of “Apple Intelligence” into an upgrade wave that feels earned instead of engineered.
The real question isn’t whether those rumored and reported pieces show up; it’s whether Apple can turn a hardware glow-up into an upgrade catalyst — and keep the revenue engine purring — while the heavier Siri overhaul keeps simmering in the background. The bet is straightforward: design first, AI later, and pricing in the margins. The company doesn’t need a royal flush. It needs customers to ante up for a slimmer phone and, ideally, add a watch or new earbuds to the tab.
That's why the first card on the felt is the one you can see across the room.
Apple is famously stingy with dramatic redesigns, but the rumored iPhone 17 Air, at roughly 5.5 millimeters thick, could shake things up. This phone could be Apple’s loudest visual swing in years — thinner, cleaner, deliberately different. That’s not just a design school flex; it’s a sales thesis. A new silhouette is the one thing that makes a phone feel new from across the room, and Apple hasn’t had a truly fresh outline in a while. Analysts are already framing the Air as the first meaningful form-factor break in years, the kind of thing that can shunt fence-sitters off their iPhone 14/15/16 islands and back into the queue.
The bones of the pitch are familiar: a larger, bright, high-refresh display; a lighter build; and a chassis that telegraphs “new” without requiring a spec sheet. Reports say we'll see a 6.6-ish-inch panel and a notably slim frame that sits between the base iPhone 17 and the Pro in price — making the Air a mid-tier showpiece whose job is to look like a Pro at a slightly friendlier price. While none of this has been publicly confirmed by the company, the consensus coalesced weeks ago — and Apple preview playbooks rarely swerve at the last minute.
But “thin” is a compromise as much as it is a feature. Squeezing the body challenges battery capacity and thermal headroom, and shaving grams can force trade-offs in cameras and speakers; every millimeter saved has to be paid back somewhere else. The Air gets the lean frame and generous screen, but also serious edge-case headaches that the spec-maxed Pro models sidestep. People will buy the Air because they want the aesthetic, and they have to accept that it’s an aesthetic with fine print.
Shaving millimeters off the iPhone might make the Air feel fresh in ads and Apple Store displays, but it puts endurance under the microscope. It also raises the first question any buyer has after four hours of scrolling on TikTok: How’s the phone’s battery? Apple is expected to promise “all-day” use — its favorite mantra — but skeptics will want proof that the Air’s performance isn’t being sacrificed for looks.
If Apple really puts ProMotion on the base models — another rumor with momentum — the thin gamble gets an assist. Motion smoothness is one of those under-the-glass upgrades people feel before they understand it, and it helps the whole lineup read as “finally modern” after years of incrementalism. The Air’s camera setup will also be a litmus test. Insiders expect the phone to ship with a single 48-megapixel rear lens, and Apple will pitch that as elegant simplicity, leaning on computational tricks such as sensor crops and 2x “lossless” zoom to fill in the gaps. If Apple’s crop-and-compute math works, the Air feels like a bold statement: one lens, many tricks. If it doesn’t, the phone risks coming across as thin just for thinness’s sake — and the internet will pounce on that story within hours of the event. Apple’s task is to frame the Air as intentional minimalism — and to do it convincingly enough that “slim” doesn’t read as “fragile.”
The real question with the Air is whether novelty is enough. Apple has been dinged for looking sleepy next to rivals who fold, flip, or sprinkle AI on everything. This “Awe Dropping” event is largely the company couching a bet on design to restart upgrades while Apple plays catch-up on AI — a stark table stake in 2025. That tension is the heart of the event: a beautiful slab, yes; but can it carry the story while the smarter stuff arrives late?
The upsell chorus
Apple rarely relies on one device to do all the lifting. The rest of the iPhone lineup is expected to play a complementary role, there to nudge the average ticket higher and to make the ecosystem feel like a set — iPhone as the star, but watches and earbuds as the chorus that turns a purchase into a plan.
On phones, expect the usual tiered escalation: iPhone 17, 17 Air, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max. The slightly larger standard iPhone 17 is expected to gain high-refresh displays at last. That one change alone — moving to 120 Hertz scrolling and gaming — would immediately modernize the base model. High-refresh screens are finally expected across the lineup, bringing smoother scrolling and gaming to buyers who have resisted the Pro tax. It’s the kind of improvement you notice five seconds after opening Messages. And a 24-megapixel selfie camera across all models nods to the FaceTime/TikTok reality of phone life in 2025. The Pro and Pro Max, meanwhile, are still the power flex. Both are slated to debut a horizontal “runway” camera bar and an upgraded telephoto lens that will keep reviewers pixel-peeping for weeks. None of that is mind-bending, but Apple knows that news doesn’t need to be mind-bending to move units.
Apple seems to be betting on its lineup finally telling a cleaner story: a style-forward Air, everyday base models that stop feeling artificially held back, and Pro models that carry the bragging rights. Of course, pricing is where the subtext lives. Rumor trackers have floated a matrix that positions the Air as the step-up model and keeps the Pro/Pro Max upmarket, with storage bands that encourage you to spend “just a little more.” If those price bands stick, Apple won’t crow about them — it will let the lineup do the nudging. Either way, the spreadsheet tells the story that Wall Street actually cares about.
Assuming Apple sticks to its usual cadence, preorders will open Friday, Sept. 12 (8 a.m. ET), with deliveries and in-store availability on Friday, Sept. 19. Apple watchers anticipate a new sky-blue option for the Air and a fresh orange for the Pro.
Beyond the hardware, iOS 26 brings the Liquid Glass look and Adaptive Power Mode, which quietly stretches battery life by dialing back performance on the fly.
The wearables side is more practical than flashy. Apple Watch Series 11 is rumored to pick up a new S-class chip, a brighter display, and a 5G RedCap modem purpose-built for wearables. There’s steady smoke around blood-pressure alerts — not medical-grade readings, but long-horizon hypertension detection — a feature that fits Apple’s cautious approach to health claims. It’s incremental, yes, but it could be distinctly useful, which is how Watches sell: They whisper usefulness instead of shouting novelty. Watch Ultra 3 is the halo — the big battery, the rugged casing, maybe satellite messaging improvements — while Watch SE 3 gives Apple a fresher on-ramp at the value end. None of it breaks the category. All of it supports the iPhone pitch with a “complete your look” logic that Apple perfected over the last decade.
Then there’s the potential sleeper hit: AirPods Pro 3. Rumors point to in-ear heart-rate sensing and at least temperature exploration, with more adventurous features (such as live translation) more likely to slip to a software update. If Apple lands even one new health metric cleanly — and keeps the case small and the ANC strong — you get a stealthy second reason to upgrade something, even if the phone alone didn’t tip you over. The event’s supporting cast is the margin plan. You came for “thin.” You leave with a bundle.
Intelligence deferred
And then there’s the part Apple would really, really prefer to be done with: the AI discourse. Here, Apple isn’t the industry headliner — and it’s still not particularly close. The company has previewed its Apple Intelligence umbrella and teased a more capable Siri, but the heavyweight Siri revamp has slipped, with expectations pointing to 2026 for the meatier upgrades. The near-term story is a slow, careful rollout — new UI polish (that “Liquid Glass” aesthetic), writing aids, some vision features — without the “Siri grew a brain overnight” moment the market keeps expecting.
Part of that pacing is deliberate. Rivals can wow with chatbots, while Apple hides behind aesthetics.
Expect Cook and company to play AI as pragmatic competence, not a moonshot. That may feel conservative, but it’s in character. Apple rarely wins by going first; it wins by making everyday tasks work without hiccups. Apple’s AI workaround has been finding a back-end partner for the web-answering part of Siri. The internal project label you’ll keep seeing is World Knowledge Answers, and the reported plan is to blend Apple’s on-device models for private data with a heavier-lift partner model — Google’s Gemini is the name most often attached — for broad, up-to-date answers. Whether that is finally announced on stage or punted to a developer post later is anyone’s guess, but the direction of travel is clear: Apple’s “privacy first” approach will lean on federation rather than one giant Apple-owned frontier model.
So yes, AI will be on stage tomorrow, just in small letters. The company may spotlight on-device “Apple Intelligence” — summaries, transcriptions, better autocorrect, context-aware Siri prompts — the sort of features that feel practical immediately and can be wrapped in Apple’s preferred framing of privacy, battery life, and latency. The grander ambitions are still on the calendar, although the clock is ticking in investors’ minds.
Apple can’t credibly sell a world-beating AI story tomorrow because too much is still cooking. What it can do is frame intelligence as a background advantage: features that quietly make the phone, watch, and earbuds feel more helpful without turning the keynote into a chatbot demo. That’s a very Apple move, and it might land — if the hardware feels fresh enough to carry the pause in the software saga. Design is the tip of Apple’s spear in part because its in-house AI isn’t honed yet.
There’s one more pressure point in the larger phone conversation: rivals. Samsung and Google have been shipping generative features, camera AI tricks, and, in Samsung’s case, a living room of foldables that make Apple look conservative by design. Apple’s answer has historically been execution: fewer features, but they work, and they work together. If tomorrow’s keynote feels like that — crisp, cohesive, and grounded — Apple can survive another news cycle of “late to AI” takes. If the event is thin phones and thin substance, the narrative calcifies fast.
Apple is playing a careful hand: a thinner flagship-adjacent iPhone to sell the sizzle; a chorus of practical wearable updates to sell the steak; and a frank acknowledgment — explicit or implicit — that the delayed AI payoff is worth the wait. But the risk is that the market has heard, “It’s coming, we promise,” for too many seasons in a row.
There will be, of course, wild cards to watch out for on Tuesday, including iPhone pricing ladders (does the Pro quietly start at 256GB?) and whether Apple even name-checks any AI partners on stage.
Regardless, if the Air looks as good in hand as it does on rumor sheets, and if base-model screens finally graduate to the modern world, Apple buys itself another cycle of “good enough.” If Watch 11 and AirPods Pro 3 land tangible health wins, the bundle math starts doing quiet work on the revenue line. And if the company can sketch a believable Siri arc — even in broad strokes — the AI deficit becomes a calendar problem, not a capability problem.
Apple doesn’t have to wow to win on Tuesday. It has to reassure — that thin can be durable, that the ecosystem still adds up to more than the parts, and that the intelligence behind the glass is coming on Apple’s timeline, not Redditors’. Do that, and tomorrow’s “Awe Dropping” show means the company has played its hand well. The suspense isn’t whether Apple has pocket kings or whether the right cards are on the table — it’s whether the table lets Apple keep playing into 2026.
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