At Apple’s “Awe Dropping” event on Tuesday, the rumored “iPhone Air” — a sleeker, thinner iPhone inspired by the MacBook Air — could significantly boost iPhone sales this year, analysts say.
Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, said a slimmer iPhone could spur upgrades. “It’s been a while since we have seen any meaningful update to the form factor of the device beyond tepid incremental changes, and the novelty of the Air will likely induce many 14, 15 and even 16 iPhone users to migrate up,” Chatterjee said.
The slimmer phone could also be a stepping stone toward an iPhone that folds out flat like a book and would act as a platform for an upgraded Siri, neither of which are likely to arrive until next year, analysts said.
Ben Bajarin, CEO of technology consultancy Creative Strategies, said Apple may highlight improved AI processing capabilities of its next generation of Apple Silicon chips that could, in the future, power an “agentic” Siri that takes care of tasks in the background for the owners of the 2.35 billion Apple devices in use around the world, without draining the device’s battery.
“It could be foreshadowing of a broader kind of agentic integration with their operating system, because the operating system is going to be the thing that hits the (chip’s AI processing capabilities) the most,” Bajarin said.
MacDailyNews Take: If anything, an “iPhone Air” will draw eyeballs and Apple Store visits and spur, if not sales itself, of other iPhone which will offer more in terms of battery life and camera capabilities.
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They better have an AI story and solid, provable progress or else it won’t matter to investors. They have to do all this hardware upgrade junk just to stay even. Investors patience is running thin for Tim Apple.
AAPL announcements used to feature new products that enabled/increased what one could do (creativity/productivity, etc) and now it’s technical iterations that say little about the human. It’s mostly about the machine.
Reminds me of the empty days of Intel/AMD ghz-wars. When speeds-feeds become the pitch, the product is a commodity.