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Comment by tra3 | Hacker News Reader

No Mini. Not surprised. I guess I'm gonna replace the battery in my 13 mini finally.

Wonder if we'll ever see folding phones. I'm not concerned with the thickness but the overall foot print that's pocketable would be amazing.

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No Mini. Not surprised. I guess I'm gonna replace the battery in my 13 mini finally.

There are more people on HN claiming to use a 13 mini than Apple actually sold.

There are dozens of us!!

The iPhone Air is definitely a testing ground for folding phone technologies.

As in, it will accidentally fold in people’s pockets?

Seems like the harder part would be getting the folding piece down - foldable is going to have much more volume for components than the air; but I'm sure getting it as thin as it is was already challenging

At first I thought I disagreed because they put the glass on the back but on further thought, I agree because they put the glass on the back.

How so? That would be great either way.

Foldables need to have very thin construction as when folded, you essentially have two phones on top of each other. There's speculation online that the air was launched off the back of their internal foldable R&D.

Which is mad becausw the Chinese are already making super thin foldable phones for consumers

Another area where we're falling behind in tech

That's just par for the course with Apple. Late to the party, but they tend to nail it when they show up

Like AI ?

They stacked almost ALL the actual stuff, like the camera system, SOC, etc. inside that little plateau and the rest of the slab is basically just display and battery. If I was going to make a clamshell phone, experimenting with miniaturizing and arranging the whole thing into a small corner of the footprint would be where I’d start.

If you scroll halfway down the press release page you can see an image of the internals https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-iphone-ai...

Presumably because a folding phone needs each half to be quite thin to still produce a reasonably normal phone thickness when folded.

Speculative renders of iPhone Fold size, https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/rumoured-iphone-fold-si...

That's very cool thanks for sharing!

There are some great renders in the first post in the thread, and towards the end you can see 3d printed mocks [0] of foldable devices. Very cool.

0: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/rumoured-iphone-fold-si...

Yeah, are they all large form-factor iPhones now?

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