Last week a report detailed a shocking change coming to the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max in 2025, namely a return to an aluminum frame, giving up on both titanium after only a couple of generations, as well as stainless steel, for whatever reason.
Today a leakster from Weibo contradicts that entire rumor, claiming that going back not even to stainless steel but to aluminum for the Pro models would represent too big of a blow to Apple’s reputation, considering how much it’s tried to convince us that both stainless steel and titanium are way better than aluminum.
And that’s all true of course. A not huge but definitely not tiny part of Apple’s introductions for its new Pros over the past few years have been dedicated to materials, and how first stainless steel and then titanium make them oh-so-premium feeling. So there’s that.
But Apple has also been a very profit-driven company recently, so we wouldn’t be that surprised to see it simply going back to aluminum which is cheaper than both stainless steel and titanium in order to make a few more bucks per phone, and obviously pretend like it never said anything about the other two materials’ superiority.
So at this point it’s still rather unclear what will really happen, and that’s not surprising considering how far away we still are from the launch of the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max. Is the material choice for the frame important to you? And if you use a case non-stop anyway, does it really even matter? Let us know.
Source (in Chinese)
