iPhone Air parts to be scrapped due to poor sales.
Kudos for Apple to try and make a new product category, but it isn’t what the people wanted.
Apple and its suppliers are currently tallying up the cost of severely miscalculating consumer enthusiasm for last year’s iPhone Air. Weighing 12 grams less but with a slightly larger screen than the iPhone 17, Apple made the bet that customers would be willing to pay $200 more for, well, “air.” […]
Apple and its suppliers are now stuck with components for up to 1.5 million units of iPhone Air, my sources tell me, even after the order came down in October to cut back production. What’s worse, some of that cannot be repurposed and instead may need to be scrapped, I am told. To be clear, that doesn’t mean 1.5 million iPhones will be scrapped, merely some of the components specific to the iPhone Air.
The three main components discussed are the titanium frame, the 6.5-inch screen size, and the binned A19 Pro chip:
The titanium frame is specific to the iPhone Air in both size and materials, with the other two models using aluminium. Excess inventory here cannot be repurposed but can be recycled. In fact, 80% of this inventory is already recycled, so Apple and its suppliers will recoup some of the cost.
The OLED “Super Retina XDR” screen is basically the same across all models, but the Air’s 6.5-inch size is mid-way between the 6.9-inch and 6.3-inch versions. I am told that displays which have already been cut, framed and put onto modules will need to be scrapped, though some of that will also be crushed, separated, and recycled.
Possibly the biggest hurt could be with the chips. Apple uses the same A19 Pro CPU in the Air as it does with the iPhone 17 Pro. But the Air has only 5 GPU cores — as does the base iPhone 17 — while the iPhone 17 Pro has 6 GPU cores. (To be blunt, this is merely chip binning, not a new chip).
As a result, the unused Air chips cannot be put in the the lower-end base iPhone 17 nor in the higher-end iPhone 17 Pro. They cannot be repurposed. Even worse, the Air has 12GB of DRAM while the baseline iPhone 17 has just 8GB, according to TrendForce. So, any processor modules which have already had their DRAM fused onto the CPU would also result in wasted DRAM — unless Apple and TSMC find some magical way to “unfuse” the memory from the base die.
I agree with Tim that the Air wasn’t a mistake, and Apple broke the mold by trying something new instead of rehashing the same boring set of phones each year. Apple doesn’t spray and pray, but the ability to be more bold with their hardware decisions is welcome.
Now please, make the Pro devices out of titanium again.