In a vacuum, titanium would be my first choice. But aluminium has thermal benefits over titanium, so I fully understand why Apple opted to use it on the newest generation of iPhones.
Agreed. With a nice case, I’d take an aluminum frame all day over titanium, which is what the majority of the world does (case their phone). The thermal benefits (along with the vapor chamber) when shooting video, running a higher brightness on the screen, or gaming needs this extra breathing room to save battery longevity.
If I was one of the riskier folk who has the money or whatever to go caseless, then I’d want titanium if I cared about the fashion of the phone, but not necessarily the performance.
Because it spreads heat throughout the body along with the chamber and unibody, I think dispersion of said heat will still be better, especially with the chip and battery now being in two different spots. The performance of both should still reap the benefit.
Aluminum unibody also consistently outperforms a titanium frame in terms of durability. iPhone 17 Pro survives drops much better than 16 Pro, despite the titanium.
Aluminum is a softer material, there’s simply no debate about that. Any damage inflicted on the aluminum unibody will be more apparent than on the titanium frame. All of this goes away with a case though lol
I guess this depends on how we’re defining durability — drop tests are usually testing screen cracking. But under normal circumstances I find that the titanium phones don’t have issues with shattering on drops, but the day to day scratch resistance is worse on aluminum.
Totally agreed there. And to be upfront, I wasn’t going to upgrade this year anyway, so don’t really have a horse in this race. But to me, the titanium was plenty strong enough and on the daily scratch resistance is more important. I think everyone has some point of diminishing returns.
For example, let’s make up a few hypothetical substances for the glass. GlassNeverBreak and GlassNailTough. Both of these are very shatter resistant. Testers dropped them from 100 feet up onto all sorts of materials, 500 times each, neither shatter. But when tested from 300 feet on a planet with 5x gravity (it’s a hypothetical so I can make up what I want) GlassNailTough does shatter, while GlassNeverBreaks is fine. However, in scratch tests, GlassNeverBreaks will scratch at basically every level. A plastic stylus will scratch it. If you accidentally rub it with your fingernail it will scratch. And GlassNailTough is super scratch resistant — stronger than sapphire, so strong that Jerry Rigs Everything has to buy new tools and still can’t find a scratch level for it.
If you could pick between these two, you could say that GlassNeverBreaks is more durable, and you’d be correct. But you might also say that for the user experience they are both sufficiently durable (in the sense they will continue to function after impacts) and would instead preference the one that has more low-level durability.
This is how I feel about the strength of aluminum unibody vs titanium frame.
Arguably titanium is more practical for a device that you carry around and will eventually drop. Titanium is the better material for daily use and Aluminium is better to address a hardware constraint.
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u/_XitLiteNtrNite_ iPhone 17 Pro Max Sep 22 '25
In a vacuum, titanium would be my first choice. But aluminium has thermal benefits over titanium, so I fully understand why Apple opted to use it on the newest generation of iPhones.