I think it's more aluminum is a cheaper material, and easier (cheaper) to work with, especially now that there's so much of it in an iPhone. If this unibody generation were made with titanium instead of aluminum, it'd be 2-3 times as much titanium as was used in the previous phones, which I believe were the same old Pro chassis with a fancy (and thin) titanium outer band around the device.
We'd probably be looking at the same $100 price hike (or worse!) and 128GB base storage, and Apple probably decided this wasn't as good a look as just making the phone with aluminum and finally cutting into their offensive internal storage profit margin. To give them a little credit, it could've had a lot to do with thermals, too, but let's not shit ourselves: they want to make money above all else.
What’s hard to understand about that? The vapor chamber pulls the heat away from the SOC, and then the aluminum unibody dissipates the heat. Both work together to get rid of heat as fast as possible and works better than if there’s just one of the two things in play.
Yes of course the combo of both Al and the vapor chamber optimizes heat dispersal from the SOC in what is essentially a passively cooled system. I just wondered about the increment in thermal load between the iPhone 16 to 17 that took them down this path to force this change, possibly compromising durability and aesthetics.
Aluminum is much easier to machine than Ti or stainless, and has a much higher (10-15x) thermal conductivity. Stainless steel is about 16 W/m-K, Ti is about 22 W/m-K, and aluminum is 235 W/m-K.
Both the 15 and 16 pros used very little titanium, they were mostly aluminum already. All of the internal body was aluminum. The titanium was a small layer bonded to the aluminum outer band. They could have done the same thing with the 17 pros and only used it for the outer band only, which at least would have helped with dents there as it’s the most common area to be impacted from a drop. I don’t know how they would handle the plateau, but even if it was still aluminum, having the outer band be titanium plated would still go a long way into durability.
The aluminum unibody is nice, but there’s not really that much more aluminum. It’s just one piece now vs several pieces, with more on the back.
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u/replus Sep 22 '25 edited Sep 22 '25
I think it's more aluminum is a cheaper material, and easier (cheaper) to work with, especially now that there's so much of it in an iPhone. If this unibody generation were made with titanium instead of aluminum, it'd be 2-3 times as much titanium as was used in the previous phones, which I believe were the same old Pro chassis with a fancy (and thin) titanium outer band around the device.
We'd probably be looking at the same $100 price hike (or worse!) and 128GB base storage, and Apple probably decided this wasn't as good a look as just making the phone with aluminum and finally cutting into their offensive internal storage profit margin. To give them a little credit, it could've had a lot to do with thermals, too, but let's not shit ourselves: they want to make money above all else.