Will the iPhone 17 Air come with a high-density battery and an official battery case? Leaked by a South Korean carrier.

Over the weekend, a poster detailing the release of the iPhone 17 series within South Korean carrier KT (Korea Telecom) was leaked.

Regarding the new Apple phones to be officially launched early next Wednesday, this poster reveals a large amount of technical details, including some previously unknown or unconfirmed information. Let's take a look at them one by one:

17 Air: Battery Details

Many consumers are looking forward to the ultra-thin iPhone 17 Air, but their biggest concern is the small battery and insufficient battery life.

Judging from the information leaked by KT, Apple has two plans to address the battery life issue: high-energy-density batteries and battery cases.

According to the above image, the battery capacity of the iPhone 17 Air is 2800 mAh, but another image shows it as 2900 mAh. The difference is negligible.

The bottom column shows that the iPhone 17 Air will use high-energy-density battery cells and come with an original Apple battery case.

Previously, rumors indicated that Apple might use silicon-anode batteries in the 17 Air - this might be something new for Apple, but it's no longer unfamiliar to domestic smartphone brands.

In 2015, Apple first released the Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6 series. This product line continued until the iPhone 11 series in 2019 and was not launched thereafter. (Before 2015, third-party accessory manufacturers also released battery case products.)

It seems that after a full 10 years, Apple is bringing back the battery case - to solve the battery life problem of the iPhone 17 Air.

17 Pro: 12GB RAM; VC Vapor Chambers for the Entire Series

First of all, the 17 Pro/Max no longer uses the traditional 8GB RAM and has been upgraded to 12GB. This will bring some improvements to app background retention and resource-intensive tasks/games.

Previously, leaker Majin Bu pointed out that the iPhone 17 Pro/Max would be equipped with VC vapor chambers. This information has been confirmed by the leak from KT.

A VC (Vapor Chamber) vapor chamber is a metal-encased heat dissipation device. Its working principle is similar to the heat pipes commonly found in computers, and it is in the form of a flat metal plate. It encapsulates a very small amount of pure water inside and has a dot-matrix/honeycomb structure.

The working principle of a VC vapor chamber is based on the phase-change mechanism of liquid: heat causes the water inside to evaporate, move within the chamber, and then condense, allowing the temperature concentrated at a single point to quickly spread over a larger area, thereby achieving overall cooling and ensuring that components (such as the SoC) can maintain high performance more stably without rapid frequency reduction.

The overheating problem of iPhones under high workloads has long been criticized. It seems that Apple is determined to solve this problem.

The battery capacities of the 17 Pro/Max are 3700 and 5000 mAh respectively (3582/4685 mAh for the previous generation).

Imaging

According to the information leaked by KT:

1. All four models in the iPhone 17 series are equipped with a 24-megapixel front-facing camera.

2. The 17 Pro/Max are equipped with a triple-camera setup with 48 megapixels. Among them, the telephoto lens supports 8x optical zoom, which is a significant improvement over the previous generation (12 megapixels, 5x).

3. The 17 Pro/Max support 8K resolution recording (4K for the previous generation)

4. The 17 Air is equipped with a single 48-megapixel camera and supports 4K recording; the 17 has a 48-megapixel main camera/12-megapixel wide-angle lens.

Price

Note: The prices in this section are from the KT carrier poster. The converted RMB prices are for reference only and do not represent the actual prices in the Chinese mainland; price changes may be due to exchange rate fluctuations and are for reference only.

iPhone 17

128GB: 1.25 million won (6586 RMB, +500)

256GB: 1.397 million won (7187 RMB, +200)

512GB: 1.694 million won (8715 RMB, -200)

iPhone 17 Air (compared with the Plus model)

128GB: 1.4 million won (7202 RMB, +200)

256GB: 1.554 million won (7995 RMB, unchanged)

512GB: 1.851 million won (9523 RMB, -400)

iPhone 17 Pro

128GB: 1.55 million won (7974 RMB, unchanged)

256GB: 1.79 million won (9209 RMB, +200)

512GB: 2.09 million won (10752 RMB, -200)

1TB: 2.29 million won (11781 RMB, -1200)

iPhone 17 Pro Max

256GB: 1.94 million won (9980 RMB, unchanged)

512GB: 2.2 million won (11318 RMB, -600)

1TB: 2.497 million won (12846 RMB, -1100)

Leaked Poster & Other Details

iPhone 17 Air compared with the S25 Edge:

1. The iPhone 17 Air will come in four colors: black, white, light gold, and light blue.

2. Screen size: 6.6 vs 6.7 inches; weight: 145g vs 163g.

3. The camera performance is hardly comparable.

4. Battery: 2800/2900 vs 3900 mAh.

Release plan (South Korean market, for reference only):

The text in the table headers is as follows: Baseline, Unpack (launch event time), Pre-order, iOS release, Release date

This article is from the WeChat official account “ifanr” (ID: ifanr). Author: Discovering tomorrow's products. Republished by 36Kr with authorization.