Report: iPhone 17 Air may have slower GPU speed than the rest of the iPhone 17 lineup

One month before the launch of the iPhone 17 series, there are only a few details that have not yet been agreed upon. One of these concerns the chip in the iPhone 17 Air.

Back in October 2024, industry specialist Ming-Chi Kuo reported that the new thin iPhone would use an A19 chip, just like the standard iPhone 17. A leaker on the Chinese social media platform Weibo has now contradicted this: Fixed Focus Digital claims that the iPhone 17 Air would instead come with the A19 Pro, but it would be a binned chip with one deactivated GPU core.

A standard A19 chip is projected to have 6 GPU cores, while the binned version in the iPhone 17 Air would have 5 GPU cores. The performance difference would be noticeable in benchmarks, but not so much in practice. The only times it would be noticeable would be with demanding games (which would put a noticeable strain on the battery life of the thinnest iPhone) and when editing and rendering high-resolution videos, which should also be secondary on the iPhone 17 Air with only one camera.

Fixed Focus Digital had claimed a week ago that Apple had finalised the development of its own image sensor for the iPhone camera, in July that the iPhone 17 Air would come in a completely new shade of blue and the standard iPhone 17 would not have a Pro Motion display, and in April that the iPhone 17e would be released in spring 2026.

Just over a year ago, Fixed Focus Digital claimed, contrary to the opinion of many others, that the iPhone SE 4, which has since been released as the iPhone 16e, would use the iPhone 16 casing. This claim turned out to be false–it’s actually using the iPhone 14 casing. So that Fix Focus Digital’s reports for what they’re worth.

Apple is expected to release the iPhone 17 models at an event on September 9. Learn more about the iPhone 17.