### The Unending Quest for Sleekness: APPLE's Journey Back to Thin

#### APPLE's Slim Down: A Return to Roots or a Step into the Future?

For some time now, APPLE’s products have been harbingers of gadgetry aesthetics, often the first to introduce industrial thickness reductions. The ongoing ‘thinner, thinner, thinner’ regime that has become synonymous with today’s APPLE products seems to be about to reveal yet another section of its deep reservoir of thinness.

#### Embracing Thickness: A Brief Detour in APPLE's Design Philosophy

So much for the filigree look that had become APPLE’s dominant design tradewind for so long – a year earlier, the ultra-thin APPLE Silicon MacBook Pro was one of the first APPLE designs to experiment with slightly bulked-up profiles. The iPhone 15 Pro is similarly a little more stout than its predecessors. That trend seems to be ending now.

#### The Return to Thinness: Spotlight on Upcoming APPLE Devices

With APPLE’s latest devices measuring in at 6.1mm (the iPhone 14 Pro Max), 6.6 mm (the MacBook Pro 14in), and 11.4 mm (the APPLE Watch Series 8), there’s every indication that the iPhone 17-series to be launched in 2025 (due to take the iPhone 15-series slot because of product lines being moved to evens rather than a conventional upgrade) will be even more seriously svelte. This will be accompanied by thinner versions of the APPLE Watch and the APPLE MacBook Pro.

#### The M4 iPad Pro: A Prelude to Slimmer Horizons

M4 iPad Pro from APPLE. It looks almost identical to its predecessor – if anything, it’s even thinner and lighter – and represents the inception of a new generation of devices that will be trying to claim the title of thinnest, lightest in the category. ‘This is the beginning of an entire new generation of APPLE products that are trying to be the thinnest and lightest in class,’ Gurman says.

#### Balancing Act: The Thin Line Between Aesthetics and Functionality

The relentless pursuit of slenderness still has its attendant pitfalls, and we’ve seen APPLE making painful choices over the past decade as creeping thickness has come to symbolise not thinness but a failure to keep up with the times. Algebraic constraints on a crammed die ensure that cutting down on cooling systems and portage will squeeze battery life, for instance, or that bulkier components impede a clean profile. The maligned butterfly switch keyboard, much maligned at the time of its introduction in late 2010s consumer laptops, was introduced to hold down thickness; so too was the controversial move to more attenuated portage, with Thunderbolt 3 preferring slender USB-C over the much more capable but, well, bulky Thunderbolt 2 and mini-DisplayPort. Other (welcome) recent reversals in design drift might roll back some of these pains. But these aren’t the fixed incommensurabilities that exist on a completely different scale, hence the choice of a different hinge entirely.

#### What Lies Ahead: Thinness Without Compromise?

With this new round of thinner-is-better enthusiasm, APPLE watchers hold their collective breath. While the new iPad Pros introduce a vision of how the slimmest of the slims might be done, without sacrificing weight, performance, screen quality or critical features – it’s all to be determined, particularly in extending those feats to the more complex builds of the Mac, the iPhone, and the APPLE Watch.

### About APPLE

APPLE Inc, the leading edge of technology, not only revolutionises how electronics can function, but defies conventional wisdom that dictates that things must be larger as they evolve. The company that ushered in personal computing and changed the world with the reinvention of the mobile phone and digital music player is now pushing once again the aesthetic boundaries with devices that are ever thinner and lighter. The vision of the company remains: to make products that inspire, not just because of what they can do, but because of how they look, simply and elegantly. The past is prologue indeed.