Apple iPhone 17 Design Feature May Disappoint, New Report Says

When Apple launches its iPhone 17 series, there could be a lot of changes coming. Better thermals could make for stronger Apple Intelligence performance, the highly anticipated new form factor, which I’ve calling iPhone 17 Air, could be thinner than expected, and it could even be cheaper than was predicted. But one rumored change might not be happening: the size of the Dynamic Island.

One of the first reports about the new iPhone series, from analyst Jeff Pu back in October 2024, promised a change to the Dynamic Island, saying it would be much-narrowed. Now, though, a comment on X from Ming-Chi Kuo of TFI Securities has contradicted this, saying it won’t change from its current form.

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“I expect the Dynamic Island size to remain largely unchanged across the 2H25 iPhone 17 series,” the well-regarded analyst said.

This is a blow to those who were hoping that Apple was taking the next step to the holy grail of an all-display front for the iPhone, with no cut-outs for the Face ID cameras or other sensors.

Not that anyone was expecting the cut-out to vanish entirely this fall, but a smaller lozenge of black space seemed to be on the cards.

Mind you, this might not matter that much. Though the pill-shaped black space is evident on the screen, and some would say more noticeable than the single circle cut-out on some other phones, it’s something that almost vanishes from your attention most of the time.

And the genius of the Dynamic Island is that it makes a virtue of this otherwise dead space, offering a neat way to see what track is playing, how long before your plane takes off or how your meditation is going—depending on whether Apple Music, Flighty or Headspace is active at the time.

Really, a smaller Dynamic Island cut-out would be most important for Apple’s marketers able to point to a strikingly different look for the iPhone 17 display.

A similar question mark has arisen over the other phone expected to launch this year: will the iPhone SE 4^th generation have a Dynamic Island or just the notch-like cut-out found on the iPhone 14, for instance. We’ll find the answer to that query rather sooner, perhaps as early as March this year.

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