The slimmest iPhone to date is getting roughed up online — and shrugging it off. With a gossamer thickness of just 5.7mm, the iPhone Air appears as though it would fold under a strong grasp or a bad sit. Rather, swarms of viral bend tests show a phone that bows slightly then snaps back as if nothing had happened. It’s a sharp reversal from the Bendgate era, and another lesson in the fact that thin doesn’t always have to mean flimsy.
What the bend tests actually do show about the iPhone Air
One of the more believable tests was a three-point bend by a Chinese creator called Mediastorm, with the iPhone Air supported at both ends, and a precise weight applied in between. The rig left behind about 60 kilogram-force of indentation, and the phone stood back up after the device’s removal. For reference, 60 kgf is roughly 588 newtons — quite a serious load for something that slims down to less than a No. 2 pencil.
Side-by-side with an old iPhone 6 Plus in the same conditions, the distinction was clear. The old phone seemed to be permanently deformed. The iPhone Air did not. That jibes with more informal trials circulating on YouTube and TikTok — attempts to bend by hand, over table edges, even after whacks from a hammer — where catastrophic failure simply hasn’t materialized.
Apple itself has followed that lead: Videos on the company’s website depict a fixture pushing strong, direct pressure onto the center of the Air and then feeling for full rebound. Sure, the manufacturer-shot demos are marketing, but the concurrence between independent tests is interesting.
Why won’t a 5.7mm phone snap under everyday pressure?
Engineering, not luck, explains it. Bend resistance is controlled by two large levers: material stiffness (E) and the structure’s moment of inertia (I). You can’t alter physics — stiffness generally decreases as things get thinner — but you can configure a thin “sandwich” to act like a thicker beam. Modern phones already do this pretty well: stiff glass-ceramic up front, a strong metal frame, the back laminated on and glued layers that function as something like the interior of a composite panel. Separate those stiff skins by a greater distance and you multiply I by plenty while hardly adding any weight.
The iPhone Air is also a winner when it comes to component positioning. These designs, which spread mass and anchors away from the neutral axis and employ large-area structural adhesives, reducing cuts around the mid-frame, make a permanent kink more difficult to initiate. That is probably why testers say the elastic flex disappears once you remove them, instead of the fatal crease that plagued older models.
Glass improvements matter, too. Corning’s latest glass-ceramic compositions prioritize surface compression and edge toughness — a necessity in flexing, where edges experience the greatest tensile stress. And if those edges hold and the frame remains in its elastic zone, the assembly can flex and snap back rather than crack.
How it stacks up against other thin phones
Thinner Android flagships have been making progress, but it’s mixed. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge is a shockingly thin device that endured a high-profile torture test from one of the best-known durability channels with little more than some minor back-panel separation. Some recent premium models, by contrast, including chunky camera-focused slabs and certain foldable phones, have collapsed during straightforward hand-bend attempts due to trade-offs that include big battery cavities and large camera cutouts or complex hinges.
If there’s a takeaway here, it’s that thinness makes design choices louder. Presumably, the iPhone Air takes advantage of cleaner internal organization and better bonding to ensure that everything stays in place structurally, while other phones with more aggressive cutouts or an adhesive strategy may be more susceptible to a localized buckle.
Durability in the real world and caveats
Surviving a three-point bend or a viral “two hands and a knee” test doesn’t mean your phone is indestructible. Torsion (twisting), point impacts on tile, thermal cycling, and repeated micro-flex can still wear out over time — particularly at ports, antenna lines, and camera islands. Warranty documents don’t cover intentional abuse, and just elastic flexing alone puts stress on solder joints, lenses, and seals — you maybe won’t feel it for a while yet.
Still, for daily wear and tear — pockets, backpacks, and the occasional sit-down — the iPhone Air looks unusually sturdy for its size. Standard bend fixtures have always been favored over hand force by consumer testing labs exactly for this reason — they show elastic vs. plastic behavior. The Air reliably lands on the right side of that line.
The verdict: thin and tough to embarrass
The internet will continue to try and snap the iPhone Air in half. For now, the physics, the numbers, and the images are all pointing in the same direction: This ultra-thin slab is designed to flex and bounce back instead of fold over and flop. Until some verifiable, repeatable test proves otherwise, the iPhone Air is a rare thing in gadgets — shockingly skinny but famously hard to break.