You can hear the winds of change in Apple’s new iPhone ringtone

In online publishing, as in Hollywood, nobody knows anything. Why did a dashed-off news story get vastly more traffic than a painstakingly honed opinion piece? Who can say. As flies to wanton boys are we to the algorithms; they kill us for their sport.

Last week’s mystifying success (not that I’m ungrateful, Google!) was a short article about a ringtone. In the first beta of iOS 26, testers discovered a new variant of the Reflection ringtone; in the second beta, this became a usable option. “ReflectionAlt1-EncoreRemix,” as it almost certainly won’t be called by the time iOS 26 launches to the public in the fall, is a definite improvement on the original, and I thought it was worth a quick story. What I did not expect was for it to go viral. To be clear: not complaining.

Then again, maybe there’s more significance to the new Reflection ringtone than I realize. The first Reflection was launched as an exclusive for the iPhone X in 2017, and immediately became its default—and most recognizable—option. That was only the iPhone’s third ever default ringtone, following Marimba from 2007 to 2013 and Opening from 2013 to 2017. These things don’t happen that often, and when they do, they generally signify a major new phase in the iPhone’s history, whether it’s a complete redesign of the operating system or the switch from Home button to notch. If we’re getting a new default ringtone this year, that would suggest that something big is changing.

As it happens I don’t expect much from the iPhone 17 later this year; as I’ve written in a separate article (toiled over for hours, read by hardly anyone) the iPhone 18 launch currently looks like a far more interesting event. So is this mere marketing magic? Is Apple using the sizzle to sell the steak?

Yes and no. I’m expecting the new iPhones later this year to be skippable, on the basis that the three conventional models will be very cautious iterative updates, and the fourth model, the iPhone 17 Air, will go too far the other way, making too many sacrifices to achieve a startling new design. But it’s nevertheless arguable that 2025 will turn out to be the inflection point for a new phase in the iPhone’s history.

The iPhone 17 Air will be an entirely new iPhone design–an unwise one, in my opinion, but absolutely a new one. And Apple can then iterate on that to produce, hopefully, something more appealing. As technology advances, the reduced-size battery will become less of a handicap; as Apple’s photographic software becomes steadily more sophisticated, we may be less hindered by the loss of specialist camera lenses. The price might even come down as component costs decrease.

Reports suggest, in fact, that the iPhone 17 Air is only the tip of the iceberg of Apple’s design ambitions. That if it succeeds, and perhaps even if it doesn’t, greater things will follow: folding and curved screens; portless chassis; the Dynamic Island shrinking, then becoming a little circle, and then disappearing altogether. After years of design stagnation, the iPhone is ready to go on a journey of discovery.

And all of this is symbolised by something as small as a remixed ringtone hidden in beta code. Who knows? Maybe Google’s algorithm knows what it’s doing after all.

Foundry

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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The rumor mill

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