Apple’s new iPhone Air might look like a futuristic, ultra-thin smartphone, but under the hood, it’s closer to an Apple Watch strapped to a giant battery. In this episode, Seve (founder of tscircuit) and Matt (founder of atopile) break down the wild engineering behind making phones slimmer than ever:
iPhone Air Deep Dive:
* Why the iPhone Air’s PCB layout looks more like a smartwatch than a phone
* How Apple carved down the circuit board to a tiny “plateau” under the camera
* The real limits of *batteries, casings, and glass thickness*
* Why reducing *just 1 mm* of thickness is brutally hard
* Tricks like *embedded resistors* inside the PCB stack-up
* Why thinner phones aren’t just aesthetic — they change the entire board design
Beyond the iPhone — Startup Life & Silicon Valley:
* What “honest tells” are — from biology to founder culture
* The strange power moves of Silicon Valley investors and founders
* Why outfits are status signals in tech * Lessons from Reddit’s messy founder history
* How investor–founder dynamics shifted in the past 15 years
* The psychology of saying “no” to meetings (and why it makes you work harder)
If you’ve ever wondered how Apple keeps packing a supercomputer into a device smaller than your wallet or what it’s really like building hardware startups in Silicon Valley, this episode blends both worlds.
