Every year, when Apple introduces its new lineup of iPhone models, the company also offers its first-party protective cases to go alongside the latest smartphones. With anticipation of the iPhone 17 line, we can expect the same thing. But this time, those upcoming cases may feature something new for Apple. DuanRui posted on X a CAD image on what may be Apple’s official case for the iPhone 17 Pro (based on a design file), and when translated from Chinese to English, it reads “the official phone case for the iPhone 17 Pro series will have two additional lanyard holes at the bottom.”
Majin Bu also shared a blog post that discussed the so-called Liquid Silicone case design, further backing DuanRui’s claim. Apple also uses this material for its Solo Loops for Apple Watch. With that said, Apple could support optional lanyard accessories on the iPhone 17 case lineup this year, following suit of Beats‘ protective cases for iPhones. In fact, many third-party cases have had lanyard support for years; even ESR cases for both my iPhone and AirPods Pro 2 (which already has a built-in lanyard feature) have this feature too.
This move will certainly be Apple’s motive into making iPhone the best everyday camera that people can take everywhere. Just last year, Apple added the dedicated Camera Control button across the iPhone 16/iPhone 16 Pro lineup, so by adding lanyard support will greatly benefit iPhone photographers and videographers, especially to mitigate concerns over dropping or losing their iPhones or even prevent “death grips” perhaps.
As a bit of trivia for you, Apple actually implemented something like this on the iPod touch (5th generation) from 2012 where there was a retractable button on the bottom corner that lets you attach what was called the “iPod touch loop”, which make the iPod touch act like a point-and-shoot camera. Alas, this feature didn’t lived onto the next generation of iPod touch, possibly because nobody cared about the feature or that the button just took up little valuable space that Apple could use like a larger battery, maybe.
Both sources correctly predicted the ill-fated FineWoven cases for iPhone, so this report does seem plausible. We expect Apple to introduce the iPhone 17 line on September 9, so we’ll find out all the details soon.
