Turns out an iPhone can be too thin and too light—maybe. That’s what I realized as I picked up the iPhone Air off the ground and inspected it for damage.
Moments earlier, Apple’s thinnest iPhone ever—a 5.6mm glass and titanium metal sandwich that makes the previous thinnest iPhone, the 6.9mm iPhone 6, look fat by comparison—had flown out of my hands and fallen onto its screen, just as I pulled it out of my pocket.
The good news is that the iPhone Air was largely undamaged. There were a few very minor scuffs on the corners, but the 6.5-inch display was scratch-free. On the one hand, the accidental durability test showed me just how tough the iPhone Air is. But on the other hand, I regret not protecting it in the bumper, clear case, or crossbody strap that Apple also included with the loaner phone. As I walked to the subway station, I attached the new MagSafe Battery pack to the iPhone Air and nodded at how the accessory gave it a little more heft for a better grip. The iPhone Air needed recharging, anyway. Its battery was down to 17% after a day of normal usage.
iPhone Air
Apple’s thinnest phone ever is a marvel of engineering, but it comes with tradeoffs to the camera and battery life that may not be acceptable for everyone.
Pros
- Gorgeous, super thin design
- Extremely durable; won’t bend
- 17 Pro-level performance
- So lightweight
- Awesome Center Stage selfie camera
Cons
- Good, but not great battery life
- Only has one camera
- So thin and light it could fly out of your hands
There’s no dispute that the iPhone Air is a marvel of engineering. Nearly all screen and battery, the device, which starts at $999, feels like the closest thing to holding a sheet of glass in your hand. Without a case or battery pack, it’s so thin and slippery that I didn’t foresee it soaring through the air like a frisbee. It’s not the best value iPhone in Apple’s new lineup; that’s the iPhone 17, which starts at $799. And it’s not the most feature-packed and powerful; that’s the iPhone 17 Pro / 17 Pro Max, which start at $1,099 and $1,199, respectively. The iPhone Air is Apple’s latest stab at a different class of smartphone—it previously tried a Mini and Plus-sized iPhone—but this time with more of the company’s classic design appeal front and center.
After a week of testing the whole family of new iPhones, I remain drawn to the iPhone Air the most, even with its compromises to the camera and battery life. It’s so damn hard to resist. The big question is whether or not consumers will buy skinny phones. The iPhone Mini and iPhone Plus each lasted only a few years before being discontinued. Will the iPhone Air suffer the same fate?
Impossibly thin, but super strong
You really have to hold the iPhone Air in your own hands to believe that it’s a real, fully functional phone and not a dummy unit like the ones you may find at a retail store. While not the lightest iPhone that Apple has ever made, the iPhone Air holds that distinction compared to the iPhone 17 and 17 Pros. With its weight distributed across its skinny footprint, the phone feels smaller than it actually is. I prefer my phone in the 6.1 to 6.3-inch screen range, so that I can comfortably use it with one hand and fit it into my pants pocket without it popping out. I can still do both with the iPhone Air and its 6.5-inch display. I get the appeal for the massive 6.9-inch screen on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, but that’s too much of a tank for me.
I already told you how scratch and crack-resistant the iPhone Air is thanks to its Ceramic Shield 2 glass front and Ceramic Shield glass back. But what about bendability? The iPhone 6 attracted the wrong kind of attention when people found it could easily bend. You don’t need to worry about bendgate 2.0 because the titanium frame is incredibly strong. Apple encouraged me to try to bend it in half with as much force as I could. I could see the iPhone Air bow, but it always reverted back to its shape. After the original bendgate over a decade ago, I’m glad Apple is so confident in the iPhone Air’s rigidity.
Stunning screen
I love tech specs as much as any other gearhead, but I couldn’t rattle the display specs for the iPhone Air off the top of my head without looking at Apple’s product page. The quality of the screens in premium smartphones peaked years ago. They’re plenty bright, high-res, and vibrant enough. As far as I can tell, the iPhone Air has the same display specs as the iPhone 17 and 17 Pros.
I really have no complaints about the Super Retina XDR display. It’s got great viewing angles, especially outdoors when it can hit a peak brightness of 3,000 nits; colors look rich and blacks are inky thanks to OLED; and the new anti-glare coating really does reduce reflections. And just like the family of iPhone 17 devices, the screen supports up to 120Hz refresh rates, or what Apple calls “ProMotion” and has an always-on screen. The Dynamic Island sits a little lower than on other iPhones, but other than that, this is as good as a screen gets on a phone.
17 Pro-level performance
You’d think that such a skinny phone would come with major compromises to performance, right? That wasn’t the case in my testing. Apple could have easily used a less powerful chip, but it decided to stuff an A19 Pro chip inside and let it rip. That’s the same desktop-level chip inside the iPhone 17 Pros with a 6-core CPU. The only difference between the A19 Pro chips in the iPhone Air versus the 17 Pros is that there’s one fewer GPU core, five instead of six.
As expected, the A19 Pro chip is insanely powerful and smokes the best Android phones powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chipsets. Do you need all this power if you’re only doing basic phone things like browsing the web, sending messages, checking emails, watching videos, and taking photos? Not at all. But if you play 3D games or do anything that may make use of the new neural accelerators that are baked into the GPU, then you’ll appreciate the headroom. Apple Intelligence still mostly stinks, but that may not be the case starting next year if Apple gets its AI plans back on track, so the performance could come in clutch very soon.
I don’t think many iPhone Air users will push the performance too hard; get a 17 Pro if you want the best performance and, most importantly, sustained performance, thanks to the vapor chamber cooling that keeps the 17 Pros from getting hot enough to fry eggs.
On the topic of cooling, the iPhone Air’s thin chassis means there’s less room for heat dissipation. Apple cleverly moved the A19 Pro and all of the core components into the oval-shaped “plateau” that also houses the single-rear camera, but that doesn’t completely alleviate the iPhone Air from getting warm. It never got hot, but I noticed the area just below the plateau could get toasty when I was playing Genshin Impact or doing anything more graphics-intensive, like a long FaceTime call with my girlfriend. Something to watch out for if you pick up an iPhone Air is potential throttling. Every once in a while, apps would freeze and become unresponsive. I especially noticed this when using GPU-heavy apps or trying to multitask (i.e. watching a video in picture-in-picture mode while using another app like Messages). I tried troubleshooting the anecdotal latency with Apple—buttons could become untappable or scrolling with lag just a sec or two—but in the end, it’s hard to know if I got a lemon review unit or it’s just bugginess in iOS 26. It’s possible it may be the buggy new software; I’ve been experiencing similar random Liquid Glass sluggishness within apps on my updated iPhone 16 Pro. I wouldn’t say there’s any major throttling to worry about, but I am hoping responsiveness stabilizes soon. (Or maybe, I really did get a lemon review unit.)
One camera on the front, one camera on the back
I’m a big camera guy, so it was an adjustment going from the triple-lens camera on my iPhone 16 Pro to the single-lens shooter on the iPhone Air. (I’ll get to the new Center Stage selfie camera in a moment.) The rear camera is a 48-megapixel image sensor that’s the same one inside the iPhone 17’s main “wide” camera. Apple calls it a Fusion camera because, by default, it creates 24-megapixel photos taken from the information of the 48-megapixel sensor. The Fusion camera also has multiple virtual lenses that provide more focal lengths (26mm, 28mm, 35mm, and 52mm, aka 2x optical-quality zoom) to frame shots. It’s a solid single camera with good sharpness and wide dynamic range.
Frankly, the photos look great if you’re just posting them to social media or sending them in a messaging app, which is what 99% of people do. There were times when I missed the ultrawide and telephoto lenses on my iPhone 16 Pro, but I found the 2x optical-quality zoom more than sufficient for most photos and videos I take. Still, it’s hard to give Apple a pass for a single-lens camera when Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge has an additional ultrawide while still being a thin 5.8mm phone.
The real star of the show is the 18-megapixel Center Stage camera on the front. This new square image sensor solves one of the biggest problems with using a modern (read: big) phone for taking selfies: doing finger gymnastics to hold an iPhone up and then tapping the shutter button without dropping it. The Center Stage camera lets you take horizontal selfies while holding the iPhone Air vertically or vertical photos while holding the phone horizontally. The variable orientation not only means it’s easier to hold your phone while taking selfies, but aligns your eyes closer to the center of the screen instead of to the side in photos. All my selfies look so much better because of this. The feature also works for video. Everybody that I’ve talked to has been very excited for the Center Stage camera over any increased sharpness to the rear cameras. Additionally, a new Dual Capture lets you record video from both the rear camera and the selfie camera (in a picture-in-picture format). It’s useful for reaction videos where you want to capture the moment, but also how you were feeling as it happened. Third-party apps like Filmic Pro have been able to do this, but now it’s built into the Camera app. I have a feeling it’s going to be very popular and more so than recording spatial video or turning on action or cinematic mode.
Battery life is good, but not stellar
The elephant in the iPhone Air room is none other than battery life. Super-thin phones simply have less physical space to fit the kinds of big lithium-ion battery cells to get extraordinary battery life. If you want the longest battery life, you really gotta go with the iPhone 17 Pros. Apple advertises up to 33 hours of video playback on the 17 Pro and up to 39 hours on the 17 Pro Max. The iPhone 17 comes in third with up to 30 hours of video playback.
In comparison, the iPhone Air is advertised with up to 27 hours of video playback. Although I didn’t do any battery rundown tests with a video playing continuously to confirm that number, I do own an iPhone 16 Pro, which gets the same 27 hours of video playback. Similarly, the iPhone 16 Plus is advertised with the same video playback hours. With the identical hours for video playback, I expected the iPhone Air to last about the same. In my totally unscientific daily testing, I would say the iPhone Air has good battery life, but my iPhone 16 Pro still had more juice by the end of the day. Is it deal-breaking, poor battery life like many people have been fearing? Absolutely not. On one light day, I made it through 13 hours on a single charge and still had 15% left. I popped on the $99 iPhone Air MagSafe Battery pack, and any shred of battery anxiety disappeared after it recharged past 20%, which is what iPhones consider low power.
Of course, I wish the iPhone Air had longer battery life, and of course, I wish that Apple had made the phone another millimeter or two thicker to fit a bigger battery. Or hell, nix the Camera Control to fit more battery. But for a first-gen model in this new Air class, the battery is fine. Most people are perfectly fine topping off their phones midday at home or at work. And most people are okay with carrying a portable battery for charging up their phone or wireless earbuds. Apple has optimized hard for “all-day” battery life, from the custom and power-efficient A19 Pro chip to the C1X modem to the N1 chip (for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Threads connectivity) to supporting only eSIM. It’s very clear that Apple engineered the iPhone Air with battery life top of mind. But physics is physics, and while the MagSafe Battery pack is a serviceable way to extend the iPhone Air’s battery life, people are always gonna demand more. The original MacBook Air had terrible battery life, and then it became best-in-class within a few generations. I can’t see battery life for the iPhone Air going anywhere but up in future models.
Apple’s big, new test
Whether it’s the right iPhone for you or not, I believe the iPhone Air is here to stay. Bulbous “plateau” aside, it feels like the smartphone that Apple has been trying to make since Steve Jobs changed everything with the original iPhone—a pane of glass that you manipulate with touch. It’s, dare I say, in Apple parlance “magical” even when I know the iPhone 17 gets you more bang for your buck and the iPhone 17 Pros have no compromises at the expense of thicker and heavier designs with higher price tags. Much like the MacBook Air, I can’t help but love that the iPhone Air weighs and feels like almost nothing. I’ve been an iPhone Pro user since the 11 Pro, and I haven’t had to decide between a Pro-level iPhone and any other model. But I’m seriously leaning toward the iPhone Air, especially in Space Black, which makes the profile appear even thinner. (No offense to Sky Blue fans, but the color just doesn’t do anything for me.) It’s the new aspirational iPhone, not the people’s choice or professional device.
If nothing else, and the iPhone Air doesn’t connect with consumers and ends up going the way of the dodo like the iPhone Mini and Plus, the compact design could be a glimpse of the long-rumored, book-style foldable iPhone that may come out next year, according to the latest reports. If I put two iPhone Airs side by side and squint, I could see a foldable similar to the excellent Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, but running iOS and with all the Apple features that you can’t get on Android or elsewhere. Or maybe the iPhone Air is a testbed for miniaturizing components into a smart glasses form factor.
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