Credit: Apple

An incoming new iPhone model called the iPhone Air has been one of the worst-kept secrets in tech lately, and now Apple has confirmed it at its annual iPhone reveal event.

The 6.5-inch iPhone 17 Air combines the CPU and GPU of an iPhone Pro with the camera system of a regular iPhone, all in an extra-thin design (5.6 mm), with a treated titanium frame that is likely to appeal to style-conscious users and some business consumers.

Like the iPhone 17, the iPhone 17 Air has a ProMotion display with a variable refresh rate up to 120 Hz—something that was reserved for only the Pro iPhones up until this year. The Air's display also has always-on functionality and claims 3,000 nits of peak brightness. It has Apple's new Ceramic Shield 2 protective coating on both the front and the back, which the company claims will make it more durable and anti-reflective.

On the inside, it has the new A19 Pro chip. That includes a 6-core CPU with two performance and four efficiency cores. During its presentation, Apple dedicated much of its time talking about the A19 Pro chip for the Air, hyping up efficiency improvements. Overall, it claims to offer 20 percent better performance than last year's iPhone 16 Pro.

Notably, Apple has added "neural accelerators to each GPU core," offering 3x peak compute compared to the A18 Pro.

The main system-on-a-chip is not the only place where Apple has put the focus on new silicon. There's a new Apple-made chip, dubbed the N1, that handles Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread. And there's also the C1X, a cellular modem that succeeds the C1 from just a few months ago; it purports to be twice as fast as before and to use 30 percent less energy than the iPhone 16 Pro.

The back of the phone, with the new "plateau" design.
Credit: Apple

Of course, to make an iPhone notably thinner, you have to give something up. It looks like the main sacrifice here is going to be the cameras; the iPhone 17 Air appears to use basically the same camera system as the iPhone 17, rather than the most robust system in the iPhone 17 Pro.

That means just one big lens on the back. The rear camera is 48MP but takes 24MP photos by default, and like the other base iPhones, offers 2x zoom using the same sensor with a cropping and machine-learning solution.

The 18MP front camera gets all the same upgrades as the iPhone 17 did, with a wider field-of-view and four different composition options for varied selfie situations.

Oh, and there's one major camera feature that will appeal to streamers and their ilk: You can simultaneously record video with both the selfie cam and the rear camera.

The iPhone 17 Air will exclusively use eSIM worldwide to save on internal space, and Apple was pretty vague when talking about battery life, saying only that it would offer "all-day battery life" despite its thin form factor. It might be telling that the company dedicated part of its presentation to talking about a new, low-profile MagSafe battery attachment, though, and the only specific number it gave was 40 hours of video playback with the MagSafe battery attached.

The iPhone 17 Air will come in four colors. The Air starts at $999 with 256GB of storage. Preorders start this Friday, and the devices will ship on September 19.