Credit: Andrew Cunningham

If you'll indulge me for a moment, here's some ancient history.

In 2008, when Apple took the very first MacBook Air out of a manila envelope, it was not positioned as Apple's new entry-level Mac laptop. The innovative but flawed system started at $1,799, far above the $999 price of the entry-level plastic MacBook and well into MacBook Pro territory.

In those early, formative years, the "Air" branding denoted not a midrange or entry-level model but an alternate branching path from the baseline MacBook. Paying Apple more money could get you more computer—the Pro model, with more processor, more screen, more storage, more everything—or it could get you a different kind of computer, with fundamentally different benefits and tradeoffs.

I bring up this ancient blip in Apple's history because that early MacBook Air is the "Air" product that the iPhone Air reminds me of the most. Starting at $999 unlocked—$200 more than the basic iPhone—it's priced into iPhone Pro territory. But like that old MacBook Air, the focus on size and weight actually makes it a downgrade from the basic iPhone in some fundamental ways.

I landed on the iPhone Air as the first of these three iPhones to sequentially review because it's the only one where I don't already have a pretty good idea of what it is. I know what using an iPhone feels like. I know what using an iPhone Pro feels like. But this is a kind of new-feeling third thing. Maybe I'll like it!

Out-of-the-box observations

From left to right: iPhone Air, iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham

As I set the phone up, I jotted down a few notes about changes from my 15 Pro and what the default settings were, and a few of those notes didn't end up fitting anywhere else in the review.

Here they are:

• The always-on display feature of the iPhone Air was turned off by default on my review phone. Apple advertises the always-on display as a feature in all three of this year's phones, so this could just be a bug (all three phones pulled down a newer build of iOS 26.0 after I finished setting them up). But it might also be that Apple wanted to save the small amount of power this feature uses, given the Air's smaller battery.
• Apple allows the iPhone Air's 6.5-inch screen to show a two-column view of compatible apps while in landscape mode, a feature normally reserved for Plus and Max-sized phones. Why a 6.5-inch iPhone can handle this and a 6.3-inch iPhone can't is a bit of a mystery to me—the first phones to support doing this used 5.5-inch screens, so the distinction has been artificial for a while now. But it's one way in which this phone blurs the line between Apple's Air and Pro branding.
• The new Adaptive Power feature in iOS 26 is turned on by default on all of this year's iPhones. This power mode can dynamically reduce performance and lower screen brightness if it detects that "your battery usage is higher than usual," and it turns on Low Power Mode automatically when the battery level reaches 20 percent. Users can choose whether to be notified about these adaptive changes if they like, almost certainly an option to avoid the perception that the company is artificially limiting performance without telling anyone. Adaptive Power is also available on the iPhone 15 Pro and all iPhone 16-series phones but isn't turned on by default (at least when users upgrade their phones from an older iOS version to iOS 26).
• Because it uses Apple's in-house C1X modem, the Air doesn't support mmWave 5G, unlike both the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro (and most 5G-compatible iPhones going all the way back to the 12). This fast but infrequently deployed and easily disrupted form of 5G is only situationally useful, and we doubt most people will feel its absence at all. But if you do ever find yourself benefiting from mmWave 5G, the Air won't be able to do it.

Second first impressions

I got my actual first impressions of the iPhone Air just after Apple's hardware event, but a few minutes of superficial handling amid a throng of PR people, journalists, and influencers is different from the experience of taking something out of its box for the first time in the comfort of your own home.

I’ve decided to tackle the task of testing and writing about three different iPhones by devoting 48 to 72 hours of unbroken time with each of them as my main phone, without touching any of the others (or my current phone, an iPhone 15 Pro) except to occasionally take a picture or run a benchmark. It was right around noon on Friday that my box full of phones, cases, and other accessories from Apple showed up, and about an hour after that, I had my eSIM transferred and the new phone set up to be the center of my digital life.

The iPhone Air's titanium body is thin and light enough that it can be hard to feel like you have a good grip on it.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone 17 and 17 Pro are still sitting in their boxes, but I can say that Apple's obsession with the iPhone Air's thinness extends to the container it ships in. All iPhone boxes trend thinner now that Apple has stopped shipping headphones and power bricks, but the Air’s box is much thinner than the Pro’s and noticeably thinner than the regular iPhone’s, befitting its status as “the thin and light one.”

I remain struck by how light the iPhone Air seems, even though the difference between it and most recent iPhones is, on paper, a matter of just a few grams and millimeters. I put it down partly to the phone’s 6.5-inch screen, which at 0.2 inches larger than the basic iPhone (and 0.4 inches larger than what I’m used to) makes the phone look like it should be more of a brick.

But spending time with it has given me a more mixed opinion of what actually holding the phone is like. On the one hand, you really feel the difference in both thickness and weight when you’re doing that thing where you sit the bottom of the phone on your pinky and scroll with your thumb. On the other, its thin profile makes it harder to feel like you have a good grip on the phone, and holding onto it can feel precarious.

I handed the Air to my wife, whose viewpoint I can generally trust to be pure—she’s one of a small handful of people in my life who don't absorb a single iota of news about new iPhones or whatever discourse has sprung up in their wake (this is, if it’s not clear, a compliment).

She immediately clocked and was impressed by how thin and light the phone was, which tracks with my first reaction. Apple has succeeded in building an iPhone that is different from older iPhones in a way that is instantly noticeable by a layperson, something the company hasn’t done in a few years.

But once this initial surprise dissipated, she became skeptical. Her grip on it felt too tenuous. She figured a case would help with that—we’re both iPhone-in-a-case people—but also thought that putting a case on something designed explicitly to be as slim as possible would be partially purpose-defeating.

I did end up putting a case on the phone after the first day, a $49 clear case from Apple that covers the phone in a slim plastic sheath and gives me a little more confidence in my grip on the phone without totally spoiling the thin-and-light effect. A grippier case with textured sides would likely help even more.

Battery: Not as bad as I thought it would be

The iPhone Air's $99 MagSafe battery accessory. A case might not ruin the look or feel of the Air, but this definitely does.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham

What did feel purpose-defeating was the $99 external MagSafe battery that Apple also shipped me, the company’s official answer to concerns that the Air’s battery might not last long enough. It attaches firmly to the back of the phone, whether it’s in a case or not, and it extends the phone’s runtime by 50 or 60 percent, according to Apple’s own figures.

It’s not that I don’t see the point of an external battery accessory. If you could take your current phone and reduce its weight by taking some portion of its battery out and putting it in your bag or on your desk so you didn’t have to walk around with it all the time, wouldn’t you occasionally make that tradeoff?

It’s more that I think that paying for Apple’s particular solution to that problem feels sort of silly and only medium-elegant compared to a less-expensive external battery. It is nice how Apple’s accessory clamps to the back of the iPhone Air via MagSafe, forming a secure connection (even with a case attached) and letting you use the phone as you normally would without the umbilical cord of a charger or external brick.

But the battery also more than erases the size and weight advantage of the Air compared to Apple’s other phones, spoiling the Air's light weight and thin profile. Its compatibility with anything other than the Air is limited (it will charge things connected to its USB-C port, and it will also charge any Qi-compatible accessories you can manage to position correctly on top of it, but the MagSafe magnets won’t latch properly on any phone other than the Air). It also… isn’t available in any colors other than white, which makes it stick out like a sore thumb on the black version of the iPhone Air in particular.

After three days, my main takeaway is that the iPhone Air’s built-in battery doesn’t actually feel bad. I was expecting a return to the bad old days of the iPhone 8, which I routinely needed to recharge in the middle of the day, especially if I’d used it as a hotspot for half an hour. But what I got was something that felt more or less normal for the larger, post-iPhone-X phones I’ve used.

For a typical (for me) day of intermittent usage between 7:45 am and 1:00 am, I was scraping the bottom of the battery by lights out, but I can make it a full day, especially if I let Adaptive Power trigger Low Power Mode for the last 20 percent. With 20 or 30 minutes plugged into a reasonably fast USB-C charger sometime in the late afternoon or early evening (the phone chargers in our house are usually around 20 W), making it to bedtime without Low Power Mode was pretty comfortable.

Bear in mind that my baseline is an iPhone 15 Pro with 88 percent battery health, a phone that seems extremely unhappy that I have decided to revisit Pokémon Go and which usually needs an evening top-up now that it did not need for the first year of its life. I am primed to be impressed by the performance and the consistent drain rate of a new battery, one that has not had time to become inhabited by the ghosts that take up residence in every iPhone battery after 18 months of charge cycles.

Your mileage will vary depending on your usage and the iPhone you’re coming from, but I came in expecting battery life to feel like more of a dealbreaker, and I was surprised that I didn’t end up noticing it all that much. Just remember that your experience with the Air's battery will deteriorate as the battery ages.

Camera: One-lens limitations

The "camera plateau" stretches across the entire top of the phone, and a camera bump on top of that makes the back even less even. If you're upset about camera bumps, this whole generation of iPhones is really twisting the knife.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham

What did feel more like a downgrade coming from the iPhone 15 Pro was the camera. The camera is what convinced me to jump from the main iPhone to the Pro years ago, so it’s not surprising that it would be the thing I’d have the most trouble giving up.

The Air has the same main camera as the iPhone 17 but without the second wide-angle camera lens. It's a single 48 MP sensor, which uses a pixel binning to improve image quality on the 24 MP photos it saves to your camera roll. The phone offers a 2x telephoto mode by cropping a 12 MP image out of the center of that sensor, giving Apple room to claim "optical-quality" zoom (technically more-or-less true, since the photo is taken at the sensor's native resolution), albeit with a small drop in quality because there's no pixel binning.

This is, at least, the best version of this camera system that Apple currently offers. Despite using the same resolution and pixel binning system, the size of the sensor in the iPhone 17 and the Air is roughly double the size of the sensor in the iPhone 16e. If you’re just shooting photos with the main camera lens, you’ll absolutely notice improvements to color and detail on the iPhone Air coming from a 2+ year old phone, even a Pro model. Two years of sensor and ISP improvements yield noticeable improvements in the amount of detail being captured and how vibrant and accurate colors look.

You can even get better macro photography results on the Air than on an older Pro phone, depending on what kind of shooting you’re doing. If you’re trying to get really close to a nearby subject, even the “3x” telephoto mode on a Pro iPhone is actually giving you a crop of the main camera sensor because you’re too close for the telephoto lens to focus on the subject of your shot.

Because Apple uses a slightly shorter 24 mm focal length for its “regular” iPhone cameras versus the 26 mm length the Pro phones use, it was common for me to take 2x shots that looked closer and more detailed than 2x or 3x shots from my iPhone 15 Pro. When the main cameras go up against one another, the newer one wins out.

That advantage fades quickly once you go beyond 2x zoom, where the Air has to rely solely on digital zoom rather than hardware. Even the 3x telephoto lens of the iPhone 15 Pro is clearer and more detailed than the iPhone Air's 2x shot digitally zoomed to 3x. The gap grows ridiculously wide when you compare the Air's results to the iPhone 17 Pro's 4x telephoto lens or 8x "optical-quality" zoom (Apple's pixel binning system comes to the telephoto lens on the Pro for the first time this year, thanks to its new 48 MP sensor).

Those who prefer to shoot RAW images for processing after the fact will also want to look into a Pro phone instead of the Air or the regular iPhone 17—Apple still restricts that functionality to its Pro phones, at least in the first-party camera app and its settings.

The iPhone Air also doesn't have any kind of tricks up its sleeve to try to recreate the results from the ultra-wide lens in either the iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Pro. I use the telephoto lens constantly and the ultrawide lens only in a handful of specific situations, but it's still worth noting that a phone $200 cheaper than the Air comes with a more flexible camera system.

All of Apple's new phones this year pick up the 18 MP Center Stage front camera, with a square sensor meant to allow people to shoot at all the same aspect ratios regardless of whether they're holding their phone in portrait or landscape. (The sensor is actually 24 MP—the phone doesn't give you access to 24 MP square images, opting rather to crop out 4:3 portrait or landscape rectangles.)

If you're some kind of YouTuber or another video-adjacent influencer type, being able to hold your phone one-handed in portrait mode while still getting landscape video could be especially useful. Even if you don't care about any of that, I did notice a marked improvement in detail and image quality from the 12 MP front camera on my 15 Pro.

Specs and speeds and other things

As time has gone on and both the processors and screens on phones have settled down and become more mature, I've found "how does it feel" and "what kind of pictures does it take" to be more interesting and relevant questions for potential purchasers than a bunch of spec sheets and benchmarks. But there are still under-the-hood things here that are worth paying attention to.

The iPhone Air uses the new Apple A19 Pro processor just like the iPhone 17 Pro does, but Apple again blurs the line between "Air" and "Pro" by shaving quite a few of the "Pro" features off. The Air's A19 Pro uses five GPU cores instead of six, the same as the iPhone 17. The data transfer speeds of its USB-C port top out at USB 2.0's 480 Mbps rather than 10 Gbps. There's no support for filming or working with ProRes video files. The chip even benchmarks a whole lot like a non-Pro A19.

One major advantage of the A19 Pro remains: 12GB of RAM, up from the iPhone 17's 8GB. Once you're past 8GB, which is the floor for Apple Intelligence, more RAM in an iPhone doesn't really get you anything in the way of unique features. But you may notice slightly less reloading of browser tabs or apps because the phone will need to eject things from memory less aggressively. I didn't really notice a difference here relative to my iPhone 15 Pro and its 8GB of RAM, but historically, iPhones and iPads with more memory have aged more gracefully than those with less.

Benchmarks comparing the A19 and the A19 Pro to the last couple generations' worth of iPhone processors show the now-typical slow and steady improvement. Single- and multi-core CPU performance for the A19 Pro improves by around 20 or 30 percent compared to the two-year-old A17 Pro, where graphics performance depends on whether you have four or six cores but is still generally in the low-to-mid double digits. We would expect the Air's performance over time to be worse than the Pro's because of thermal throttling—the Air just doesn't have as much room for a cooling apparatus—but it's not something we tested for specifically.

The graphics tests we ran showed one other downside of the iPhone Air, relative to Apple's other iPhones. There are signs of pretty aggressive thermal throttling, something that probably comes down to less room for cooling inside the phone's thin enclosure. The five-core GPU in the regular iPhone 17 consistently beats the one in the iPhone Air in our tests, and the Air's GPU occasionally performs more like the Apple A18 from last year's iPhone 16. Regardless, we are talking about the kind of relatively mild year-over-year performance increases and differences that will be difficult to notice unless your phone is more than two or three years old.

The Air's 6.5-inch screen is right in between the 6.3-inch screen of the iPhone 17/17 Pro and the 6.9-inch Pro Max in both size and resolution, though Apple maintains the same 460 PPI pixel density across the whole lineup. It's a nice 120 Hz OLED panel that isn't appreciably different from the screens in this year's other iPhones in terms of display quality, color reproduction, or peak brightness.

The screen is a little wider and taller than the 6.3-inch phones, and you'll definitely notice the difference coming from any of the many 6.1-inch iPhones from years past. But it's worth noting that a little of that size is wasted on the no-man's land of screen space above the dynamic island, which iOS and its apps can't really use for much of anything.

Something new-ish

Most in the Ars Orbiting HQ are in the "I don't see the appeal of this" camp regarding the iPhone Air, and that's a perspective I completely understand. A decade or so ago, during the heyday of the iPhone 6, 6S, and 7, most of us were of the opinion that we would gladly carry around a marginally heavier phone if Apple could just fit a bigger battery in it.

But three days of continuous use have helped sell me on the value of the iPhone Air. The iPhone and iPhone Pro have a minor but noticeable heft to them, where the Air is just thin and light enough to feel heftless. It's easy to carry and pocket while still being sturdy enough to handle day-to-day use and abuse. And its battery life, while diminished compared to this year's other iPhones, does not regress all he way back to where it was in the pre-iPhone-X era.

It's also the most Apple has done since at least the iPhone 12, if not the iPhone X, to challenge expectations of what an iPhone is and does. Upgrading from an X or XR or 12 to anything newer, especially if you weren't jumping up a category to the Pro, has mostly felt like "getting a slightly improved version of what you already had." The Air is different enough to register as "new" to a layperson, which might help it stick out from the lineup more than the departed iPhone mini or iPhone Plus could.

I don't think the iPhone Air is a slam dunk. I didn't mind the battery as much as I thought I would, but it's a clear step down from the 17 or 17 Pro. I wish it didn't cost $1,000. The camera is good, but it's hard to go back to a single lens after using something more flexible for so many years.

Like that original MacBook Air, the iPhone Air clearly leaves room for improvement. But also like the MacBook Air, I wouldn't be totally surprised to see the iPhone Air become the template for what a "normal" iPhone looks like a few years down the road. And who knows what Apple could decide to build on the Air's slim foundation: maybe two of them, joined in the middle by a hinge?

Next up for us: the regular iPhone 17. The iPhone that gives us the least to talk about could be the year's best upgrade.

The good

• Noticeably thinner and lighter than other iPhones
• Fast processor with 12GB of RAM is good for future-proofing
• Nice 6.5-inch 120 Hz OLED screen that supports two-column app layouts, a feature normally reserved for Plus and Max-sized phones
• The one camera the phone does have takes nice photos
• Typical iPhone ecosystem benefits: tight integration with other Apple platforms, good software update track record, reasonably easy for upgraders to jump between phones

The bad

• Expensive
• Worse battery life than in other iPhones this year
• Especially without a case, it can be difficult to feel like you've got a firm grip on the thing
• External battery accessory is kind of silly
• Several Pro features removed from its Pro processor, and thermal throttling limits graphics performance in particular

The ugly

• Single rear camera is limiting compared to the iPhone 17 or especially a Pro iPhone