The iPhone Air solves 3 huge problems (of Apple’s own making)

The key to making a successful product is to identify a problem and then offer to solve it. But what happens when no problems remain? Then you have to create one. Or three.

At its “Awe Dropping” event today, Apple unveiled the iPhone Air, which at 5.6mm is its thinnest-ever smartphone. (It’s even thinner than these 17 very thin things.) But rather than explaining why this super-svelte design is a good thing for customers, the company mostly played defense. Most of the presentation was spent reassuring fans that the design’s obvious drawbacks won’t be an issue.

As I’ve argued before, making the familiar iPhone design thinner is an odd decision because it requires the user to compromise in three important areas for the sake of an upgrade that appears to be mostly aesthetic. But don’t worry! Apple is on the case to fix the problems it just created.

Pain point 1: Durability

Nearly everyone’s first thought when the iPhone Air became a serious rumor for this cycle was to worry about a repeat of Bendgate, the spate of customer complaints following the launch of the 7.1mm iPhone 6 Plus in 2014. If that device was prone to bending, surely the 5.6mm iPhone Air would be even worse?

Not so! Apple hurried to explain that the iPhone Air has the benefits of a space-grade titanium chassis which “exceeds Apple’s stringent bend strength requirements,” as the press release boasts. The display is protected by the new Ceramic Shield 2 on the front, while (presumably first-gen) Ceramic Shield protects the glass on the back. With 3x better scratch resistance and 4x better crack resistance than the previous generation, iPhone Air is the most durable iPhone ever. And it will need to be.

Pain point 2: Battery life

Cutting the thickness of the case by 28 percent means a smaller battery. But Apple again took pains to assure us that this doesn’t mean the iPhone Air has poor battery life. It highlighted, somewhat vaguely, “software optimizations,” as well as an unusual internal architecture (basically cramming the speaker and Apple silicon componentry into the camera module, now renamed as the plateau), which wins back some space for the battery.

The best way to make your power reserves last longer, however, is to use less of it. The Air is covered in that regard by a trio of new Apple chips (the A19 Pro processor with its 4 efficiency cores, the C1X cellular modem, which Apple says uses 30 percent less energy than the previous generation, and the N1 wireless chip) which make it “the most power-efficient iPhone ever made.”

iOS 26 should help, too. Apple highlighted the new software’s Adaptive Power Mode, which learns about your usage patterns in order to intelligently conserve power when and where necessary. But that isn’t unique to the iPhone Air. It’s just handy.

All in all, battery life shouldn’t be too bad. Go to the Compare iPhone page on Apple’s website (rather than the comparison tool on the iPhone Air page, which only lets you compare it to the iPhone 15 or older!) and you’ll find it’s more than respectable even when compared to recent handsets. The Air is pegged at an estimated 27 hours of video playback, which is behind the iPhone 17 (30 hours), 17 Pro (33 hours), and 17 Pro Max (39 hours), as well as the 16 Pro Max (33 hours). But it’s well ahead of the iPhone 16 (22 hours), slightly ahead of the 16e (26 hours) and dead level with the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Plus.

And if battery life does prove to be a problem, you can always buy the Air’s $99 MagSafe Battery accessory, which was announced at the same time and is somehow only compatible with the Air.

Pain point 3: Camera performance

The final obvious problem with the Air design concerns the rear-facing camera setup, which only gets a single physical lens. That’s an astonishing throwback, considering that (with the exception of the budget SE and 16e models) iPhones have had at least two lenses on the back since the XS in 2018, and the Pro models have had three since the 11 Pro in 2019. Given that iPhones have absorbed the role previously occupied by digital cameras and are used for that function more than almost any other, such a drastic compromise feels scary.

So Apple yet again moved to assuage those fears. Instead of referring to it as a single-lens setup (which is how the 2022 iPhone SE is labelled on the comparison page; similarly, the iPhone 16 is specifically labeled as “dual-camera”), the company talked about it offering two lenses in one: the 48MP Fusion main camera, plus a 12MP 2x telephoto. It seems to be the same marketing strategy used for the iPhone 16e, which also has a single rear lens yet is labeled as having a “2-in-1 camera system” on the Apple website.

But do the iPhone Air and iPhone 16e really have two lenses in one? It would appear that the “12MP telephoto” simply refers to the extra 2x optical (or rather “optical-quality”) zoom, which Apple has claimed for its iPhones since they got a bump to 48MP: any 48MP iPhone can achieve this by cropping into the center 12 megapixels of the sensor. Sure enough, if you compare the iPhone Air (with its “2x telephoto”) to the iPhone 16, which doesn’t have telephoto, you’ll see they both have the same maximum optical zoom of 2x. Whereas the iPhone 16, unlike the Air, has the ability to unzoom back to x.5, because it does have an ultra-wide lens. The Air also can’t do either macro or spatial photography either, both features of the iPhone 16.

So there are clearly gaps in the iPhone Air’s rear photography arsenal; it would be difficult to argue that it’s a match for recent two-lens iPhones in every regard. At the same time, I’d be surprised if the Air takes bad photos. iPhone photography has advanced to the point where it’s considerably more powerful than most of us need it to be, and my experience of reviewing even comparatively underpowered handsets like the 16e is that you have to really seek out the most demanding shooting conditions to find any noticeable weaknesses.

And when it comes to the front camera… well, that’s a different matter. It’s a significant step up on the previous generation. The Air’s selfie camera is rated at 18MP, up from 12MP on the entire 16-series, and now features the iPad’s handy Center Stage feature for automatic reframing based on face detection. Because of the larger square sensor, you can take selfies in portrait orientation (generally the most convenient), and Center Stage will reframe them as either portrait or landscape without having to change grip. The front camera is also capable of ultra-stabilised video in 4K HDR.

Apple

Everything (else) is awesome

Perhaps this will sound disingenuous following the comments above, but I don’t want to rag on the iPhone Air too much. Because this is exactly the kind of risky product Apple needs to be releasing. This is a remarkably conservative company, by and large, and it prefers to launch products which are the same as the previous generation, only slightly better. To release a product which is identifiably worse in some respects in order to achieve something genuinely new is exciting and admirable.

It is interesting, however, that the Air’s unique selling proposition—being amazingly thin—wasn’t addressed in the presentation anywhere near as much as the three topics I’ve discussed in this article. The speakers made a few poetic remarks about “feeling like you’re holding the future” and having to hold it to believe it’s real, but very little time was spent explaining why we need a 5.6mm phone when 7mm+ phones have been perfectly tolerable for more than a decade.

Apple

Has anyone got jeans pockets so tight their iPhone 16 won’t fit inside? Is the iPhone 16e too heavy? Do we really need a thinner iPhone? That’s the part where I need persuading.

But it’s a beautiful object, there’s no doubt about that. The mirrored finish is nice. The colors are nice (albeit perhaps a little too subtle; I’d love to have the option of sage like on the iPhone 17). I like the look of that bright 6.5-inch display, a worthwhile jump from the 6.1-inch screen on the iPhone 16, and the fact that ProMotion and always-on are also available on the iPhone 17 doesn’t make them any less appreciated. I know the A19 Pro chip will be overkill for today’s apps, but it means just that little bit more future-proofing.

In short, I’m sufficiently intrigued by the iPhone Air that I want to try it out for myself. Right now I don’t think there’s any point making a phone this thin, but I know enough about tech advancements to suspect that using the Air may change my mind. By the time the 18-series iPhones appear next year I may have got so used to a 5.6mm chassis that I can’t bear to go back to anything larger.

For more info about this year’s new phones, check out our huge iPhone 17 superguide.