Apple iPhone Air review: statement piece

The iPhone Air is as much a statement as it is a phone. It says something about the person using it: that they don’t mind giving up a few things for a phone that’s meaningfully thinner and lighter.

That they can give up all those extra cameras on the back and just live with one. That they, well, went out and bought The New iPhone — one that makes everyone go “Whooooaaa” when they hold it for the first time. That’s a hell of a lot of things for a 6.5-inch slab of titanium and glass to say, but then again, the iPhone Air isn’t your average phone.

You’ve already heard this a lot, but I’ll go ahead and say it because it bears repeating: the iPhone Air is shockingly thin and light. On paper, its dimensions might not seem dramatically different from your garden-variety phone. It’s 5.64mm thick compared to the 7.95mm iPhone 17, and it weighs 12 grams less. Isn’t this a lot of fuss over a few millimeters? Maybe, but I challenge you to pick up this phone for yourself and not be at least a little surprised at how much lighter it feels in your hand. When it comes to the device that’s constantly in your hand, pocket, or bag, those millimeters make a big difference.

But you don’t get a dramatically thinner phone without giving up a few things. And those things, boiled down to two categories, are battery life and camera versatility. Neither is a disaster. There’s enough battery power to get most people to the end of a day, and image quality from the single rear camera is good enough to satisfy someone who’s not too picky. But if you ask anyone which two things they’d most want improved on their next phone, they’d probably list those very features. Depending on the phone you’re upgrading from, this might be more of a lateral move.

For those two reasons, the iPhone Air won’t be the right device for most people considering a new iPhone. But for someone who’s not too demanding of their phone, the Air is going to feel pretty special.

So we’ve established that picking up and holding the iPhone Air for the first time is pretty cool. How about after that initial reaction wears off? After using the Air for the past week, the effect has been similar to the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge. I got used to the lightness a day or two in, but the Air kept surprising me in little moments here and there, easily fitting into a pocket or a bag where other phones dare not go. Walking around San Francisco, I kept the Air comfortably (without a case) in my jeans’ front pocket, which is something I can usually only get away with using my iPhone 13 Mini.

My overall impression using the Air is the same as with the S25 Edge: the slim profile might be the headline attraction, but the lighter weight is the real benefit. Putting the Air in my backpack’s slimmest pockets is great; holding the phone and scrolling without having to periodically adjust my grip is awesome. And for the occasion where you might actually hold the phone to your ear and talk to someone that way, it’s just a bit more comfortable than usual. Those little moments are when you’ll really appreciate the Air’s weight as its best feature.

That’s not to say this is a small phone. Like the S25 Edge, it’s a big phone with small phone energy. It’s still a stretch getting my thumb all the way across the 6.5-inch screen. It’s a little smaller than the Edge in every dimension — just a little shorter, slimmer, and less wide. But the edges are also slightly curved compared to the flat sides on Samsung’s phone, making the Air feel a little less secure in my hand. I like the look of the Air’s frosted Ceramic Shield back, but it’s hard to get a secure grip on it. I’m not a case person, but I’d make an exception for this phone.

What’s the point of a thin phone if you’re just going to put a case on it? The weight, for starters. Apple’s own MagSafe case for the Air is so light it hardly feels any heavier than without the case. There’s the bumper case, too, which helps with the grip issue. Both cases make it a little harder to get the Air into the slim pockets it could fit into otherwise. But you don’t totally give up the benefits of a thin and light phone if you want to use it with a case.

I’ve heard some concerns that the iPhone Air’s camera bar might make it feel off-balance and top-heavy, but it didn’t feel that way to me as I used it over the past week. The phone still wobbles when you set it down on a flat surface and tap the screen, which isn’t unique to the Air. The long camera bump helps mitigate this a bit, and the clear MagSafe case corrects the problem altogether. One more good reason to add a case.

The Air gets Apple’s latest chip, the A19 Pro, minus one GPU core compared to the version of the chipset in the 17 Pro. There’s no vapor chamber cooling here as there is on the Pro models this time, and you’ll feel exactly where the processor is as soon as it starts heating up. I didn’t encounter any workloads in my day-to-day that caused the Air to stutter or drop the screen brightness. A short Diablo Immortal session warmed up the phone considerably, but not enough to impact performance.

In the no-news-is-good-news department: I haven’t noticed any unusual behavior from Apple’s house-made cellular and networking chips. The C1X cellular modem is an updated version of the chip that debuted in the iPhone 16E that doesn’t offer super-fast but hard-to-find mmWave 5G, but does support the sub-6 GHz 5G I use most frequently. Between this and the N1 networking chip, I haven’t seen any red flags waving on this path Apple is taking away from its reliance on Qualcomm chips for connectivity.

Now for the less-good news: battery life is just okay. And honestly, that’s a pretty good outcome for the Air; the situation could have been worse. If you’re a light user and you spend most of your time on Wi-Fi, you might never have a problem with the battery.

Personally, it makes me a little too anxious to see that battery indicator drop into the 20s before dinnertime, though in fairness I was going pretty hard on the battery with around five hours of screen-on time. On a much lighter day on my home Wi-Fi, three hours of screen-on time took the battery down to around 40 percent by bedtime. I’d call that within the bounds of acceptable, if a little on the low end for a $1,000 phone.

Decent battery life after week one of using a phone doesn’t really concern me. I worry more about how that battery performance will hold up a year from now. If it’s lackluster now, it’s only going to get worse as the battery naturally degrades. Apple’s recent track record here isn’t stellar, either. That’s something to bear in mind if you’re the kind of person who wants to buy a phone once every five years and not have to think about another purchase in between.

You can buy a little peace of mind in the form of a $99 MagSafe battery pack. Its dimensions are specifically tailored to the Air’s; it doesn’t fit properly on either of the 17 Pro phones. But because the Air’s camera bar is slimmer, there’s more room on the back of the phone for the battery pack. You can put it on a 17 Pro or Pro Max, but it doesn’t align quite right and will hang off the bottom edge of the phone (though it does stay put on a Pixel 10 Pro XL). The battery is itself a lighter, slimmer version of the original MagSafe battery pack, though when you actually put it on the Air you’ll notice that you’re no longer using a super-thin, super-svelte phone. The whole thing is heavy enough that it’s unpleasant to hold and use for too long, but it’s a good enough solution if you’re out and about or want a recharge at home without being tethered to a wall outlet.

On the subject of limitations: that camera. I mean, technically there are two of them — the 48-megapixel rear camera and a new 18-megapixel selfie camera that does some cool stuff. But there’s just one sensor and lens on that rear camera bump, even though the Galaxy S25 Edge managed to fit a second one. The single rear camera feels justifiable on the $599 iPhone 16E; on the Air it feels like a real concession.

It’s a tradeoff that a lot of people will be fine with, and the 26mm-equivalent camera includes sensor-shift stabilization to help keep shutter speeds and ISOs lower in dim light. It’s the smaller sensor used by the regular 17 rather than the larger one in the Pros, which is a difference that manifests in edge cases. With the 17 Pro you can manage a decent amount of detail from low light portraits with the 2x crop zoom; on the Air, fine detail gets smoothed away at the 2x setting. Otherwise, portrait mode photos are fine.

In addition to the 2x crop there’s also the 28mm- and 35mm-equivalent settings that use detail from a full-resolution capture to do a kind of digital zoom upscaling without looking too digital zoom-y. But more than the telephoto, I missed the ultrawide — especially in those situations where I couldn’t move back any farther. Some shots just call for the drama of a 13mm-equivalent view, you know?

The loss of the ultrawide bothers me, but the Air gains some selfie camera updates that might matter more to this phone’s target audience. The new front-facing camera on the Air and the 17 series uses a square format sensor that can rotate automatically between portrait and landscape orientations without losing a bunch of resolution in the process. You can rotate or zoom in and out manually, or let Center Stage take the wheel. It’s kind of wild to see it in action, and I think it’s something group selfie-takers will come to rely on without thinking about it.

The other cool new selfie feature is Dual Capture, which records video from the front- and rear-facing cameras at once. You’ve been able to do this in third-party camera apps, but now it’s baked right into the native camera app. The selfie capture is overlaid on the rear-camera video as a picture-in-picture window that you can move to any corner of the frame — but only as you’re recording, not after the fact. Initially I was skeptical that I’d really use this feature, but I can already think of a handful of times in the recent past that I either wish I’d had it or remembered to use it. Mostly, I’m thinking of the videos I take of my kid where I’m just a disembodied voice that he’s talking to. They’re basically the historical record of where we went and what we were doing, so it would be nice to be able to look back on some of them and see that I was actually there too.

There’s one more statement that the iPhone Air makes, and it comes directly from Apple. It’s a declaration of what the company can achieve now, and a hint of what’s to come. After all, if you’ve made one super-slim phone, you can just double that and add a hinge to make a folding phone, right? Even if it’s not that simple, the Air asks us to remember that there’s still innovation going on in mobile hardware, despite the last decade or so of phones looking pretty same-y.

But that’s speculation. In the here and now, I’ve been trying to suss out who exactly the Air is for. And I think this is a device that lends itself to a life of ease. It’s for someone who is unbothered by a short battery and potentially shorter battery lifespan. It’s for someone who can let go of the photos they missed because they couldn’t zoom out. For someone who fits that description, it’s a rewarding device to use. And it sure makes a statement.