iPhone Air review: Back to the future

The more I think about the iPhone Air, the more I think back to the introduction of the MacBook Air back in 2008. I used the word “compromise” ten times in my review of that first lightweight Mac laptop.

If the story of the MacBook Air is a story about compromise, the decision about whether the MacBook Air is a product worth having can be answered by one question: How much are you willing to compromise?

And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.

This year’s selection of iPhones offers users a ridiculous amount of choice. The iPhone 17 has gained numerous features previously limited to the high-end iPhone Pro line. The iPhone 17 Pro has powerful new cameras and a new unibody look, including a spectacular Cosmic Orange color option. Back in 2008, the low-end MacBook and high-end MacBook Pro held similar positions.

Just like back then, an interloper has arrived that completely breaks up the high-end/low-end dynamic. The iPhone Air is priced in the middle, but doesn’t quite fit there. It’s an iPhone that doesn’t share the design priorities of other iPhones. It’s designed for people who also have different priorities.

There are dozens of obvious reasons to buy an iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Pro instead of the iPhone Air. But when I hold the Air between my thumb and index finger and feel its weight and thinness, I begin to wonder how much those reasons matter.

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The iPhone Air feels great. It’s light (5.8 ounces/165 grams, compared to 7.3 ounces/206 grams for the iPhone 17 Pro and 6.2 ounces/177 grams for the iPhone 17). That weight seems even lighter because it’s distributed over a wider surface area than those other models, owing to the Air’s 6.5-inch diagonal screen.

It’s a screen size that’s larger than all but the iPhone 17 Pro Max, so it’s not really fair to say that the iPhone Air is small. It’s small in some dimensions and surprisingly large in others. This is a wider and taller phone than I’m used to, and it took me a little while to adapt.

Every time I pick up the iPhone Air, I notice how thin and light it feels. After a week’s usage, I switched to the iPhone 17 Pro and was struck by how different that phone felt: thick and heavy, like a TV remote control or something. And, to my surprise, the screen seemed small. I’ve always shied away from large iPhones, but maybe those large screens aren’t so bad when they’re attached to lightweight phones? I found myself missing the iPhone Air’s larger screen when I switched to the 17 Pro.

I used the iPhone Air exclusively without a case, and I endorse the school of thought that there’s not a lot of point to using it if you’re going to put a case on it. A case diminishes the unique feature of the Air, which is how thin and light it is. If you can’t imagine using an iPhone without a case, don’t even consider the iPhone Air. (As someone who generally does not use his iPhone with a case, it doesn’t bother me at all.)

During my week of primary use, I gradually figured out grips that made the iPhone Air feel safe in my hands. It’s thin, but wedging those titanium rails between my thumb and opposing fingers kept it safe. I also found pressing my index finger up against the bottom of the plateau on the phone’s back created a pretty good bit of leverage. After a few days, it all became muscle memory, and I stopped worrying about it.

Most of the time when I leave the house to run or walk the dog, I don’t bother taking my iPhone and just use a pair of AirPods playing podcasts from my Apple Watch. I started doing this because I hated bringing my iPhone with me in my pocket, where it would wiggle around and sometimes even begin to swing like a pendulum as I ran. Walking with the iPhone Air in my pocket felt a lot less obtrusive, perhaps because of the lighter weight, perhaps because it’s wider and therefore has less room to wiggle. In general, I enjoyed having a wider, thinner phone in my pocket instead of a narrower, thicker one.

Finally, the camera. I know that the iPhone Air’s camera system is intended to be listed among the device’s most severe compromises, and I don’t disagree with that assessment overall. But I will say this: the single 48MP camera on the iPhone Air is the best single camera Apple has ever made. While its lack of companion cameras limits the versatility of this device, the main camera (which can bin those 48MP together to create a more nuanced 12MP image, a super-resolution 24MP image, or—yes—can be tasks with capturing a single 48MP image) is very good. It’s worth being said.

And now, the compromises

Hold the iPhone Air in your hand, and it’s easy to become so intoxicated that you forget all the things you’re foregoing.

The single camera means there’s no telephoto camera, like on the iPhone 17 Pro, which offers an excellent 4x zoom with 8x digital crop this year. There’s also no ultra-wide camera, which offers an expansive view and macro mode, like on all the iPhone 17 models. You give up a lot of flexibility when you go down to a single camera. Just this weekend, I was using an iPhone 17 Pro on a trip to the country and used that phone’s zoom camera to capture lots of interesting wildlife. With the iPhone Air’s camera, many of those images would’ve lacked an impact.

The iPhone Air also has less battery capacity than other iPhones. Apple rates it at 27 hours of video playback, versus 33 hours on the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17. If you need to squeeze every hour out of your iPhone’s internal battery, taking a 20 percent cut is not going to work for you. However, for some use cases, it’s not a big deal: I am rarely away from charging opportunities for my iPhone for a long period of time, and when I am, I frequently carry a battery with me. I doubt the iPhone Air would really change that behavior appreciably. (I like that Apple offers a MagSafe battery pack, which allows you to use the iPhone Air in its thin and light mode whenever possible, and then weighs you down a little when you need some extra life. Better than carrying all that extra battery around 100% of the time.)

They have many names but are basically just black and white.

In a year where Apple seems to have gotten the message and introduced Cosmic Orange, the most interesting iPhone Pro color ever, the iPhone Air’s color palette is quite muted. There’s Space Black, and then three shades of white (Sky Blue, Cloud White, Light Gold). My Light Gold model is more gold than silver around the edges if you look really close, but I read it as silver until I really, really looked. The back glass similarly reads as white, but I’m sure it’s a yellow off-white. I don’t mind the iPhone Air being black or white, really, but it’s funny that choosing one means foregoing some fun colors that have finally extended across the rest of the product line.

Apple has generously bestowed the latest and greatest iPhone processor, the A19 Pro, on the iPhone Air. But it’s not quite that simple. The iPhone Air’s A19 Pro has one fewer GPU core than the one on the iPhone 17 Pro. The iPhone Air also lacks the thermal management updates that Apple rolled into the iPhone 17 Pro, so the back of the phone can get noticeably hot right up by the plateau into which most of its brains are tucked. Once those brains get too hot, the system has to cool them off by throttling the processor, reducing performance.

In other words, this phone has a fast processor, but it’ll heat up and slow down in extended work far more than the comparable iPhone 17 Pro. If you’re someone who pushes your iPhone hard, especially when playing games, this phone is not going to give you the best performance.

In short, the iPhone Air is not for you if you have severe battery demands, want maximum camera zoom flexibility, need to maximize processor performance, or want to flash a flashy color. In every case, the iPhone 17 Pro is a better bet.

A view of what’s next?

In 2017, Apple released the iPhone X, which was possibly the iPhone’s biggest step forward technologically since the original. We’ve been living in the wake of the iPhone X ever since: it brought us OLED and Face ID and also created a split between high-end and low-end models that has persisted since then. It pushed the standard iPhone price up to a thousand dollars for the first time.

And yet time marches on, and yesterday’s cutting-edge technology becomes today’s bog-standard features—this year, Apple brought always-on displays with ProMotion to the low-end iPhones. To stay in the high-tech game, you always need a fresh supply of new designs and innovations.

The iPhone Air marks the biggest change to the iPhone line since the iPhone X. It prioritizes thinness and lightness above all else. It uses a larger screen to create volume beneath which Apple can tuck enough battery to cross some invisible threshold of viability.

Most interestingly, Apple has adapted its signature camera bump, now extended to a full “iconic plateau,” to be the place where all the assorted computery bits of a phone are hidden. There’s only one camera on the iPhone Air, but the rest of that space is packed full of technology. Since Apple has changed its terminology, I guess I can’t call this a “computer bump,” but what about “processor plateau?”

Again, the memories of the MacBook Air keep rushing back. Apple’s goal there was to make a thin and light laptop, and along the way, it learned to pack the bottom mostly with battery and leave just enough space for an ever-smaller chunk of computing power. To get the physics to work out, it measured thinness from the front edge and then allowed it to grow thicker as it reached the back, very much the equivalent of offering a thin phone with an appreciable plateau at the other end.

You know how the MacBook Air story went. It was impractical at first, full of those compromises, but as Apple iterated from generation to generation, the compromises dropped away. The MacBook Air became Apple’s most popular laptop, but more than that, the innovations and priorities in the MacBook Air pointed the way forward for all Mac laptops, and really, almost all laptops of any kind.

I’m not saying the iPhone Air will follow quite the same trajectory, but it’s not hard to imagine that the difficult engineering decisions made to fulfill the iPhone Air’s design goals might spur innovation that drives all iPhones to be thinner and lighter and even to tuck most of their brainpower up in that brain bulge.

Still, that’s all about tomorrow. What about today?

Today, the iPhone Air feels like no other iPhone ever made. It’s just so appealing. But it’s got so many qualities that are simply disqualifying for so many use cases. If it were the only iPhone Apple sold, it would be a disaster. But it’s one of five new iPhones introduced in 2025, so it can afford to be what it is and see if it can find an audience.

No, the iPhone Air doesn’t make the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro feel like the past. Those phones still feel like the present.

But the iPhone Air feels like the future.

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