My tool of the year – toptrends.io

It’s 10:30 AM and I’m at 77%. It’s been a busy morning – kids waking up early, streaming the new Tame Impala album to my Sonos speakers, and watching some terrible videos from my friend Stephen – but nothing out of the ordinary. However, my iPhone 17 Pro won’t be this low this early. Am I worried? Yes and no. It’s a solvable problem, but it’s still a problem.

This is basically the outline of iPhone Airwhich, after a month in my pocket, I would highly and unreservedly recommend to anyone, not just early adopters or the wealthy. As a thin phone skeptic at the highest level, I was expecting the iPhone Air to be dismissed as a gimmick, or a throwback, but it’s not. This is a great product that reflects Apple’s unique ability to charge more than just an idea. It’s nothing perfect, but it’s certainly more complete than just the “V1” moniker it inherited.

8/10

SOC: A19 Pro chip
an offer: 6.5 inches
storage: 256 GB, 512 GB, or 1 TB
Ports: USB C

The iPhone Air is a phone with amazing capabilities in a thin and lightweight form factor that compromises in just the right areas.

Pros and cons

Lightweight, thin, and still fairly durable
An excellent and capable single rear camera
Battery life is sufficient for light use throughout the day
Consistently good performance

The single speaker is annoying, but it’s not a deal breaker
Heavy users will want to use the Pro
The lack of ultra-wide and telephoto camera options limits photo and video options

Price and availability

The iPhone Air starts at $999, which represents a $100 jump over the equivalent iPhone Plus that it replaces in the lineup. It’s available in black or white SKUs since it’s made with a titanium frame that doesn’t take into account the colors Apple brought back to the Pro lineup this year.

SOC: A19 Pro chip
an offer: 6.5 inches
storage: 256 GB, 512 GB, or 1 TB
Ports: USB C
Operating system: iOS
colors: Sky Blue, Light Gold, Cloud White, Space Black
Display type: Super Retina XDR display
material: Titanium

When restrictions are a virtue

The primary consideration when buying a phone is usually what it can offer you: Is the screen wide enough? Is the battery big enough for all day use? Do the cameras provide flexibility for most scenarios? But the iPhone Air flips the script a bit; Sure, the 6.5-inch screen is large enough for almost everything you want to do on the phone, but the fact that it’s stuck into a chassis that’s only 5.6mm thick is a nice thing.

On paper, the difference between the 5.6mm of the iPhone Air and the 8.75mm of the iPhone 17 Pro seems relatively small. At the personal level, and across days, weeks, months (and potentially years), the variation is enormous.

More importantly, the weight: The iPhone Air weighs just 165 grams, which is 41 grams less than the iPhone 17 Pro and 68 grams lighter than the 17 Pro Max. It’s a big deal. I have to go back at least half a decade or more to remember a phone that weighed so little, and was almost certainly half the size of this phone.

I couldn’t be more frank about how the pancake-like size and weight distribution of the iPhone Air affects its ease of use in a positive way. In fact, they are the reason you bought this phone. If you see little upside to owning a phone like this, aside from the advantage of having such a visually appealing phone, it’s probably not for you.

But to me, these physical facts are important. On the contrary, it’s worth the trade-offs you need to make when considering the iPhone Air.

The iPhone Air’s pancake-like size and weight distribution affect its usability in huge ways. In fact, they are the reason you bought this phone.

The camera you have in your pocket

The iPhone Air camera is a challenge that I’m willing to accept. It’s a reintroduction of the fixed-length rangefinder I carried with me to university, forcing me to physically move around to frame the shot I want, or rather than get it, settle for something more creative and unconventional.

Sure, I miss the ultra-wide and telephoto lenses I used so much in my short time with the iPhone 17 Pro, but what surprised me was how quickly I got over that longing for an easy zoom or a choppy landscape. Instead, I found myself thinking more intentionally about the image I was trying to capture, and feeling happier with the results.

Of course, the other camera is on the front, the same as on every other iPhone 17 model, with a square sensor and a more prominent capability. Does it change the game completely? No, it allows me to frame it better when my kids try to escape my frequent requests to take selfies.

The battery is not actually an issue

As a heavy user, the iPhone Air didn’t last me a full day. I’m going to stay away from this, because if you’re the type who’s sensitive to charging in the middle of the day, this isn’t the phone for you.

But generally speaking, with a single 30-60 minute charge somewhere around your afternoon coffee break, you’ll be fine until bedtime. I’ve come to fortunate use of my UAG 5K MagSafe charger which, when applied, makes the phone barely thicker than a regular charger, but that’s one consideration you need to make when deciding to buy an iPhone Air. It’s a trade-off I’m used to, and I feel like it’s actually acceptable, but I’m also near a charger most days of the week, so your mileage may vary. On longer trips, I found the reliable Anker 100 Wh charger to charge the Air quickly enough to avoid any real worry.

However, most days, I barely think about the iPhone Air’s battery. Its maintenance is neither an active chore nor a passive inconvenience; With wireless chargers all over my house, and magnetic chargers in my pocket or bag, charging a phone is a non-issue. This is not me being a battery advocate; On the contrary, this is me applauding Apple for making the battery in this svelte device so good that it barely needs babysitting, and I don’t know many people who expected this outcome on launch day.

The speaker is a red herring

“Just don’t watch movies on your phone,” I say out loud to a YouTuber complaining about how the iPhone Air’s single speaker makes for a precarious movie-watching experience. Yes, the earbud speaker is small and nowhere near as capable as the louder stereo setup on most modern phones, but in my experience, it not only gets loud enough, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do: transmit the occasional podcast or audiobook when my AirPods aren’t nearby.

Should you buy the Apple iPhone Air?

Air iPhone Defender

At this point, the rest of the story should be fairly obvious because… iPhone Air It’s basically a combination of the iPhone 15 Pro, 16 Pro (titanium frame), and iPhone 17 Pro (A19 Pro SoC, Ceramic Shield 2). The screen is great — the OLED is bright and accurate — and performance is great, even with fewer GPU cores than the Pro. Call quality and 5G performance are excellent, thanks to the C1X modem, a testament to how far Apple’s baseband team has come since the early days of its acquisition of beleaguered Intel.

Do I have any criticisms of this device? Honestly, not much. It sometimes gets warm when under heavy load, a result of the A19 Pro being crammed into a small area at the top of the phone, which Apple desperately wants us to call the “plateau.”

Yes, it’s too expensive, too limited, and probably too much for some people. But this is a phone made with a specific buyer in mind, and based on early indications, there are fewer of them than Apple expected. Is it because the basic idea of an ultrathin iPhone is flawed, or that the Air, despite itself, sits uncomfortably in the middle of Apple’s best-ever iPhone lineup, buoyed by a $799 iPhone 17 that got practically every upgrade we wanted and an iPhone 17 Pro lineup that noticeably improves sustained performance, battery life, and camera quality.

However, given all the options available this year, I would still choose the $999 iPhone Air over any of the others, both in terms of what it can do and what it can’t do. This may be my own thing, but it may also be an indication that there is a growing demand for smart devices, especially phones, that encourage restriction and thinking. The iPhone Air, with its slim frame and inherent limitations, is a step in the right direction.