Pros & Cons
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- Super thin and light
- Excellent screen
- Quick performance
- Fast wireless speeds
- Sharp cameras
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- Shortest battery life among the latest iPhone 17 family
- Limited camera functionality
- Runs hot
Apple iPhone Air Specs
| Battery Life (As Tested) | 19 hours, 15 minutes |
| Camera Resolution (Rear; Front-Facing) | 48MP; 18MP |
| CPU | Apple A19 Pro |
| Dimensions | 6.15 by 2.94 by 0.22 inches |
| Operating System | iOS 26 |
| Screen Resolution | 2,736 by 1,260 pixels |
| Screen Size | 6.5 |
The $999 Apple iPhone Air is a wondrous piece of hardware. Few phones are as thin and light while still offering a vibrant screen, decent battery life, solid performance, and a proper camera. It's not the fastest or longest-lasting model in the iPhone 17 lineup, and some will find its single camera limiting, but it's the most interesting phone Apple has made in years. Ultimately, the iPhone Air is worth considering if you want a basic, competent phone experience in as small a handset as possible. Most everyone else should look to the $799 iPhone 17, which is nearly as good as the pricier Pro models thanks to its fantastic screen, fast performance, and excellent battery life, making it our Editors' Choice winner for iPhones.
Design: It's Hard Not to Be Impressed
If you're as old as I am, you likely remember how chunky mobile phones were in the 1990s and early 2000s. I used handsets that were nearly 2 inches thick, and I actually put them in my pocket! Everything since then feels pretty "thin and light" as far as I am concerned, but the iPhone Air takes things to a whole new level.
Similar to the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge ($1,099.99), the iPhone Air is a reduced-size version of an outgoing model. The S25 Edge is a slimmer variant of the S25+ ($999.99), while the iPhone Air replaces the iPhone 16 Plus ($899) in Apple's iPhone 17 lineup.
(Credit Eric Zeman)The iPhone Air measures 0.22 inches deep if you don't include the camera plateau. This is the official thickness. The Air's camera plateau is an interesting changeup from Apple. The horizontal bar almost resembles the camera module of Google's Pixel phones. I actually like the simplicity of the single lens, which has a neat and clean appearance.
In comparison, Samsung's Galaxy S25 Edge is 0.23 inches thick, not including the camera module. I broke out my calipers to see what difference the cameras make. Where the camera lens protrudes, the iPhone Air's thickness measures 0.45 inches, or twice as thick as the rest of the phone. When I took the same measurement of the Galaxy S25 Edge, I found the phone's thickness at the camera lens is 0.40 inches, or 0.05 inches slimmer than the Air. Which phone is actually thinner? You tell me.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)Whatever measurement you apply, the iPhone Air is breathtakingly thin compared with the rest of the iPhone 17 lineup. More importantly, it feels thinner than the other phones. This is by design. The Air has a polished titanium frame around the edges with a rounded shape. It blends into Apple's Ceramic Shield panels seamlessly and feels smooth all the way around. This significantly reduces the perceived thickness of the phone when you hold it. Meanwhile, the other three iPhone 17s have nearly flat side edges that feel thicker due more to their shape than their actual measurements.
The Galaxy S25 Edge, by contrast, has flat edges with sharp angles where the frame meets the glass. Like the iPhone 17 family, the S25 Edge's design increases the perceived thickness of the phone and makes it feel much larger than it really is. It also stands taller and wider to accommodate the slightly larger display (6.5 inches versus 6.7 inches).
Absolutely no other phone I've held feels as good to use or carry around as the Air. There's no forcibly cramming the phone into your pockets—the Air just fits.
Apple assures me that the iPhone Air is strong. Behind the scenes, Apple asked me to try to break the iPhone Air with my bare hands. I couldn't do it. I managed to bend it slightly, but no more than that. Apple then put the phone in a machine that pressed the center of the phone with 175 pounds of force (more than twice what I could do with my hands). It bent visibly, but quickly returned to its original shape once the machine let up the pressure. Apple says it tests every product beyond its breaking point, and the company is confident the iPhone Air will survive most trials and tribulations that befall it. To that end, it uses its own Ceramic Shield 2 on the front and Ceramic Shield glass on the rear of the Air. The second-generation glass is three times more scratch-resistant than the first generation. The phone also has an IP68 rating to protect it from dust and water, which is table stakes for any flagship phone. I'm sure it's worth slapping a case on it nonetheless.
Interestingly, Apple says it jammed a lot of the core components into the raised area near the phone's top edge, including the rear camera sensor, front camera, sensor, earpiece speaker, and the A19 Pro processor. It did this to fill the rest of the inner volume with as much battery capacity as possible. Note that no versions of the iPhone Air have a physical SIM slot. It's eSIM only. Apple recovered the area the SIM slot would have consumed to fit more battery.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)Beyond the core design and camera plateau, much of the phone's layout will be familiar to anyone who's used an iPhone before. The same Action Button and separate volume buttons are on the left edge, and the power key and Camera Control line the right side. The USB-C (v2.0) port is centered on the bottom edge, and you'll see four antenna lines breaking up the titanium encircling the phone. One thing that stands out is how thin the buttons are. They have a sharper feel than the buttons of the other three iPhone 17s.
The color selection includes Cloud White, Light Gold, Sky Blue, or Space Black. I received the Light Gold model for review, and I'm thankful that the gold accents are subtle and not overbearing. I find the smooth feel of the matte rear panel particularly appealing.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)There's no question that the iPhone Air stands apart from the other iPhone 17s for its design. In terms of usability, it's terrific to carry around and interact with throughout the day. It makes me wish all the iPhones were this thin.
Display: As Good as Every Other iPhone
The Air's screen splits the middle of the iPhone 17 lineup. It measures 6.5 inches, while the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro displays measure 6.3 inches, and the 17 Pro Max screen stretches to 6.9 inches. Otherwise, all four iPhones use the same OLED technology and have the same 460 pixels per inch screen density, brightness levels, and ProMotion adaptive refresh rate (1Hz to 120Hz), which enables the always-on display. These are the most equivalent screens we've ever seen from Apple across four phones.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)Over a week of testing, I used the iPhone Air in every lighting environment I could find. Not only is it dazzlingly bright and easy to see and use everywhere I took it, but it also benefits from multiple modes for managing blue light, white balance, late-night viewing, and accessibility needs.
The S25 Edge has a larger 6.7-inch screen with the same dynamic refresh rate and more pixels (3,120 by 1,440) but fewer nits (2,600 peak). Even when compared side by side, the 400-nit difference between the two screens is hard to judge.
Performance: Quick, But Could Be Faster
This is where things start to get interesting. Apple debuted the A19 processor, which succeeds last year's A18, for the iPhone 17. The base iPhone 17 gets the A19 while the Air, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max get the A19 Pro.
The chip features a six-core CPU with two performance cores and four efficiency cores, a five-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, and a 16-core Neural Engine (or NPU). The 17 and Air get five GPU cores while the two Pro models get an additional sixth GPU core. Apple says the Neural Accelerators in the GPU, new for the A19, deliver a step forward in AI performance, with four times the AI compute power compared with the A18. This means the A19 is quicker at generative tasks, such as generating images, videos, and features like Clean Up in Apple Photos. In addition to the A19, the Air has 12GB of RAM and comes in 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB storage options.
We run artificial benchmarks to calculate how processors perform against competing phones. This year sees some of the closest numbers between iPhone variants. Overall, the Air is the slowest of the iPhone 17s, but not by all that much. For example, it has basically the same CPU performance as the iPhone 17, yet it falls behind in GPU power. The two phones have nearly identical GFXBench scores, but the iPhone 17 outguns the Air in the 3DMark and AnTuTu tests by a margin of about 10%. My guess is this is directly related to thermals. The iPhone Air becomes much warmer when running benchmarks than the iPhone 17.
Looking at competing phones, the Air (and every other iPhone 17) wrecks the Pixel 10 series phones (which use the Google Tensor G5) on benchmarks, but it comes in just behind the Samsung Galaxy S25 family (which use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite).
What does this mean in the real world? The iPhone Air is just as quick as the other iPhones at opening and managing multiple apps and running Apple Intelligence. The Air does get warmer more often when doing things like editing photos or videos, and it definitely heats up when gaming. There's a pocket just below the camera plateau that really gets warm when you run titles like Asphalt Legends. The Air doesn't benefit from the vapor chamber that Apple has engineered for the Pro models, which is a shame, because it seems to need it the most.
Battery: Shorter Than the iPhone 17, Longer Than the Galaxy
Apple doesn't reveal the capacity of iPhone batteries, and internet sleuths haven't sussed out the details just yet. All we know about the iPhone Air's battery capacity is that Apple crammed as much battery into its slim chassis as it could manage.
As it always does, Apple rates iPhone battery life by measuring the number of hours each phone can stream video content. For the Air, that means up to 27 hours for a video stored locally on the device or 22 hours when that video is streamed over a wireless connection. These estimates are close to those of the iPhone 16 Plus (27 hours and 24 hours, respectively). The numbers improve to 40 hours and 35 hours, respectively, if you slap an iPhone Air MagSafe Battery accessory onto the back—but with it attached, the iPhone Air measures 0.54 inches thick and weighs 10.23 ounces. Apple isn't disclosing the capacity of the MagSafe battery, but says it's equal to 50% of the Air's internal battery (again, whatever that is).
In our test, we stream a full HD video over Wi-Fi with the screen brightness set all the way up. The iPhone Air ran for 19 hours and 15 minutes. That's less than the 16 Plus's 21 hours and 51 minutes, but better than the iPhone 16's result of 17 hours and 47 minutes. More importantly, it's the shortest battery life of the new iPhone 17 models by several hours. The iPhone 17 runs for five hours longer, the 17 Pro runs for eight hours longer, and the 17 Pro Max runs for an amazing 13 hours longer. If you have battery anxiety, the iPhone Air is not the iPhone for you; the other models offer far more battery life.
The iPhone Air does best the S25 Edge, which ran for 16 hours and 15 minutes, and the Pixel 10 Pro, which lasted only 12 hours and 40 minutes.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)All the iPhone 17 models support about the same wired (30W) charging speeds, and are compatible with MagSafe and Qi2 wireless charging accessories. The iPhone 17 and Pro models charge wirelessly at up to 25W with the right MagSafe charger, but the Air is limited to slower wireless charging of 20W.
When plugged into Apple's new variable-rate iPhone charger (40W-60W), the Air needed only 59 minutes to reach a full charge. That's quick for an iPhone. Only the fastest Android phones beat that speed.
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Connections: As Fast As You Need
The iPhone Air stands out among the iPhone 17 family for its cellular modem. It relies on Apple's second-generation in-house modem, the C1x. The other three iPhones use a third-party modem (most likely Qualcomm).
The company debuted the C1 in the iPhone 16e earlier this year. Apple says it's already moved forward a generation thanks to how the C1x interacts with the A19 Pro chip in the phone. The radio handles sub-6GHz 5G, including C-band, but not speedier mmWave. Even so, Apple says the C1x and the iPhone Air should deliver twice the cellular speeds that the C1 and iPhone 16e did. I didn't see that type of result in testing, but I did see speeds quick enough for most any mobile application you might need to run over the network.
I tested the Air on AT&T in the New York City area and saw a peak download speed of 617Mbps and a peak upload speed of 219Mbps. Those are excellent speeds for sub-6GHz 5G and more than enough for most people. While the download speed is about on par with the 16e, the upload is twice as quick. Apple says the C1x modem has an entirely new front end compared with the C1, in addition to new algorithms that take advantage of the A19 Pro processor. The rest of the iPhone 17 lineup gets mmWave, which means potential peak speeds quicker than 1Gbps. In testing, however, I only saw about a 50Mbps improvement in speeds from the other phones via mmWave.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)For the first time in an iPhone, Apple has combined the Bluetooth, Thread, and Wi-Fi radios into a single component called the N1. The N1 packs Bluetooth 6.0, the latest version of Thread, and Wi-Fi 7, which is all anyone needs at the moment. The company says the N1 allows it to maintain greater control and deliver better efficiency than it can achieve with third-party components. I got excellent Wi-Fi speeds of 703Mbps down and 481Mbps up in testing. And the Bluetooth connection remains steadfast with the new AirPods Pro 3.
The Air also features dual-frequency GPS, Apple's second-generation ultra-wideband chip, and NFC for tap-and-go payments. In other words, it has a full radio suite.
Audio: Great Sound, But No Stereo
The iPhone Air is Apple's first phone in years with just a single speaker. The speaker is one of the components Apple wedged under the camera plateau. It provides audio for phone calls, the speakerphone, and any media you care to listen to out loud.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)The speaker provides a surprising range. During voice calls, the earpiece creates crystal-clear audio that is bright and free from background noise. Those I spoke to in test calls said I sounded like I was in the same room. The earpiece gets up to a loud 77dB, which is more than enough to hear calls despite environmental noise. The speakerphone generates a bit more oomph at about 88dB, though it starts to crackle a bit from distortion if you set it all the way up.
I listened to our test track, The Knife's "Silent Shout," and came away impressed with the experience. This track has a thumpy bass line audible from the Air despite the layers of other instruments on top. At its peak, the song reached 89dB with the volume cranked. Again, I heard some distortion with the volume at this level, but the Air produces enough power to push sound into a mid-sized room.
You can opt for Bluetooth earphones for a more personal listening experience.
You get stereo sound and more volume from the iPhone 17. The 17's pair of speakers also offers clear, loud sound. I'd call the quality equivalent between the two, with the iPhone 17 able to generate a bit more audio power.
Camera: Solid, But Single
The iPhone Air's lone rear camera is its most significant limitation. The iPhone 17 has two rear cameras, and the Pro models have three, giving them a significantly expanded toolset for mobile photography.
The Fusion camera can capture up to 48MP, but it blends several images to create 24MP shots. Apple has used this Fusion system in its iPhones for several generations now. The camera has an aperture of f/1.6, sensor-shift optical image stabilization, 2x optical-quality telephoto zooming, digital zoom up to 10x, and a sapphire crystal lens cover.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)The Air provides many of the shooting modes the other iPhone 17s do, but not all of them. For example, without an ultra-wide camera, it lacks 0.5x zooming. And the 2x option is as far as you can zoom "optically." You still get the True Tone flash, Photonic Engine, Smart HDR 5, and modes like portrait, night, panorama, and all of Apple's photographic styles.
Apple has redesigned the camera app for iOS 26, and a short tutorial helpfully explains the biggest changes. The secondary shooting modes are hidden in favor of simple Photo and Video modes. You can swipe the mode button left or right to access more modes, like Portrait, Cinematic, Slo-Mo, and so on. As usual, quick buttons let you tap to reach 1x and 2x zoom, as well as a small drop-down to tweak settings like file type (HEIC, RAW) or resolution (24MP, 48MP). I don't necessarily think the changes make the app any easier or simpler to use, but at least you have all the same features from iOS 17 and the iPhone 16 family, even if they're in a different spot.
For me, the real issue is not having the zoom range you get on the Pro models. Those allow you to go from 0.5x to 8x with optical quality. Here, you have just 1x to 2x. Sure, you can zoom up to 10x via digital cropping, but it's not pretty, despite the magic Apple dusted into the imaging pipeline to clean things up.
How do the photos look? You can get excellent results at 1x and 2x. The Air's camera takes sharp images with proper color and exposure, and plenty of detail hiding therein. I have absolutely no complaints about the power of the phone's main camera. I even noticed some fast shutter speeds that really froze motion, like a fountain in the evening.
(Credit: Eric Zeman)
(Credit: Eric Zeman)Things really get interesting with the selfie camera. Apple has completely rethought the front shooter, and I won't be surprised if we see copycats next year. Apple opts to go with an 18MP square sensor across the entire iPhone 17 line. This sensor allows you to take portrait or landscape images, no matter which way you hold the phone. Moreover, you can shoot wide and focused fields of view, giving you eight possible photographic shapes and styles from this single camera. It's really quite something. Here's a collection of the four main shapes taken in Portrait mode; I took all four of these without moving the phone or my hand.
On the video front, the iPhone Air is just as capable as the standard iPhone, meaning it can shoot 4K60 footage in Dolby Vision, stabilized video, slow-motion, and time-lapse. You also get the standard batch of Apple tools, such as TrueTone flash, night mode, Action mode in 2.8K Dolby Vision at 30fps, Spatial Audio, and so on.
The last big feature is Dual Capture, which lets you use the front and rear cameras simultaneously to shoot video. Android phones have had this for years, and surely some iPhone owners will have a hoot experimenting with it for the first time. It's perfect for reaction videos on social media and so on.
The iPhone Air does a phenomenal job for a phone with a single rear camera. However, thanks to their additional lenses, you may simply want the expanded focal range that the regular and Pro iPhone 17 models provide.
Software: iOS 26 Ushers In a Whole New Experience
The iPhone Air ships with iOS 26, Apple's latest mobile operating system. It's a whopper of an update, both from a design and feature perspective.
Liquid Glass is the first thing you'll notice. It's the new design language and has a distinct look. You may hate it; it's not for everyone. You can revert it to something resembling iOS 17, but it takes some doing.
Some of the tentpole features include the refreshed visual look to messaging and its expanded usability options (polls), the camera app and its simplified user interface, the rehash of the Apple Photos app, which reverts things a bit after the outcry following iOS 18's disaster, and the greatly expanded lock screen, which now supports dynamic widgets. It's all a lot of fun and makes for some improved usability and greater flexibility in making the user interface your own.
On the Apple Intelligence front, there are a handful of new features. iOS 26 introduces new Live Translation for two-way conversations between people and improves the Visual Intelligence tool for visual search results. You also get more fun tools in the Image Playground and Genmoji space, and more personalized fitness data and help from Apple's voice-powered Workout Buddy.
Apple typically supports its iPhones with feature and security updates for at least five years, which is a little short of the seven years Google and Samsung promise for their flagship models.
We'll have a full review of all the new features in iOS 26 in the days ahead, so check back soon.