There’s nothing worse than a product reviewer that tells you how great a device is when he’s not even close to willing to spend his own money on it, right? Well that, dear reader, is the journey I’m about to take you on today with this iPhone Air review. This is going to be a classic tale of a product that I absolutely love, but would never, in a million years, purchase.
I’m even going to stray down that path of finding really specific use cases where this would be right for you. It’s that time-honored, PR-pleasing, really safe approach that we’re all familiar with.
Yes indeed, if you don’t care about the camera, battery life, or putting a case on your phone, then the iPhone Air is a great choice. And the kicker is, I really do love the device. I absolutely love it.
It takes me back to 2014, the undisputed golden age of smartphones (you can dispute it in the comments but I won’t read it; I’m too busy dreaming about 2014). The iPhone 6 launched that year, and it was the only iPhone that I stood in line to get. The product weighed 129g, and it was the first that Apple used a larger, 4.7-inch screen on. Respective to its era, it was the best iPhone ever made.
Two years before that, Apple switched from its larger 30-pin connector to Lightning, and with the iPhone 7, the headphone jack was removed. There was a lot of discourse around the idea that Apple was putting form over function, sacrificing anything it could to make its phones thinner and lighter.
Then, the opposite happened. Batteries got bigger, cameras got better, and chipsets got more powerful. Today’s iPhone 17 Pro Max weighs over a half-pound. If no one was asking for their phone to get ever-thinner and ever-lighter, no one was asking for this either.
Apple sent us the iPhone Air for review. It had no input on the contents of this article.
8/10
SoC
A19 Pro chip 6‑core CPU with 2 performance and 4 efficiency cores 5‑core GPU with Neural Accelerators 16‑core Neural Engine Hardware-accelerated ray tracing
Display
Super Retina XDR display 6.5‑inch (diagonal) all‑screen OLED display 2736‑by‑1260‑pixel resolution at 460 ppi
Storage
256GB, 512GB, 1TB
Ports
USB 2 Type-C
The iPhone Air is the slimmest phone Apple has ever made, and it’s the lightest one that’s currently available. It has a single-lens main camera, and an A19 Pro chipset under the hood.
Pros & Cons
- Beautifully design
- Feels delightful to carry
- Powerful performance
- No compromises on key iPhone features like the Action button, Camera Control, or MagSafe
- Only one camera lens, and missing video capture features
- Small battery
iPhone Air pricing and availability
The iPhone Air was announced on September 9 and was made available on September 19, 2025. It’s available now from Apple, all major carriers, Best Buy, and so on. There are four colors: Sky Blue, Light Gold, Cloud White, and Space Black.
It starts at $999 for the 256GB model, increasing in $200 increments for the 512GB and 1TB variants, topping out at $1,399.
SoC
A19 Pro chip 6‑core CPU with 2 performance and 4 efficiency cores 5‑core GPU with Neural Accelerators 16‑core Neural Engine Hardware-accelerated ray tracing
Display
Super Retina XDR display 6.5‑inch (diagonal) all‑screen OLED display 2736‑by‑1260‑pixel resolution at 460 ppi
Storage
256GB, 512GB, 1TB
Ports
USB 2 Type-C
Operating System
iOS 26
Front camera
18MP Center Stage camera ƒ/1.9 aperture
Rear camera
48MP Fusion Main: 26 mm, ƒ/1.6 aperture, sensor-shift optical image stabilization, 100% Focus Pixels, support for super-high-resolution photos (24MP and 48MP)
Connectivity
Apple C1X cellular modem 5G (sub-6 GHz) with 4×4 MIMO Gigabit LTE with 4×4 MIMO
Dimensions
6.15×2.94×0.22in (156.2×74.7×5.64mm)
Colors
Sky Blue, Light Gold, Space Black, Cloud White
Weight
5.82 ounces (165 grams)
IP Rating
IP68
No one is asking for thinner and lighter phones
Maybe you should
I’ve been doing this for well over a decade, and I’ve reviewed hundreds of phones. I’ve read scores of comments from people who say they don’t care about a phone’s thickness and weight. I can’t recall a single time someone has said they do care about it, let alone made a purchasing decision for it.
The iPhone Air weighs 165g, two grams heavier than Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge. Thin and light devices are great, even if it’s tough to acknowledge. It’s delightful when you stick a device in your pocket and suddenly it isn’t weighing you down like it used to.
The iPhone Air is reminiscent of Jony Ive-era design.
The problem is that it’s something you have to experience. We all suffer from the old “what I have is fine” feeling. Why would I care about my phone weighing less when I don’t care how heavy my phone is? How can you improve that someone needs a better experience?
The iPhone Air is a work of art, a piece of jewelry. The quality of its design can’t be questioned, with its polished titanium frame and matte rear glass panel. It maintains the iPhone features that make it an iPhone, including an Action button, Camera Control, and MagSafe.
The big, glaring camera compromises
I might call them cameramises because I’m the writer and you can’t stop me
The iPhone Air has the same 48MP main camera sensor as the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro series, but that’s it. There’s no ultra-wide like there is on the iPhone 17, and certainly no telephoto like on the Pro.
Those two sentences actually tell you most of what you need to know. It has the same main sensor as the rest of the lineup, so camera quality is the same, at least on regular photos. When you see someone posting on Instagram and saying, “Wow the iPhone Air camera is surprisingly good”, remember that it’s not surprising at all. They’re just not telling you the whole story.
The single-lens camera does everything the main camera can do on the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro.
The iPhone 17 Pro series absolutely knocks lossless zoom out of the park this year. It blows me away. Without the added 4x zoom lens, you’ll rapidly lose quality as you pinch to zoom. In fact, while the Camera app on my iPhone 17 Pro Max has toggled to zoom at 2x, 4x, and 8x, the only toggle on the iPhone Air is for 2x.
Here’s a regular photo taken at 1x zoom (left: iPhone Air, right: iPhone 17 Pro Max):
If I didn’t tell you which phone was which, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. They have the same main sensor and the same chipset. Now, take a look at 4x zoom.
Now, you’ll start to see a difference. Finally, look at 8x zoom:
There’s a huge difference. Historically, zoom lenses don’t perform at night. To put it really (OK, overly) simply, they work by packing a high resolution into a camera with a smaller field of view. A smaller sensor means less light gets in, and often, low-light performance is so bad that a lot of phones don’t even use the zoom lens when it’s dark enough.
But like I said, the zoom lens on the iPhone 17 Pro series is such a significant improvement.
Once again, we’ll start at 1x.
Once again, the images are pretty much indistinguishable from each other. Next is 4x.
And finally, 8x.
And then there’s the ultra-wide sensor, which isn’t just an iPhone Pro feature, but a base iPhone feature. It’s definitely my least-used sensor when taking photos, but its omission causes you to miss out on some key video recording features, including Cinematic mode, macro video recording, and spatial video recording. To be clear, those video capture features are all included on the regular iPhone 17, which costs $200 less than the iPhone Air.
Look, lots of people ask me which phone they should buy, and when I suggest a ‘pro’ version of whatever they’re thinking about, they simply tell me they don’t care about the camera much. “Takes nice pictures” is fine for a whole lot of people, and that’s great. Just make sure you know which group you’re in.
One thing that I’m not going to do is post a huge gallery of pictures I took with the iPhone Air, which I typically do in phone reviews. It’s a great camera, barring what you’re missing from the two other sensors found on other models. Adding a whole bunch of photos that demonstrate that the camera capabilities are exactly what you’d expect from a premium iPhone with one excellent camera lens is a waste of your time. You know what it can do, and you know the limitations.
It uses an A19 Pro chip, for some reason
I’m not clear on why it needs a better chip than iPhone 17
The iPhone Air packs Apple’s best in-house smartphone chip, the A19 Pro. It’s the same one that’s in the iPhone 17 Pro series, rather than the A19 that’s in the iPhone 17. It’s an odd choice, since the A19 Pro is throttled in the iPhone Air. It does make me wonder if the company could have used a regular A19 and charged $100 less.
I really don’t think the chip makes a difference. Apple seems to be touting AI workloads on the A19 Pro, not that I did or ever would do any kind of testing for that on a phone such as this. The iPhone Air is a beautiful, amazing product that serves users in a way that they don’t even know they need, but it’s just not going to be the thing you buy if you want a performance powerhouse. The power envelope isn’t there, and the battery is already too small to be using that much power.
The A19 Pro delivers, even if it doesn’t deliver as much as it does on an iPhone 17 Pro.
I ran some benchmarks on the iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 Pro Max just so you can see the difference. I’ve also got the OnePlus 15 in hand, which has the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, but you’ll have to wait a bit to see how that one stacks up.
iPhone Air
iPhone 17 Pro Max
Geekbench 6 (single / multi / GPU)
3784 / 9710 / 38,306
3801 / 9740 / 45,978
Geekbench AI
6,580
6542
Steel Nomad Light
1,876
2567
Steel Nomad Light Stress Test (Lowest / Best / Stability)
1450 / 1975 / 73.4%
1912 / 2558 / 74.8%
AnTuTu (overall / CPU / GPU / MEM / UX)
2,098,498 / 701,709 / 667,830 / 354,904 / 374,055
2,378,004 / 816,637 / 900,114 / 278,766 / 382,587
Based on benchmark scores, it seems like for the most part, it’s the GPU that’s throttled, or at least the most throttled. Still, it’s not something you’re going to notice in daily use.
As you can guess, battery life isn’t great. It’s not terrible either, as it got me through the day. But if you’re the type that isn’t near a charger all day, this might not be for you. If you sit at a desk all day like I do and it’s easy to top up your phone, then it’s a nonissue.
Apple did make a MagSafe battery pack for the iPhone Air, which feels oddly specific because it should work on any iPhone. I suppose it’s a way for Apple to say, “Hey, this is the thing you need a battery pack for.” The only problem is, if you’re slapping a battery on the back of the iPhone Air, you’re already missing what makes it great.
Should you buy the iPhone Air?
You should buy the iPhone Air if:
- You want a beautiful product that’s comfortable to carry
- Want premium but aren’t super-invested in the camera
You should NOT buy the iPhone Air if:
- You care about the best camera features
- You’re out and about all day / not near a charger
Like I said from the very beginning, the iPhone Air is a product that I am absolutely in love with. Would I buy it myself? Absolutely not. Yes indeed, it’s the internet’s favorite kind of product review.
But that’s just me. I want the amazing lossless zoom that comes with the iPhone 17 Pro Max, and cinematic mode video capture is one of my favorite iPhone features.
With the original iPhone nearly two decades old, there’s going to be an entire generation soon that never experienced a time when it was extremely controversial just to have a camera bump on the back of your device. Everything that was good about form factors a decade ago has been sacrificed in order to fit more powerful silicon, better cameras, and bigger batteries into a phone. That’s awesome. Like I said, those cameras are so important to me that I still wouldn’t give up my half-pound phone.
But it makes me so happy to see some company that is doing something different, and that includes Samsung with the Galaxy S25 Edge. It’s innovative, and it’s good. Go to a store and hold one, just play around with it. I’m not even telling you to buy it. But just experience it and open your mind to the idea that maybe, just maybe, the smartphone industry lost something special in the last decade because we all said we didn’t care about it.
8/10
SoC
A19 Pro chip 6‑core CPU with 2 performance and 4 efficiency cores 5‑core GPU with Neural Accelerators 16‑core Neural Engine Hardware-accelerated ray tracing
Display
Super Retina XDR display 6.5‑inch (diagonal) all‑screen OLED display 2736‑by‑1260‑pixel resolution at 460 ppi
Storage
256GB, 512GB, 1TB
Ports
USB 2 Type-C
The iPhone Air is the slimmest phone Apple has ever made, and it’s the lightest one that’s currently available. It has a single-lens main camera, and an A19 Pro chipset under the hood.
