iPhone Air review: A whole lot less for a whole lot more

Macworld

At a glanceExpert's Rating

Pros

So thin it actually changes how you use it

Selfie camera is a big upgrade

Very expensive

Cons

Battery life is just OK, and won’t be after a year or two

One rear camera limits options

Mono earpiece speaker sounds tinny

Our Verdict
The thin design makes this phone feel like the future, but Apple had to make compromises to achieve it that certainly affect your day-to-day use. With a $1,000 price tag, you pay more for less.

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I’ve been using the iPhone Air nonstop for over a week and I still can’t tell if I love it or hate it. In so many ways it just feels like the future. But every day I run into some compromise or cut corner that frustrates me.

In a very real sense, the iPhone Air asks you to pay more for less. It’s less in good ways: it’s the slimmest iPhone ever and is so light for its size that it surprises you every time you pick it up. But also less in bad ways: a single rear camera, one poor earpiece speaker, and significantly less battery life.

It delights and disappoints in equal measure, especially for an iPhone that costs a thousand dollars or more.

The iPhone Air feels like the future

Looking at photos and reading specs of the iPhone Air is not enough. You need to hold it. 165 grams isn’t much lighter than the 170 grams of an iPhone 16, on paper. And 5.6mm is thin, but it’s hard to get your head around.

But when you hold phone of this size, with its 6.5-inch display and its smooth titanium outer frame, in your hand it just feels futuristic. With the “camera plateau” so high to the top edge of the phone’s back, and relatively narrow, your hand just never bumps into it. You don’t see or feel it, so the whole phone feels like this wonderful little metal-and-glass slate. It doesn’t quite achieve the sci-fi dream of holding a piece of “live glass”in your hand, but it really is getting there.

This is the “goldilocks size,” just the happy medium between too-small regular iPhones and too-big Plus/Max models. It’s visibly much bigger than the standard 6.1″ iPhone and makes watching video, playing games, and reading the web a lot nicer. But it’s smaller than the Plus and Max phones, and when combined with the thin body and rounded frame, is truly usable in one hand.




The iPhone Air is the perfect middle ground between the regular and large iPhones.Foundry

It’s almost disappears in my pocket. Plus and Max iPhones feel heavy and lopsided in a front pocket, and often barely fit. But iPhone Air is just small enough and thin enough to slip right in and I can almost forget it’s there. It’s like a magic trick.

I gave it to my friend to take a selfie and she said, “wha…what…I have anxiety just holding this!” It feels like something that would break easily, but it’s surprisingly durable. Shockingly so, really.

One of our favorite destroy-an-iPhone-for-science YouTubers, JerryRigEverything, put the iPhone Air through its paces, as have several others. They all found the same thing: This phone is practically impossible to bend to the point it breaks, and the new Ceramic Shield 2 is clearly much more resistant to cracks and scratches.




You would think this would be fragile, but you’d be wrong. Very wrong.Foundry

Dropping the iPhone Air edgewise on its corner is still going to leave a dent and may very well crack the screen. No phone really survives that very well without a case. But the durability of the iPhone Air is not just impressive for such a thin phone, it’s impressive for any phone.

Like the other new iPhones, the Air’s new Center Stage front camera is a huge leap forward for the iPhone. It’s 18MP and has a much larger, square sensor. You can take clear, vibrant shots with landscape or portrait orientation without turning the phone, and it smartly and quickly adjusts the field of view depending on how many faces are in the shot (a feature you can easily disable if you like). The flexibility of formatting is a great trick, and overall photo quality is improved a lot, especially in challenging lighting conditions.

Apple advertises “ultra-stabilized” video for the front camera, and that might be overselling the digital stabilization here. It’s stabilized, but it’s not on par with Action Mode on the rear camera, for instance.

But whether snapping a selfie or scrolling a news feed, the Air is an impressive feat of engineering. Even after using it every day for 10 days, I feel a little delight when I pick up the iPhone Air, and when I pick up a regular iPhone, it feels…old. This surprises me, as I’m not typically a proponent of the tech industry’s compulsion to make everything thinner.

Buy the iPhone Air is stuck in the past

Remember when flagship iPhones had only one rear camera? Apple remembers!

Dual rear cameras was introduced with the iPhone 7 Plus and has been on every premium model since. Apple’s taking us all the way back to 2015 with a thousand-dollar iPhone that has a single rear camera.

Yes, it’s a good rear camera. The same 48MP rear shooter Apple is using on all three iPhone 17 models that effortlessly zooms in to the center 12MP for a pseudo “optical 2x zoom,” and it takes nice images, if still a little too over-processed. With just one camera, it can’t record Spatial Video, as even the base iPhone 17 can.

Not a day went by that I didn’t miss having a second (or third) camera. The lack of an ultrawide didn’t bother me for landscape shots, but the inability of the standard wide camera to focus less than about 6 inches is a killer. I missed my macro photography! And I was surprised at just how often I regularly use a telephoto of around 4x or 5x. I can always use digital zoom and get the shot, it just doesn’t look as got as it should. Not for a thousand-dollar iPhone.

The battery, at 3,149mAh, is also stuck in yesteryear. It’s around the same size as in the iPhone 13 or 14, and while all the components are much more efficient and therefore it lasts longer, it’s still considerably less battery life than the basic iPhone 17. You’re paying $200 more to get a couple of hours a day less battery life.

Does it make it through the day without charging? Usually, yes, if you don’t do stuff like play lots of games or watch a bunch of videos. But it just barely makes it, and after a year or two, when the battery health has diminished, you’re going to be looking for a charger every single day. That’s not a thousand-dollar phone experience for 2025.






Geekbench 4’s battery test is reliable and consistent, but just runs periodic benchmarks on a loop with the screen on (we calibrate to 200 nits). Better battery life than an iPhone 16 isn’t bad, but it’s behind all the other new iPhones and in our experience, it just barely avoids dipping into low power mode after a day of casual use.

Way back in the day, phones used to have a single speaker. There would be one on the bottom of the phone, used for apps and media, while the earpiece was only used for phone calls. With iPhone 7, Apple started using both of them to deliver stereo sound. iPhone Air is a big leap back, using only the earpiece speaker for all audio. It’s an instantly noticeable drop in sound quality and volume that affects everything: Watching a TikTok video, holding a call on speakerphone, streaming a Netflix show, you name it. Everything sounds tinny and thin compared to just about any iPhone of the last 8-10 years. It’s fine for making a phone call, but your old iPhone will sound better than your new one, and that’s not a great place to be.




Barely enough room for a USB-C port, and no room for a speaker. It matters.Foundry

iPhone Air performance is just okay

The iPhone Air has an A19 Pro chip inside, but it deserves a big asterisk. The version of the A19 Pro you’ll find in the iPhone 17 Pro has six GPU cores, this one has five. And while it has the same CPU cores (two high performance, four efficiency) and the same Neural Engine, media encoders, and everything else, it does not perform like an iPhone 17 Pro.

In many cases, it does not perform like the regular A19 in the iPhone 17. Geekbench scores are fine, but sustained performance drops very quickly as the processor gets too hot.






As you can see, Geekbench results are close to the A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro in some cases, and in others are closer to the A19 in the regular iPhone 17. In any case, these are great scores, but they only tell part of the story.






While Geekbench GPU scores measure GPU compute capability, they don’t test the ability to render real-time 3D graphics. For that, we prefer a test like 3DMark.

The iPhone Air is slower than the base iPhone 17, thanks in part to the reduced GPU core count (five instead of six) and in part because the SoC very quickly has to slow down to keep from overheating in this new compact design.

It’s disappointing to see an iPhone perform the same or worse than its $200 cheaper cousin, but it’s important to view this performance in context. This is still a very fast phone, as fast or faster than last year’s iPhone 16 Pro, and it runs circles around premium Android phones. Performance is compromised, but only when compared to this year’s brand-new iPhones.




Cramming so much of the phone circuitry behind this little “plateau” is not great for thermal performance.Foundry

Should you (or anyone else) buy the iPhone Air?

I’ve only used the iPhone Air for nearly two weeks and every time I pick it up I have moments where I think “this is the future” and other moments where I think “haven’t we solved this already?”

I struggle to imagine the target audience for this particular iPhone. You have to be enough of an enthusiast to want to spend a thousand dollars or more to get a new iPhone whose defining quality is that it’s extremely thin and light. But at the same time you have to be casual enough not to care that you only have one camera that won’t do macro shots or zoom very well. And your phone use will be casual—web, social media, and messaging—or you’ll be looking for a charger every day.

Are there ultra-premium phone buyers who just don’t care about the camera shortcomings or that the battery dies midday if they do things like edit video or play games? Will they shrug off the tinny single earpiece speaker? Are the really casual users that don’t care about those things willing to pay $1,000 or more just because the phone is crazy thin?

And it is crazy thin; not just thin enough to be a fashion statement, but thin enough to actually matter. Thin enough to let you use this larger-than-normal phone with one hand and stuff it into a front pocket with ease. Thin enough that you won’t get that weird hand fatigue when you lie around in bed scrolling on your phone. And all without sacrificing durability at all. It’s an impressive feat of engineering.

In the end, I can’t help but give the iPhone Air a moderate score. The headline feature does make a difference, more than I was expecting it to. But the corners Apple had to cut to make an iPhone this thin also matter, and have affected my daily use. You do truly pay more for less, in both a good way and a bad way.