The Apple iPhone Air feels like something that Apple from a few years ago would design – things get sacrificed at the altar of cool design, no matter whether people think those features were essential (or that the design is all that cool).
We’ve seen unreliable butterfly keyboards and iffy cooling on MacBooks, we’ve seen bendy iPhones and ones that have connectivity issues depending on how you grip them.
So, what did the iPhone Air designers sacrifice to make a phone just 5.64mm thick? We won’t know the full extent of that until people have been using them for a few months, but here are the obvious omissions that the Air comes with. Note that we’re not going by order of importance, even though we start with the biggest issue by far.
1. Battery
The iPhone Air has a 3,149mAh battery – coming up short of the 3,692mAh battery inside the smaller (though thicker) iPhone 17 and is much smaller than the 4,832mAh battery in the 17 Pro Max (5,088mAh if you get an eSIM-only model).
That means lower endurance on a single charge – we haven’t tested it ourselves yet, however, numbers from the EU energy label suggest that the iPhone Air lasts 40 hours on a single charge, compared to 41 hours for the vanilla phone and 53 hours for the Pro Max.
To make things worse, the smaller battery also means slower charging – both the vanilla iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro Max can get to 50% in 20 minutes, the Air needs 30 minutes to get there. This is despite having less capacity to fill.
Interestingly, Apple didn’t sacrifice MagSafe support, which might have shaved off a fraction of a millimeter. That might not have been an altruistic move, though – perhaps the iPhone Air MagSafe Battery will be a required purchase to get you through the day. Probably not unless you are a heavy user, but it’s something to keep in mind.
The Apple iPhone Air MagSafe Battery
2. Display size
The iPhone Air has a 6.5” display – that’s smaller than the 6.7” panel on the iPhone 16 Plus and smaller than the 6.9” panel on the iPhone 16 and 17 Pro Max. It is bigger than the 6.3” display on the iPhone 17 (older vanilla phones had 6.1” displays), though.
We’re bringing this up as it might have been a technological limitation – the Air is the only new iPhone to still use a titanium frame. Even the Pros switched back to aluminum. Titanium is stiffer than aluminum, meaning that it resists bending better.
However, with such a thin frame even titanium might not have been strong enough if Apple had gone with a 6.7” or 6.9” display. Samsung also used titanium for the Galaxy S25 Edge and while it’s a bit thicker (5.8mm), it does have a larger 6.7” display.
We will have a better idea of why Apple may have settled at a 6.5” diagonal when the first bend tests come in.
3. Main camera
The iPhone Air features a single camera on its back – that may have been okay for the cheap iPhone 16e (it wasn’t, but still), though on a $1,000 phone it’s quite rough.
And it’s not even Apple’s best main camera. The Air module is the same as on the vanilla phone – it has a 1/1.56” sensor, which is smaller than the 1/1.28” sensor in the two Pro models. In terms of pixel size, it’s 1.0µm vs. 1.22µm.
We’d let it slide if this camera didn’t cap the video frame rate at 4K 60fps, while the Pros can do up to 120fps. Also, it lacks ProRes, ProRes RAW and Apple Log 2 support (this might be related to #7 on the list, but unlikely).
There’s more, the LiDAR is gone – Pro models use this to speed up autofocus and improve the portrait mode. It’s also used in some niche applications like improving the accuracy of AR tracking, 3D scanning objects and so on.
4. Telephoto camera
The 48MP module has lossless 2x zoom, but that’s as far as you can go – after that, image quality starts to degrade. Okay, the Galaxy S25 Edge doesn’t have a dedicated telephoto camera either, but at least it has a 200MP main. That has a better chance at taking a good photo beyond 2x, though that is a hypothesis we will obviously have to test.
Perhaps, Apple didn’t want to tune a 200MP sensor just for the Air. Or perhaps, this is just market segmentation – iPhone 17 Pro Max owners might feel shortchanged if the Air has a better main camera than their pricey phone.
5. Ultra-wide camera
How often do you use the ultra-wide camera on your phone? Perhaps not often, but even so it offers a unique perspective that you can’t get with a narrower lens. Plus, on iPhones it is tasked with macro photography – that’s just missing from the iPhone Air.
6. Pro chipset
“Wait a minute, the iPhone Air does have a Pro chipset!,” you may be thinking. But does it? Apple is traditionally tight-lipped about details on Apple A-series chips, so here’s what we know from the specs:
| iPhone 17 (A19) | iPhone Air (A19 Pro?) | iPhone 17 Pro/Max (A19 Pro) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU, performance cores | 2x | 2x | 2x |
| CPU, efficiency cores | 6x | 6x | 6x |
| GPU | 5 cores | 5 cores | 6 cores |
| NPU | 16 cores | 16 cores | 16 cores |
So, uh, how is the chipset inside the Air “Pro” and the one inside the iPhone 17 isn’t? We will investigate the difference once we have our hands on the new iPhones.
While Apple doesn’t report RAM capacities, we know that the Air and Pro phones have 12GB, the vanilla model has only 8GB. That may play into the “Pro” label, but who knows.
7. USB 3.0 port
Most people use the USB-C port on their iPhone for charging and nothing else. And that’s fine, but the iPhone Pros are capable of recording high-bandwidth ProRes video at up to 4K 120fps on external storage.
As we alluded above, this might have something to do with the lack of ProRes support on the Air. Of course, iPhones can record ProRes to internal storage, so the most likely explanation for that is that the Pro camera is just more capable. Still, have you seen how much Apple charges for the upgrade from 256GB to 512GB storage? There’s a reason many are using external SSDs.
8. Stereo speakers
The Apple iPhone Air has a single speaker – the one built into the top part. The bottom part – which, again, measures only 5.64mm thick – may not have had enough room for an additional speaker. Or maybe Apple decided that the space would be better used by the battery.
9. Bumpers are back?
Bumpers became a practical necessity when Apple failed to properly isolate the antennas on the iPhone 4 – your hand could significantly degrade reception strength.
That was fixed in the next generation and hasn’t been a problem since, but now bumpers are back? Indeed they are. Here is the iPhone Air Bumper, which is “made from reinforced polycarbonate for added edge protection”.
Now, titanium is not a material that dents easily (it’s more resilient than aluminum in this respect), so it seems that Apple is worried about drop resistance on its super-slim new phone.
Beauty requires sacrifice as the saying goes. What do you think of the iPhone Air – did it sacrifice too much or does it still cover all the important stuff, while delivering that impressively slim design?
