By now, most of you have seen the iPhone Air. Most of you have an opinion on the iPhone Air. Apple fanboys love it, critics are skeptical of its practicality, and keyboard warriors can’t get enough of its thin body and design irregularities. I, too, had my rosy glasses on for a week into using the iPhone Air, and now that the novelty has worn off, it is easier and fair to judge the iPhone Air – it’s good but not everyone’s cup of tea.
Let’s get the narrative straight – Apple wanted to have fun with a fourth model in the annual iPhone release lifecycle back in 2020, and hence, came up with the compact iPhone 12 Mini. The idea, which was hailed as genius by critics and fans, tanked. Apple then experimented by reversing the formula – make a ‘Plus-sized’ version of the standard iPhone. This concept remained unsuccessful.
Third time’s the charm, and hence, Apple has its hopes pinned on the iPhone Air. The formula is simple – flaunt your ability to miniaturise tech while retaining the performance, efficiency, and practicality of a conventional smartphone. The numbers seem promising – a 6.5-inch display with a 120Hz OLED panel, a 48MP rear camera, a blazing-fast A19 Pro chip, a 5.6mm thin body – all at a starting price of Rs 1,19,900. Apple believes that most of you may be willing to pay a premium for its slimmest phone ever.
But should you?
Design and build
The Air is thin. Relatively thinner than any of its siblings in the iPhone 17 lineup. Relatively thinner than 2014’s iPhone 6. That’s all you see initially – a thin phone. With its gleaming titanium side frame highlighting the sleek proportions, it looks remarkable. As my boss quoted, “it looks like jewellery.” You buy the Air primarily for it being slim. It feels criminal to put it into a case (which is why I risked using it without any bumper case).
Look beyond the slimness and this is a fresh take on the standard iPhone design. It looks like an iPhone from the front – thanks to the Dynamic Island. However, it looks like a mashup of the Google Pixel 10 and the iPhone SE from the back – not an original take. Mind you, that pill-shaped camera plateau is where A19 Pro and most of the crucial computing bits stay – the rest of the body holds the display panel and the battery.
No physical SIM card slot present for maximising the battery capacity, but Apple managed to make space for the Action Button, Camera Control, and the basic control buttons. Camera Control is an annoyance, considering you end up pressing it every time you pick up the phone from a flat surface (or is it just me?). The rear camera lens protrusion leads to the familiar ‘table wobble’ syndrome.
But it’s not all bad. With an overall compressed weight of 165 grams, the iPhone Air is incredibly light, which makes it comfortable to hold. The Ceramic Shield 2 glass is scratch-resistant enough to oppose micro scratches from dust and cramped jeans pockets – both on the display and rear.
And no – there’s no bending happening here. Unless you are willing to crush it under a road roller, the iPhone Air won’t break in the hands of a considerate human. It isn’t as beautiful as the decade-old iPhone 6, but it does command attention.
Display and speakers
2025 is the year when Apple normalises a high refresh rate display, and the Air enjoys the perk too. In typical Apple fashion, this is one of the nicest mobile phone displays your eyes can feast on – it’s bright under the Sun, allows for smooth scrolling animations, and renders my Instagram feed in the most natural yet pleasing colours. If you prioritise display quality, the iPhone Air has got you covered, even with the slightly annoying Dynamic Island pill cutout eating into the viewing space.
Sadly, I cannot say the same for the audio output. Unlike most smartphones of today, the iPhone Air has only got a single speaker – and it’s integrated into the earpiece! The most aching trade-off for that slimness!
For a single-speaker setup, the iPhone Air’s loudspeaker sounds nice. However, with no stereo output, your generic media consumption and user experience are compromised. The overall volume is lower as a result. Maybe Apple is pinning its hope on you doing all your media consumption on AirPods, which is how you can navigate around the issue. But the trade-off is noticeable, and it does take away from the experience.
Performance
Every new iPhone is the fastest in its launch year. Hence, there’s nothing new to say about the performance of the iPhone Air – it is fast as usual. Apple takes the attention away from the technical bits, such as RAM and a gazillion technical tricks to keep it chugging all smoothly, and encourages you to just pick up your iPhone and go on. The promise of a sublime and premium user experience lasts for almost three years (or even more in some cases!).
iOS 26 is the hero here, using all the grunt of the A19 Pro chip to render its ‘Liquid Glass’ animations in the nicest of ways. Don’t worry about the lack of a GPU core as compared to the A19 Pro on the iPhone 17 Pro – it is near impossible for a usual iPhone Air customer to choke the chipset. Be it console-derived video games or 4K video rendering projects on the VN Editor app, this lean and trim iPhone can do it all. Maybe not as effortlessly as the iPhone 17 Pro Max, but it’s nearly there.
That said, AI isn’t the iPhone Air’s strong suit. Compared to the previous generation Apple Intelligence supported iPhones, the onboard Gen AI features work faster but there’s a lack of usable ones in the first place. Consider the Clean Up feature in Photos – it can’t perform complex omissions from busier photos as nicely as Samsung’s Galaxy AI or Google’s Magic Eraser. Siri is just good enough for setting up alarms and taking notes. You have the option to integrate ChatGPT for assistance but Apple’s role ends here.
We also need to talk about the C1X modem. On a Reliance Jio eSIM, the iPhone Air did its best to latch on to the network in tricky areas. In network-rich areas, the iPhone Air was visibly better in network connectivity than my two-year-old iPhone 15 Plus.
Battery and charging
Battery life on the iPhone Air isn’t its strongest suit. Regardless of all the optimisations and power-efficient hardware, a 3,100mAh battery can only do so much to keep your phone alive for as long as the base iPhone 17. In my general weekday usage, which is usually a mix of light-to-moderate reliance on my phone, the iPhone Air ended the day mostly with 30-35 per cent charge in the tank. On other ‘work-free’ days that involve a lot more reading, browsing, photographing, and ‘Instagram-ing’, the iPhone Air gets desperate for a recharge by sunset. Note that these use cases mostly involve a fully charged battery (to 100 per cent). Hence, if you venture out a lot, you MUST have a powerbank.
Apple’s iPhone Air-specific MagSafe power bank does a full recharge but commands a lot of premium for its slim design. Get a much more affordable third-party MagSafe-compatible powerbank instead.
When you gain access to a charging port, the standard 20W Apple charging adapter and cable combo can do a full top-up in just about an hour. 0-50 per cent refills are usually done in 30 minutes, which is slower than the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro’s charging speeds. Another trade-off for slimness, but this one doesn’t hurt enough. On to the cameras now.
Cameras
The biggest trade-off for the ‘Air-iness’ lies in the camera department. You only get a single rear camera – no telephoto and no ultrawide. While Apple and its fans may insist that this single camera with its digital tricks can take care of your needs, the truth is that you will miss the presence of those additional cameras that come standard on phones costing this much.
In its own right, the single 48MP rear camera is great. Taking photos in 24MP resolution, photos in daytime and night conditions look incredibly good – full of minute details, superb noise suppression, and a closer-to-natural colour science. For those who prefer moody colour tones and themes, the iOS camera app now allows you to tweak the colour profile to your liking – a vibrant ‘Samsung-y’ one or a cooler yet contrasty Pixel look. The same goes for videography, where the output quality is second to none. The video processing is simply exceptional for a mobile phone camera.
Push this single camera beyond its intended role, and sadness begins to seep in. Zoom quality visibly deteriorates beyond 2x magnification, and the lack of any ultrawide capability limits your photography scope.
When it comes to selfies, though, the iPhone Air, just like its iPhone 17 siblings, impresses. A new 18MP sensor makes it the perfect tool for vlogging – exceptional clarity and colour science, the ability to lock portrait orientation imaging/videography in landscape mode, and auto framing based on the number of subjects in the frame (Apple calls it Center Stage).
iPhone Air: Our verdict
The Air is Apple’s third experimental design after the unsuccessful Mini and Plus versions, going in a direction that was Apple’s hallmark in the company’s Steve Jobs era – designing beautiful yet practical products.
As a piece of modern smartphone technology, the iPhone Air is a masterpiece. Kudos to Apple for even trying it out! Clever packaging of the internals and shrinking existing computing components while delivering an acceptable battery stamina, a marvellous display, and uncompromised performance is a feat that only Apple can achieve. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge comes close, but last I remembered, nobody came up and asked, “Is that the Samsung S25 Edge? Can I check it out?”
As for the iPhone Air, it gets all my colleagues and friends awe-struck. Most of them want it not for its camera or performance or its ability to be just a status symbol, but for its form factor. They admire it for the way it looks and feels. And that’s the point of the iPhone Air – you buy it because you admire it.
It is flashy. It is sleek. Not gorgeous, but you may raise your eyebrows in appreciation. It feels good to hold, good to use. You can’t zoom in on the Moon’s surface with its camera, but you can slip it into your trouser pocket, or your handbag, without feeling its presence! You can live with its single rear camera, its just-about-acceptable battery life, and its middling single loudspeaker, but you might not be annoyed. The iPhone Air follows a different formula from “more is better”, which in my books is better.
There’s a price to pay for this sort of admiration, and once you factor in the value aspect, questions are bound to arise. However, look at it this way – your standard SUV can do everything you can ask from a car, but you always desire to be in a Porsche 911. Why? Because it’s special.
So is the iPhone Air.