It’s all about style, but at what cost?
Let’s give credit where it’s due: Apple pulled off something pretty cool here. At 5.6 mm thick (that’s like stacking three toothpicks on top of each other) and 165 grams (your average espresso cup when it’s full), the Air makes every other modern phone look like a chunky dinosaur. It’s the only iPhone in years that genuinely feels like a new category. As you hold it for the first time, you can’t help but feel like you are holding something extraordinary.But (and it’s a big but) that wow factor fades fast the moment you spend some time with the phone. The little things start piling up, and you begin seeing just how many sacrifices needed to be made to achieve this wondrous form.
Unlike the Galaxy S25 Edge, which manages to be slim without cutting quite as many corners, the Air’s entire pitch seems to begin and end with “look how skinny and pretty I am.”
One lens on a $1000 phone should be illegal
The most obvious downside of the Air is its single camera. In 2025, when you pay $1000 for a phone you expect at least a dual-camera setup. The base iPhone 17 has two, and even its only competitor — Galaxy S25 Edge — has two.
Our scores show the difference as plain as day:
PhoneArena Camera Score:
Audio and everyday use
As someone who regularly enjoys video content on their phone, this one immediately stood out to me.
The iPhone Air only has a mono speaker. In 2025. On a thousand-dollar phone. And it’s not like we are talking about an okay audio experience. Not only are you missing out on stereo sound (which will feel weird when you watch videos, believe me), but it’s also about how bad the sound is: it’s missing depth, bass, but most of all it is really low volume. Playing a YouTube video makes it feel like you are using a budget phone… Forget about playing music while you get ready for work in the morning — you won’t want to do it.
Pair that with weaker haptics than the Pro models, and you start to realize how shallow the Air’s “premium” experience really is. Ah, “shallow” — that is the word I can best use to describe the audio experience on the iPhone Air, and the phone itself, for that matter.
Wait, it has good battery life?
We were all expecting the iPhone Air to do poorly in our battery life tests. What we didn’t take into account in our predictions, however, was the lack of stereo speakers. After running a few controlled tests, we realized that the Air’s greatest downside actually had a silver lining — it helped its battery life.
PhoneArena Battery and Charging Test Results:
With a 3,149 mAh cell, the Air lasted 6h 43m in our tests, slightly better than the S25 Edge (6h 22m).
This is great news, but it is a bit ruined by the other major factor when it comes to battery life: the charging. The Air is capped at 20W, which feels a bit disappointing next to the iPhone 17’s 40W and the 25W of the S25 Edge.
Still, the difference is not astronomical. A full charge takes 1h 36m on the Air versus 1h 16m on the iPhone 17.
Still, the fact that this battery life is reached only because the phone uses a single speaker with poor audio quality leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Absolutely unnecessary horsepower
Apple gave the Air its A19 Pro chip — with one GPU core disabled, but it’s still ridiculously fast. Geekbench and 3DMark prove it can trade blows with Samsung’s Snapdragon 8 Elite inside the S25 Edge, which is no small feat.
CPU Performance Benchmarks:
GPU Performance:
The issue is that there’s no vapor chamber cooling in this ultra-thin frame to keep the chip at an optimal temperature, and titanium isn’t exactly great at dissipating heat. If you run a few heavy tasks back-to-back the Air throttles harder than the regular iPhone 17. It doesn’t break a sweat when you are casually using it for social media, but this isn’t the kind of phone you’d want to edit videos or photos for those platforms.
Did Apple really need to flex with the A19 Pro here? Absolutely not. The A18 would’ve been more than enough, probably knocked a few hundred bucks off too, and made this thing way easier to recommend. But no, Apple went with the “luxury” angle.
Admire it, don’t buy it
You are at the Apple Store and you spot the iPhone Air, a shiny thing in perfect lighting at the Apple Store, and you think to yourself: “Damn, that’s a good-looking slab of titanium.” You’ll want to pick it up, twirl it around, maybe even flex it to your friends for a hot second. But the likelihood of you selling it just a year later is high, in my humble opinion.
Meanwhile, you might catch a glimpse at the regular iPhone 17, sitting right there next to the Air. Yes, it looks a lot more familiar and — admittedly — boring, but it is $200 cheaper, and has better cameras, faster charging, and fewer compromises overall. In fact, it’s probably the best value phone Apple has released in the last five years.
So while the Air might turn some heads and feel cool, you can’t convince me that it is anything but a statement piece — not a great phone. And like most fashion statements, the shine will wear off a lot faster than you thought it would. I’d venture to guess that, even if this first generation sells well, a second one would be much less popular.
Oh, and as a little side note, let’s not forget that the iPhone Air is eSIM only across all markets, which is not ideal if you insist on having a physical SIM card.
So, my advice: admire it, go to the store and play with it if you have to, but don’t buy it unless you are absolutely certain you won’t regret it.
