There is one aspect of the iPhone Air that’s closer to the Pro devices than the standard iPhone 17, and that’s the performance. This is due to the fact that the iPhone Air has the same A19 Pro chip as the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, rather than the A19 chip offered by the base iPhone 17.
The difference between the A19 and A19 Pro isn’t massive, though –- and actually, while the iPhone 17 Pro devices have six GPU cores, the iPhone Air’s A19 Pro only has five, like the A19. Not only that, but the Air also doesn’t get the vapor chamber cooling system on offer by the thicker iPhone 17 Pro devices, which means that with sustained performance situations, like mobile gaming, it may heat up a little, and as a result, throttle performance slightly.
So, what makes the A19 Pro-powered performance of the iPhone Air better than that of the base iPhone 17? For starters, the iPhone Air benefits from the increased RAM, which is also faster on the A19 Pro. It’s not all about raw performance, either. According to Apple, the A19 Pro is more power-efficient than the A19, which is important in a device like the iPhone Air, which sacrifices some battery size to hit that super-thin size.
However, all of this arguably doesn’t matter –- it’s just numbers. What really matters is how the phone performs in day-to-day usage. The answer? It performs… great — just like every other 2026 iPhone, A19 or A19 Pro. In normal usage, the phone never stuttered or lagged, and it loaded games quickly. It handled heavy multitasking with ease, and while under very heavy workloads it did heat up, I suspect most won’t push it enough to get overly hot.
There’s another performance-related area that’s worth mentioning, and that’s wireless performance. The iPhone Air is one of the first phones to offer Apple’s new C1X cellular modem, coupled with the N1 networking chip for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread. The device performed very well across all different kinds of connectivity, and I noticed no difference between the cellular performance of the iPhone Air compared to the other devices in the iPhone 17 lineup.
That said, it’s technically missing one feature — support for mmWave. You probably don’t really care about that though. mmWave has proven to be a bit of a slow burn, and you would only ever really connect to it in areas of very heavy congestion, like a sports stadium, anyway. I’m not sure it’s worth buying a different phone for mmWave support unless, perhaps, you’re a season ticket holder and for some reason still really care about how fast TikTok loads when you’re watching your favorite team with the expensive tickets you bought. That’s not to say Apple shouldn’t add mmWave support soon — hopefully its next-generation modem will support the tech. When it does, expect Apple’s entire lineup of phones to offer Apple-designed modems.
