The combination of a large-ish screen and light created a strong perception of lightness, compared to the iPhone 17 or especially the 7.27-ounce iPhone 17 Pro. I also found that the shiny titanium frame, while a fingerprint magnet, did slide around in my hand less than an aluminum finish.
It’s a phone built to make a strong first impression, whether you’re holding it in an Apple Store or just after an Apple event in a throng of YouTubers who are all throwing elbows so that they can film each individual phone in the hands-on area for 20 minutes apiece. But I do worry that living with the Air would be frustrating in the long haul, specifically because of battery life.
Andrew Cunningham
The camera plateau might make the iPhone Air look unwieldy, but it feels well-balanced in practice.
Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham
Pushing the limits of the USB-C port.
Andrew Cunningham
The camera plateau might make the iPhone Air look unwieldy, but it feels well-balanced in practice.
Andrew Cunningham
Pushing the limits of the USB-C port.
Andrew Cunningham
Again, on paper, the numbers Apple is quoting aren’t so far apart. The Air is rated for 27 hours of local video playback, compared to 30 hours for the iPhone 17 and 33 hours for the 17 Pro. But there’s a bigger gap between the numbers for streaming video—22 hours, 27 hours, and 30 hours for the Air, 17, and 17 Pro, respectively—that suggests that any activity that’s actively using the A19 Pro chip or wireless communication is going to drain the battery even faster.
Extrapolate that out two years, when your battery is going to be operating at somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of its original capacity, and a midday charge starts to sound like an inevitability. It’s telling that a thickness-and-weight-increasing external battery accessory was announced in the same breath as the iPhone Air.
The iPhone Air’s $99 MagSafe battery accessory.
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
Apple’s official acknowledgement of and solution to the battery life issue is a $99 external battery that attaches with MagSafe and charges the phone wirelessly; by Apple’s estimates, it adds roughly 13 hours of runtime on top of what you get from the internal battery.
Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of having an iPhone Air, I hear you asking? Maybe so! But it is at least a better aesthetic match for the iPhone than a chunky third-party brick, and one that’s pretty easy to detach and put away once it’s done its job and charged your phone. It has its own separate USB-C port for charging, and a small status light (orange when charging, green when charged) below the Apple logo. The magnetic connection feels sturdy enough that it would be hard to dislodge the battery by accident, but I can’t say that it absolutely couldn’t fall off if you were trying to jam the phone into a pocket or bag and caught the battery on something.
