I get why people are skeptical of thin phones, but for most people, the iPhone Air is an upgrade. The device feels futuristic in your hands, and day-to-day, there isn’t a single trade-off that feels out of place on a device this slender.
The battery life is good, it feels just as durable as any other iPhone, and the screen is phenomenal. There’s only one speaker and one camera, but both are more than adequate. Really, this is for Canadians who want the coolest phone. This one feels like it’s for the fans.
Form over function, but not as much as you’d think
I saw a live demo of this, and the phone was perfectly fine afterwards.
The iPhone 6 was Apple’s last attempt at an ultra-thin phone, coming in at 6.9mm, but it would bend a bit if enough pressure was put on it. I’m sure you remember Bendgate. Since that was Apple’s first large-screen phone, it wasn’t expecting people to start putting it in their back pockets and sitting on it. But it was a time of skinny jeans, and back pockets were the best place for big phones. Apple is well aware of that this time, and it’s not taking any chances.
Behind closed doors after the keynote, some members of the Apple durability team showed me a plethora of tests it used to validate the Air’s design, and as you can see in the GIF above, it can stand up to a lot of force. At the event, we were given a dummy phone full of pressure sensors and asked to push on it as hard as we could. As a group, the most pressure we could exert was around 40kg of force. Apple then put a real Air into the bend test machine and cranked it up to around 60kg, which looks the same as the bending in the GIF. Then they put the phone on a table, and it returned to being perfectly flat in a few seconds, and it still worked. So I feel safe saying that I don’t suspect a repeat of Bendgate, and in all my tests, the phone feels extremely strong.
All of the photos in this review have been shot with the iPhone 17 Pro series.
To help with its rigidity, it’s wrapped in a glossy 5.6mm thin band of titanium that evokes a sense of jewelry we haven’t seen on an iPhone since the 14 Pro. However, the thinner band looks more exquisite than the chunky stainless steel Pro iPhones from the past. The phone I really keep comparing it to is the iPhone X from 2017. That was the first all-screen iPhone, and like the Air, its design evoked elegance and a bit of luxury.
The front and back of the phone are glass, and like the other two new iPhone models, Apple is using its Ceramic Shield 2 for the cover glass. The company says it’s rated to be about 3x more scratch-resistant than before, which is the improvement I was waiting for. In my experience, the iPhone 16 and 15 series were quite durable, but the screen scratched way too easily. Every iPhone I’ve owned since the 15 Pro has gotten at least one big chip or abrasion, and my fiancée’s 16 looks like it was shaken around in a bag full of keys and sandpaper. It will be interesting to see how the new 17 models handle the Mohs hardness scale that Jerry Rig Everything uses to test screen durability. This year, the back of all the phones uses the previous version of Ceramic Shield, which Apple says should be 4x more durable than the rear cover on the iPhone 16.
Unlike the S25 Edge’s matte side rails, the iPhone Air has glossy sides that help the phone look even thinner in your hands, and it hides the fact that the charging port isn’t perfectly aligned on the bottom.
If you do break the Air’s front glass, repairs from Apple cost $429 in Canada, the back glass is $219, and a new battery is $165. For comparison, replacing the front screen is the same price on the latest iPhone 17, but a little cheaper at $365 if you have an iPhone 16. The 16 and 17 Pro Max screen replacements are $499. As always, there might be lower-cost options available from other repair shops, but this is what Apple charges.
On the bottom, four holes house some of the microphones, but not any speakers. Apple decided to eschew stereo drivers in this model, meaning the earpiece speaker along the top of the phone does everything from calls to music. It’s actually impressive that Apple has been able to get so much volume and clarity out of the tiny device, but it’s nowhere near the power of the Pro iPhones, or even the iPhone 17, which can get as loud (but not as detailed) as a MacBook Air. Ultimately, the iPhone Air’s speaker is fine for FaceTime, watching Reels, or listening to a podcast while doing the dishes, but if you use your current iPhone on full blast all the time, you’ll notice a difference here.
The final design element is the camera plateau, and it’s my favourite aspect of the new phone because of how ingenious it is. Apple has crammed a large chunk of the phone’s brains into the bulge, allowing maximum battery space. The other nice side effect of this is that it keeps all the hot components away from your fingers, ensuring that even if the phone is working hard, you won’t feel it. Unless you turn your phone sideways to play some games, because then, one of your hands will definitely feel the heat, but we’ll get more into gaming performance later. The last thing to say about the camera plateau is that the lens still pops out a bit, so even with this large bump, the phone doesn’t sit flush on a table. The official bumper case doesn’t help this, but the Apple Clear Case does.
The phone for the casual photographers
The single rear camera is the only real drawback with the Air; it’s not a bad lens by any means, and actually takes great shots, but paying more and not having the ultra-wide sensor from the 17 doesn’t look great on paper. Getting that out of the way, what the Air does have is the new fantastic 18-megapixel selfie array, and the 48-megapixel Fusion Camera from the iPhone 17/16. It’s not a bad package, and you can do quite a bit with just those two lenses.
The new 18-megapixel adaptive selfie camera is also on the other 17-series phones, and across all three, I’m extremely impressed. The larger sensor doesn’t quite allow you to shoot a giant square image, but instead lets you reorient the camera in a few new ways. Most notably, this gives the selfie camera an ultra-wide mode, allowing you to shoot horizontally without turning your phone. This might be a small thing to some, but this is a huge quality-of-life improvement for content creators. It makes the phones easier to hold so they’re more stable, and you can maintain a less distracting eyeline with the camera. It’s a win-win-win-win when you also consider how good the quality can be.
The detail is excellent at its core, but I didn’t find its default images to be a clear step up over the model on the iPhone 16. It’s when I kicked it into ultra-wide landscape mode that I had a lot more fun. Since the new sensor lets you capture more of a scene than ever before, I found myself finally using the front camera since it was less focused on just me. The new sensor also lets you get quite close to a subject while retaining outstanding clarity, leading to some interesting shots. Across all three of the new phones, you can also record video from the front and rear cameras simultaneously to make for some fun memories or social moments. That said, these are baked together, so I wouldn’t use them for anything you might want to frame later. Overall, the added versatility is going to make a lot of people extremely happy.
For video, the new selfie camera also has enhanced stabilization since Apple is always cropping within the new large sensor. This works similarly to how Action mode was implemented on the rear camera. When you do it on the main lens, you’ll notice that the video zooms in a bit. This allows the software to compensate for your movements. Since the new selfie camera is always cropped in like this, it’s always able to apply extra stabilization. Both the front and rear cameras can record video in 4K 60fps, and you can also use Action Mode, and the recent Audio Mix settings from the iPhone 16 series are available in post.
Apple hit it out of the park with the new Bright Photographic Style.
You can view a folder with the full-resolution sample images on my Google Drive.
Upon scrutiny, the Air photos look great in nice lighting with incredibly crisp details and good control of the colours and light balance. Like last year, you can also use Photographic Styles to return some of the contrast Apple strips out by default. I mainly use the ‘Amber’ preset with some extra contrast dialled in; however, there’s a new style this year called ‘Bright’ that, as its name suggests, brightens skin tones while also adding in some vibrance to the rest of the image.
I was initially worried that this might not work that well for people with dark complexions, but in some examples I’ve seen, it doesn’t have any of the telltale signs of skin tone whitewashing that we typically see on Chinese smartphones. On the contrary, the colours are quite rich. Moving beyond skin tones, the extra pop of colour on offer here can make all photos shine. As with all the Photographic Styles, you can also tweak it to your liking by changing the saturation and contrast. After using it for a week, there’s a big chance the new Bright style becomes my new default. I would have loved for Apple to unlock RAW capture in the default camera app, especially since this phone has an A19 Pro chip, but to get the most out of this sensor, you need to use a third-party app like Boring Cam or Halide.
The big question
Online, everyone is asking why they’d want a thin phone with a worse battery, but for some reason, they’re missing the fact that the iPhone Air doesn’t have a bad battery. I’ve been able to get five to six hours of screen time, which is pretty much on par with all the other iPhones, not counting the Pro Max models from the last two years. If you need the extra battery, Apple makes a thick phone with a huge cell. However, if you feel like your last iPhone has been fine, this will be a nice upgrade.
In my testing, the iPhone Air peaked at 27 watts on my charger, but I wasn’t using Apple’s new specialty fast charger, just a regular Anker brick. Regardless, I think this will be a similar experience to most people, and for most of the charging cycle, the phone hovered between 18-22 watts. So I’d say that a 20-watt brick is still fine with this phone, but if you want to go faster, you could upgrade to a 30-watt.
I’ve been using an iPhone 16 for most of the summer, and honestly, I’ve been happier with the Air’s battery life. I easily get an hour or two of extra battery compared to the 16, which I liked charging mid-day, to make sure it lasted the full day. To be fair, I got used to that routine pretty quickly, and for days when I was out and about, I bought a UGreen MagSafe battery on Amazon. The third-party battery I got is about twice as thick as the model Apple announced during the keynote, but it does offer a lot more battery (5,000 mAh for $50).
The real key to the new Apple battery pack (3,149 mAh for $140) is its thinness. It makes it nicer to fit in your pocket and easier to hold when attached to the back of the phone. This model fits snugly inside the iPhone Air bumper case, and when just on the phone, it’s way more comfortable to hold than the UGreen model on the back of my iPhone 16. Plus, when you remove the MagSafe battery, you have a super-thin phone again, which is the Air’s best party trick.
I know which one of these I’d rather carry around all day…
When I was using the phone normally, the battery pack topped me up to around 50 per cent. When I put the battery on the back of the phone and left it alone, it got me up to 73 per cent, which is a little better than Apple’s estimated recharge of 65 per cent. When using a cable to charge the phone from the battery, I also got around 70 per cent, suggesting you don’t lose much energy when using the wireless power transfer. When you have the battery connected to your phone, the Apple battery widget shows you how much charge is left, but I would have loved for Apple to bring back something like the old ten-stage MacBook battery light indicator so I could see how much of a charge was left in the pack at a glance. If you plug the battery into a wall outlet, it will double as a 20-watt MagSafe charger. On the go, it charges your phone at 12 watts.
I think people are looking at the Air’s external battery pack as a crutch, but it’s more elegant than that. It’s Apple saying that it knows people are going to worry about battery life, and if that sounds like you, here’s the most comfortable external battery pack around. Sure, more power is definitely worth something, but having a device that’s comfortable to hold is the main draw of the Air, so I’m glad Apple used the same design ethos on the battery pack. It’s honestly so good that I wish Apple would make custom-sized batteries for the entire iPhone 17 line.
Other improvements and things I noticed
Unlike the other iPhones, the NFC chip is in the camera plateau, so I found that I needed to hold my phone a little differently to tap on transit and to pay for things.
One big change for Canadians this year is the loss of the physical SIM card slot. While many people are probably already on an eSIM, making switching to the new iPhones pretty easy, others might have some problems. Apple has a list of Canadian carriers that support eSIM on its website. I’m on Freedom, and moving my SIM card over was a piece of cake. My fiancée, on the other hand, had an issue, and we needed to go to a carrier store when attempting to turn her SIM into an eSIM. The employee at the store was able to help us, and we were back up and running in a few minutes. That said, we tried to set up her phone on a hotspot from the SIM card we were transferring, which is our fault. When you try to transfer yours, make sure you’re on Wi-Fi.
When using the Air, it screams at you not to use it in a case, so I had it caseless most of the time. However, Apple sent over some of its new accessories, so I spent a day wearing the phone on the new strap attached to the Bumper case, and I kinda loved it. I bike around a lot, so not having to worry about my phone falling out of my pocket, and being able to check it easily, was a huge plus. That said, as nice as the magnetic strap is on the Apple version, I’m going to wait for some Amazon knock-offs since $80 is a little more than I want to pay for a thin strap like this. The one caveat I will give is that well-made camera straps like this are also expensive, so Apple is competing squarely there (and the new crossbody strap would be a great tether for a small camera like the Fuji X-half or X100).
The bumper case, on the other hand, is quite nice, and its minimal nature pairs really well with the strap. There’s also a super-thin silicon case, which helps retain the phone’s slender nature. The only real plus it offers is a lip over the camera lens, which lets it sit flat on a table. Something I know some people will enjoy. Overall, I liked the bumper the most since it maintains the minimal spirit of the Air, but I’ll probably only use it when connected to a strap while I’m biking.
The Air still includes the new Camera Control area from the 16 series. It’s obviously a little thinner here, but it functions the same as it did before. The one change is that by default, it launches the camera app, acts as a hold-to-focus mechanism and a shutter button. All the intricate menus from last year are turned off and need to be re-enabled in Settings. If you re-enable the menu aspect, you can also customize it to do less. For instance, I have mine to only act as a toggle between the various lenses, which makes it easier to use the phone with one hand in a pinch.
There is also an Action Button above the volume rocker. I still have mine set to be a flashlight, but lots of people I’ve met over the year with iPhone 16 models all have different setups better tailored to their lives. Some use intricate shortcuts to offer a menu of controls, others have it set to be a translate key, and one super Canadian use case is to set it up to remotely start your car in the winter. This only works with specific cars, but I thought it was too cool not to mention.
Inside, the binned A19 Pro chip benchmarks somewhere between the M1 and M2 iPads, which is pretty insane power to have in a phone that just feels like a piece of glass. This lets the new 120Hz screen zip around, and even AAA games that a few years ago struggled to run on an iPhone 15 Pro Max can run pretty well on the Air. That said, it doesn’t handle thermals well, so it will get hot if you’re playing a game in landscape and you need to hold onto the camera plateau.
Due to the thermal throttling, I’d recommend playing AAA games like Hitman World of Assassinations and Assassin’s Creed Mirage at 30fps and lower settings. Playing high-end games like this also eats the battery really quickly. While this phone has a powerful chip, it’s probably more for the type of user who plays games in portrait orientation, like Pokémon Go or Candy Crush. The other test I usually do is a large spot reduction job in Lightroom mobile, and the Air handled around a hundred dust removal spots with relative ease.
Apple Intelligence
We’re still missing the contextually aware Siri feature one year after Apple’s false start on Apple Intelligence. There have been a few other Apple Intelligence tools that I do use or find compelling, so it does add a bit more to the phones this year compared to last. However, all these features will also run on the iPhone 15 Pro and the 16/17 series.
Obviously, I’ve got a pretty big stack of Genmoji’s, and I have used Visual Intelligence to translate menus a few times. Other than that, I’ve found writing tools are not something I use. If the proofreader worked more like Grammarly and let me yay or nay each edit, I might be more into it, but in its current form, it requires a proofread of the proofread, so why wouldn’t I just edit the original paragraph myself?
I don’t mind message summaries, but I only leave them on for texts now. Everything else seemed to get too confused. The summaries in Apple’s email app are nice, but it’s still not my favourite email client, and I don’t like the AI features enough to switch. Honestly, if anything is going to get me to switch to Apple Mail this year, it will be Liquid Glass.
Priority notifications were one feature I wanted to work well, primarily because of how cool they looked. However, after seeing it highlight random/normal notifications as a priority all the time, I turned that off. The new Live Translation features are the most impressive features I’ve seen so far from Apple’s AI ambitions. You can check out more on that in my AirPods Pro 3 review.
A newer AI feature in iOS/iPad/macOS 26 is the ability to use Apple Intelligence as part of your Shortcuts. One of my friends who runs a tech YouTube channel has created a cool one that analyzes screen time and another that can transcribe audio files using Apple’s local AI models. The possibilities with this tool are nearly endless if you like playing around with Shortcuts. The new Adaptive power mode in iOS 26 also seems to be an AI feature unavailable on older devices.
Overall, Apple Intelligence is a pretty mixed bag. More features are coming out all the time, but I have a feeling that until Siri gets a substantial upgrade, this isn’t going to be a major selling feature for most people.
Who is the Air for?
The Air is exactly as tall as a stack consisting of one Loonie, one Toonie and a quarter.
Midway through writing this review, I moved over to do some testing with the 17 Pro Max, and when I came back and picked up the Air, I had chills. The phone weighs so much less; holding something with a screen-to-weight ratio like this feels incredible. I think 6.5 inches is the sweet spot for large-screen devices as well. The Pro Max feels like a behemoth, and even last year’s 16 Plus was pretty hefty in retrospect.
Slimming down the Air and shrinking the screen makes it feel like it was designed with hands in mind, not just with the sole purpose of putting a giant screen in your pocket. There’s something about that that’s reminiscent of Apple from the past, and more than anything, this feels like a true successor to the iPhone X from 2017. Like the iPhone X, all this new design comes at a cost, and the Air is $1,449 in Canada with 256GB of storage. The iPhone Air MagSafe Battery is another $140, and while you don’t need it, I think most Air owners would be happy to have it. The Bumper case is $55, and the Crossbody Strap is $80.
If you love the latest and greatest from Apple’s lineup, buy an iPhone Air. I was the type of nerd who bought and loved the 12-inch MacBook, and this phone appeals to that part of me like a magnet.
If you’ve been using a standard iPhone for a few years and feel you deserve an upgrade, this is also a fantastic option. The bigger screen and slim design are a real treat, and while all iPhones this year get the new 120Hz display, the more fluid screen paired with Liquid Glass on the thin phone feels perfect.
Content creators who rely mainly on the front camera could use this phone, but I think most will want the larger battery life and more versatile camera system on the iPhone 17 Pro or Pro Max. If you fall into this camp, check out that review.
If you’re just looking for a good deal on an iPhone, there’s no denying that there’s a lot of value packed in the regular iPhone 17 with its new screen, two-camera system and stronger cover glass; however, the biggest iPhone value right now is the iPhone 16e from last year.
And if you’re still on the fence, the last thing I can recommend is going to an Apple store and trying it out for yourself. A lot of people I showed the phone to didn’t understand it until they held it in their hands.
