Transcription
[Music] Apple's new iPhone is here and is thinner than ever. I'm of course talking about the iPhone Air, but what did it cost to make the phone this slim? And we'll go for GSM Marina and let's find out in our iPhone Air review.
[Music] Apple finally brought the spirit of the MacBook Air to the iPhones, giving us a phone with a large display, but a thin and light body that's easy to carry around. The iPhone Air replaces last year's iPhone 16 Plus, but it's no successor. This model is less than 6 mm thick and weighs only 165 g. It has a pro-level chipset and a high refresh rate ProMotion display. However, there's only one camera on the back.
The rear panel of the iPhone Air is made from frosted Ceramic Shield glass, and we have this super subtle light blue finish here. There's a large glossy camera bump that stretches all the way across, even though it's only housing a single camera. The thin frame is also glossy and is made of titanium, something that even this year's Pro models don't have, but it does look and feel a lot like the chrome-painted plastic frames you see on a number of mid-rangers. Between this camera setup, the feel of the frame, and the remarkable lightness of the phone, the impression of the iPhone Air just isn't as impressive as you'd expect from a design-centric premium smartphone.
At least there are no surprises when it comes to ingress protection. The iPhone Air is IP68 rated against dust and water submersion to a depth of up to 6 m. Screen-wise, the iPhone Air is bigger than the vanilla iPhone 17, but it's not quite as large as the iPhone 17 Pro Max. What you get here is a 6.5-inch OLED panel with a high resolution, a 120 Hz refresh rate, and Ceramic Shield glass 2 protection. Like on the new Pro Max, there's an anti-reflective coating here. This means less glare and better legibility out in the sun.
With our standard testing procedure, we measured a max brightness of 780 nits with the manual slider, and this boosted to just under a thousand in auto mode. While this is rather unimpressive, the display is able to light up smaller patches to much higher levels. And even at normal levels, the anti-glare coating makes the screen perfectly usable, even in the bright sun outdoors. The iPhone Air's 120 Hz refresh rate makes swiping and scrolling appear much smoother than on last year's non-Pro iPhones, which are using the outdated 60 Hz screens. And this display is able to dial down all the way to one Hz when you stop interacting with it to save energy. The screen looks great. It's contrasty and sharp. As other iPhones before it, it supports HDR10 and Dolby Vision video playback. And of course, you get that large cutout for the selfie camera and 3D ToF sensor. This enables Apple's secure Face ID, which is used for biometrics and unlocking the phone as there's no fingerprint reader. Apple's Dynamic Island functionality is back. The display is able to show info and shortcuts in the space surrounding the cutout.
One area in which the iPhone Air falls behind though is the speaker quality, which is a consequence of this thin form factor. Rather than stereo speakers or even a bottom-firing speaker, the audio here only comes out of the top at the earpiece. It isn't that loud, scoring just average on our loudness chart. Worse yet, its sound is flat, thin, and lacking in bass. You can listen for yourself through a comparison tool linked below. Like other recent iPhones, the iPhone Air has a hardware key for shortcuts. You can choose from a number of predefined actions for it, or even set up your own custom shortcuts. One thing worth mentioning is that the iPhone Air misses out on the faster USB 3.2 transfer speeds of the Pro models. It just uses USB 2.0. And for storage options, you can get the phone with 256 GB, 512 GB, or a terabyte on board. As expected, that's not expandable through micro SD.
The interface of the iPhone Air is Apple's new iOS 26, which brings the new Liquid Glass design language. This features larger icons on the home screen as well as a bubble-like theme across the OS. Many elements are now rounded and partially transparent with a brightened outlines and borders. It's quite different and something that takes getting used to. We'll be doing an in-depth video about iOS 26, and we'll add a link to that here when it's ready. And for software support, you'll be getting at least 5 years with the iPhone Air, just like on other recent iPhones.
The iPhone Air's chipset situation is a bit more complicated than it seems at first glance. It packs an Apple A19 Pro like you'd find on this year's iPhone Pro models, but actually the chipset inside of the Air is less powerful with a 5-core GPU instead of the six that the Pros get. In CPU benchmarks, the iPhone Air clearly outranks the iPhones from last year, but when it comes to graphics, it trades blows with them. It's also consistently outscored by the iPhone 17 Pro Max, even if Apple's specs would make you believe that they have the same chipset. Still, the iPhone Air is very powerful, and it's doubtful that you'd notice the difference in raw power from the Pro models. And quite surprisingly, the iPhone Air does a respectable job when it comes to thermal management considering the thin form factor. In our prolonged stress test, the CPU throttled down to 76% of maximum, a better showing than other thin phones like the Galaxy S25 Edge.
The battery of the iPhone Air is small, as you might expect, at 3,149 mAh, but even so, the phone squeezes a decent amount of endurance out of it, earning an overall active use score of 12 hours and 44 minutes. That's better than some Android phones with batteries at 5,000 mAh. The charging here is not very exciting. The iPhone Air doesn't get the new Power Delivery 3.2 with AVS that you see on this year's other iPhones. With the proper adapter, we charged the phone from 0 to 57% in half an hour, and a full charge took a little more than an hour and a half. It's even more disappointing considering how small the battery is. The phone also has support for reverse wired charging and C2 wireless charging.
And now we move on to the camera quality. The iPhone Air uses the same 48-megapixel main camera as the vanilla iPhone 17. You get a hardware key for camera controls here, just as on other recent iPhones. You can use it to launch the camera, adjust controls, and to shoot without needing to touch the display. The iPhone Air's main cam produces great photos during the day. You get excellent contrast and dynamic range. Colors are accurate and not oversaturated, and the detail levels are quite good, though some fine details, like far away foliage, aren't perfect when viewed up close. The photos we took of people look natural and consistent across lighting scenarios. You get plenty of detail and skin tones are well rendered and the dedicated portrait mode produces a very natural-looking bokeh effect. When zooming in digitally at two times, you can see a drop in sharpness and fine detail if you examine closely, but overall the quality is pretty solid.
In the dark, photos come out clean and sharp with good detail, low noise, and accurate colors. Dynamic range is good, too, though light sources are often clipped. The iPhone Air tends to trigger Night mode rather often. And shooting this way does take extra time, but you can disable it manually. If you keep it on, you get more detail in the shadows. And in darker scenes, it also helps improve the dynamic range and sharpness, but the clipped light sources are still present. Moving on to selfies. The new 18-megapixel selfie camera brings a multi-aspect sensor that can capture a 4:3 selfie in either a landscape or portrait orientation with no need to rotate the phone. Image quality is great. Selfies are sharp and detailed with wide dynamic range and natural-looking skin tones and colors. The extra-wide field of view is handy, and so is the autofocus, which keeps your subjects coming out consistently sharp.
The iPhone Air can record videos in 4K at up to 60 fps, and the main camera's footage is excellent. It's clean and crisp with plenty of fine detail and a wide dynamic range. And at two times zoom, the quality remains great, even if foliage and buildings in the distance come out a little fuzzier. The electronic video stabilization does a great job here to smooth movements out. The nighttime footage is impressive, too, with wide dynamic range, good contrast, and accurate colors. Noise is also quite low.
So, there you have it, guys. The iPhone Air is an impressive feat of engineering. Apple was able to fit all that hardware and is such a slim form factor without wrecking the battery life or the thermals. The biggest downside here is the speaker quality. A single speaker around the earpiece is a far cry from what you get on any other iPhone. Also, while the camera does an okay job, you don't get the versatility of an ultrawide or a telephoto. But otherwise, the iPhone Air is a good phone. And if you ever wish your iPhone was thinner, then this could be the right choice for you. Thanks for watching, guys. If you're looking for another ultra-thin alternative, there's the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge. Or if you just want the premium iPhone features without going over budget, then there's last year's iPhone 16 Pro. Let us know what you think, and I'll see you on the next one.