The iPhone Air is Apple's thinnest phone yet
The worst kept secret of 2025 is official. At its Awe Dropping event on Tuesday, Apple announced the iPhone Air, its thinnest iPhone to date.
Just how thin is the iPhone Air? At its thinnest point, the new model is 5.6mm thick. To put those measurements in perspective, the iPhone 16 Pro is 8.25mm thick, making the Air over 2mm thinner than Apple's 2024 flagship. Prior to today, the 6.9mm thick iPhone 6 was the company's thinnest smartphone to date. Since then, newer iPhones have been thicker to accommodate larger batteries, Face ID, multi-camera arrays and other components. The iPhone Air reverses that trend.
At the same time, Apple claims the Air is its most durable phone yet, with a frame made from recycled titanium. Additionally, the Air is encased in the company's Ceramic Shield material, which on the front Apple says is now 3x more scratch resistant than previous iterations. As for the display, it's a 6.5-inch screen with ProMotion support up to 120Hz, always-on functionality and 3,000 nits of peak outdoor brightness. Additionally, Apple says the display has better outdoor contrast.
Internally, the iPhone Air features the company's new A19 Pro chipset. Tim Millet, vice president of platform architecture at Apple, said the new chip, with its six-core CPU, is the fastest smartphone processor on the market. The A19 Pro also comes with an upgraded GPU and Apple's new N1 networking chip. In conjunction with the Air's C1X modem, the iPhone Air offers WiFi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread connectivity out of the box. What's more, the new 5G-capable C1X is more power efficient, using 30 percent less energy than the modem in the iPhone 16 Pro. Unsurprisingly, the iPhone Air will only support eSIMs. Apple did not include a physical SIM slot to make space for other components. The phone's "plateau" houses its cameras, speaker and Apple Silicon.
For photos, the Air comes with a single 48-megapixel main camera that has an f/1.6 aperture lens and 2x telephoto zoom. Like the iPhone 17, the iPhone Air also comes with Apple's new Center Stage front-facing camera, which makes use of a 18MP square sensor to allow you to take both portrait and landscape shots without reorienting how you hold the phone in your hand. As for video, the camera can record 4K footage at 60 frames per second with Dolby Vision support included.
Now, for the question on everyone's mind: battery life. Here, Apple is claiming you'll be able to get "all-day" usage out of the Air. Of course, all-day can mean different things to different people. Even Apple today said the Apple Watch Series 11 and Apple Watch SE 3 — which offer 24 and 18 hours of usage on a single charge, respectively — both feature "all-day" battery life. Apple will sell a new MagSafe battery alongside the iPhone Air that will extend its battery life, but at that point you might as well have bought the iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Pro.
The iPhone Air will start $999, with 256GB of internal storage included with the base model. Apple will begin accepting pre-orders on 8AM ET on Friday, with general availability to follow on September 19. The Air will be available in four colors: space black, cloud white, light gold and sky blue.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/the-iphone-air-is-apples-thinnest-phone-yet-174342422.html?src=rss
