iPhone Air Review – 6 Months Later

By Josh Teder

The iPhone Air has been my favorite iPhone I’ve used in years, maybe a decade.

Weight and Design: A Breath of Fresh Air

The first highlight of using the iPhone Air is, of course, weight. If you’ve followed the site for a while, you’ll know that my biggest complaint by far with larger phones is that most of the time they’re just too damn heavy. This year’s iPhone 17 Pro Max is 233 g. And while that doesn’t sound like a lot on paper, you don’t realize how heavy these phones are until you start using the iPhone Air.

The iPhone Air weighs 165 g, and it feels like a breath of fresh air in the smartphone market, because finally you can have a larger screen phone while keeping the weight down. Once you hold this in your hand, you don’t want to put it down and pick up a heavier phone. It’s why the iPhone Air, whenever I’m not reviewing or testing another device, has been the phone I’ve reached for as my go-to.

But weight is only half the story. This is also Apple’s thinnest phone to date, coming in at an incredible 5.64 mm. Now, you might be thinking: who cares about thinness? All I care about is battery life. Trust me, we will get there. But I do think a lot of people miss, when outright dismissing the phone’s thinness, just how much that thinness is working in conjunction with the lighter weight. Together, they deliver a phone-using experience that just feels better than every other slab phone I’ve used.

When you think about how you actually use a phone (you hold it in your hand, look at the screen, and scroll), Apple has made that experience feel so much better here. The other thing Apple just did an excellent job with is build quality. With the way they’ve engineered the battery and titanium frame, it’s not going to bend or break in your pocket, even if you go caseless.

Speaking of cases, the one I’ve mainly been using is Apple’s clear case, but it has an interesting omission: there’s actually no protection on the bottom. My guess for the reason Apple designed it that way is that if you covered the bottom up completely, it would really dull the sensation of just how thin this phone is when you’re swiping with your thumb, and you’d probably want to tear the entire case off at that point anyway. This is actually the first iPhone I’ve found myself regularly going caseless with, because of just how good this thin design feels in your hand without a case.

From an aesthetic standpoint, I also think it looks pretty premium, especially with the polished titanium side rails. Though the colored models, like my Sky Blue, are really desaturated to the point where I forget I even have the Sky Blue color depending on the lighting conditions.

Ceramic Shield 2: Why I Skipped the Screen Protector

Another highlight has been Ceramic Shield 2, Apple’s latest generation of custom glass, and the reason this is the first iPhone in years I haven’t put a screen protector on.

Not only is this new glass significantly more scratch resistant (Apple claims it’s three times better than the previous material, and in tests it’s been shown to resist light scratches up to level seven on the Mohs scale versus six with the previous material), but Apple also went out of their way to point out that Ceramic Shield 2 uses a denser nano crystal matrix that better helps prevent microabrasions from accumulating over time, as well as a more durable oleophobic layer. Putting all of those upgrades together probably explains why, six months later, I have yet to see any of those tiny scratches in the glass that you can typically spot in really hard light.

The other reason I skipped the screen protector is the new anti-reflective coating that comes with Ceramic Shield 2. We’ve seen this type of coating on other phones before, like the Ultra line from Samsung, but this is a first for Apple. It’s been great, and I much prefer phone makers going this route than just touting how much brighter the display gets at peak, because a higher nit count at this point still isn’t really doing anything to actually reduce the reflection showing up on the glass.

“This is the first iPhone in years I haven’t put a screen protector on, and six months later, I have yet to see any of those tiny scratches in the glass.”

Screen and Software Highlights

Screen size is another highlight. While it’s not quite as big as the Max line at 6.9 in, 6.5 in is actually a pretty decent size and feels great in my hand. The display looks stunning. You get ProMotion with a 120 Hz refresh rate and 3,000 nits of peak brightness.

On the software side, a few iOS features have stood out during my six-month period, like the new phone call features. You can now put calls on hold, and the call screening feature lets the iPhone pick up and screen whoever is calling before your phone rings. But what really keeps me coming back to iOS day after day is the ecosystem and the overall performance of apps. The connection between iPhone and Mac, with features like AirDrop, Continuity Camera, being able to copy anything on my phone and paste it on my Mac, the way apps work seamlessly between devices. There’s still nothing integrated quite as deep as the iPhone and other Apple products in my experience.

With all of these little features you notice between Apple devices, or just parts of iOS like being able to put any app you want on the Lock Screen as a shortcut, those little things all add up over time.

Something else that’s added up over time is how good Apple’s in-house modem has been. The C1X modem and the N1 chip in this phone have been excellent. Over my Wi-Fi 6E network, I’ve noticed that this iPhone stays with the 6 GHz band much more consistently than my Android phones do. It’s also worth noting that the N1 chip upgrades the Air to Wi-Fi 7.

Battery Life

All right, let’s talk about it. When this phone launched, Apple claimed all-day battery life. For my light to moderate use (about 1 to 2.5 hours of screen time per day, plus 1 to 2 hours of background playback for music and podcasts), that’s actually been totally accurate.

I’ve been seeing anywhere from the low 40s down to maybe 15 to 20% at the end of a heavy use day where screen time is closer to four or five hours, or on a day I’ve been doing a lot of shooting photos and video. This is on the lower end for phones I typically test, but I’ve only come close to running out once, and I was home and could easily plug in to charge or slap on the MagSafe battery pack.

That’s actually another highlight. When you really need that extra battery, you can just bring the MagSafe battery with you. But on most days when you don’t need that extra capacity, you don’t have to carry it around, which when you think about it is exactly what you’re doing most of the time with all of these flagship phones like the 17 Pro Max. After six months, I don’t think I’d ever go back to carrying a heavier phone just for battery headroom I rarely need.

“After six months, I don’t think I’d ever go back to carrying a heavier phone just for battery headroom I rarely need.”

Camera: What I’ve Used and What I Haven’t

I haven’t actually used the selfie camera all that much. Looking through my camera roll, I just don’t take selfies that often, and when I do, it’s usually just me. But it’s worth noting that the iPhone Air, along with the 17 and 17 Pro models, got upgraded to an 18 megapixel square sensor that can automatically crop and change the aspect ratio when more people enter the frame behind you. Importantly, when that happens, you don’t have to change how you’re holding the phone. Note that selfies will still come out between 12 and 7 megapixels depending on how tight that crop is.

I’ve mainly used the main camera system for casual shooting and have been overall pleased with the photo and video quality. It uses the same wide sensor found in the regular iPhone 17, which produces very good photos with crisp detail and colors that look right, not overly saturated. And while Apple does still love pushing up the highlights, in my experience with this line of iPhones, they’ve actually been more restrained about it, where things don’t look as blown out as they used to. Video quality also continues to just be excellent, with great clarity and great color.

The one caveat is there’s no ProRAW Max, Apple’s own RAW format that preserves their computational photography while giving you a lot more latitude to tweak images in post. There’s also no ProRes Log video recording. For my line of work, those features absolutely matter, and yes, there are instances where I’d want every one of them on the iPhone Air. But that’s not the only reason this isn’t my go-to camera for important events.

While iPhone cameras nowadays are very good, they still just can’t compete in some areas with dedicated cameras. If you really care about image quality, want ultra high-res images, or need true shallow depth of field that you can only get with a real lens, you’re still going to want something like the Fujifilm X100VI I reviewed or the Sony A7 Mark V.

As for the Camera Control button: I use it occasionally as a shortcut to jump into the camera app, but I can’t stand when I accidentally press it. The Action button, on the other hand, I use constantly. I have it mapped to toggle Do Not Disturb on and off, and it’s become one of my favorite physical buttons on any phone.

Apple Intelligence

Overall, I haven’t found Apple Intelligence very useful outside of notification summaries, which have been getting better, as well as priority notifications, which are great for when your phone is in a Focus mode. You can still set Focus modes to allow priority notifications, where the phone will read the incoming notification and then use Intelligence to decide whether or not to still alert you.

Downsides

The most obvious downside is that there’s no triple camera system like on the Pro iPhones. Apple says you get four lenses in your pocket, but that’s not really true. What you’re really getting with a lot of those modes is just a sensor crop with some computation around it. The two lenses you actually get on this phone are the 48 megapixel main camera and the 18 megapixel selfie camera. And you don’t even get a macro mode because of the missing ultrawide camera.

Battery life is another downside worth calling out for heavier users. For me, it’s been fine. It does dip lower than other phones, but I haven’t constantly found myself running out of juice by the end of the day or having to lean on Low Power Mode. However, if you are a heavy user who plays power-hungry games like Pokémon GO, that’s going to chew through this battery a lot faster.

As for whether getting the MagSafe battery pack is worth it for the iPhone Air: in the course of six months, I haven’t actually run into a situation where I needed to use it. However, if you’re traveling a lot or in a situation where you may not have a place to charge, then yes, I would absolutely get it for that peace of mind.

The Air is also slower at fast charging, only reaching a peak of 20 watts compared to 40 watts on the Pro and 17 models.

The speaker is another downside. At high volume, you get a lot of audible distortion that just doesn’t sound good compared to the 17 Pro Max’s speakers. There’s only one speaker at the ear, with no bottom-firing speaker. It’s not a dealbreaker for me, but I could see how it could be for some.

Another downside involves iOS 26. The new Liquid Glass redesign has introduced a few rough edges. The tabs in Safari now take one more tap to access than before, for example. And while the new design has some areas that genuinely look nice, like the way timers display on the Lock Screen with that cool light refraction, there are plenty of rough spots where elements are just harder to see, especially for users who already have a harder time reading their screen.

The biggest systematic downside to iOS, and this applies to every iPhone not just the iPhone Air, is that everything still has to be downloaded via the App Store. You just don’t get the software freedom that you do on a Mac. That’s actually one of the reasons I keep coming back to the Mac as the ultimate creative device, not iPads or iPhones. The flexibility of being able to download things from the web is irreplaceable.

One last small downside worth mentioning: this phone runs warmer than some of my previous iPhones, mainly because all that computation is packed up at the top. When you’re doing something really intensive, you’re going to feel that part of the phone heat up. It still has the Pro chip, but sustained performance in games isn’t quite on the level of the 17 Pro and Pro Max, which benefit from better thermal management thanks to a vapor chamber and aluminum chassis.

Verdict

So, do I recommend the iPhone Air? 100% yes. This is the iPhone I’ve been recommending the most throughout the year. Though I will say I haven’t sold many of them. I think most people see that single camera on the back, get nervous, and end up buying the Pro model or the regular 17. Which is interesting, because the only extra camera you get on the regular 17 is the ultrawide, and I think the telephoto is far more useful, and you only get the telephoto on the Pro.

Look, if you’re doing a lot of video work like I am, or you’re really into photography and want pro tools or extra camera lenses, yes, I’d still point you toward the Pro. But if the photos you take are mostly casual, and especially if you have a dedicated camera for the important family events or trips you go on, do your hand a favor, save the weight, and I would absolutely go with the iPhone Air.

Overall, I think it is worth the price Apple is charging for it. You can check current prices and find links to multiple retailers on our shop page. And if you want to keep an eye out for deals on Apple products in general, head over to 6monthslater.net/shop and search Apple deals. That’ll pull up all of the Apple products we recommend that have recently gone on sale.

For more on how the iPhone Air stacks up against the iPhone 17 Pro Max, check out our full comparison post.