The iPhone Air might not be another MacBook Air, but that’s okay.
We knew it was coming, and now it’s here. The iPhone Air, as rumored, is only 5.6mm thick and has fewer features than the base iPhone 17, which is $200 cheaper. Sure, it’s not the first slimline reinterpretation of a major smartphone — Samsung beat Apple to the punch with the Galaxy S25 Edge earlier this year — but the influence of Apple can’t be underestimated. It’s too early to tell if the iPhone Air will shake up smartphones as the MacBook Air did with laptops, but it’s definitely a safer evolution. And hey, perhaps the iPhone Air is merely a pit-stop on the way to the first Apple foldable.
Let’s go back to 2008. With the MacBook Air, Apple ditched the optical disc drive and many ports, leading to a device that was so thin Steve Jobs pulled it out of a manila envelope when he first revealed it. The first MBA had some issues; it was underpowered, used a tiny and slow hard drive and battery life was pretty awful. But Apple refined the formula, which led to countless slimmed-down laptops and even a new category, the ultraportable.
Sadly, Apple didn’t figure out an equally iconic way to reveal its super slim iPhone. In fact, it dropped it in a carefully prepared marketing video, presumably in a bid to show off how confident it is with the hardiness of the iPhone Air. But it felt like Apple trying to assuage durability fears in a way that doesn’t really work, since this was just part of a carefully-manicured marketing promotion.
