iphone air

Reports suggest Apple is already pulling back on the iPhone Air

Apple, IPhone, iphone air, iPhone mini, iphone plus, Tech / Shannon Garcia / October 23, 2025

Apple’s iPhone Air was the company’s most interesting new iPhone this year, at least insofar as it was the one most different from previous iPhones. We came away impressed by its size and weight in our review. But early reports suggest that its novelty might not be translating into sales success.

A note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, whose supply chain sources are often accurate about Apple’s future plans, said yesterday that demand for the iPhone Air “has fallen short of expectations” and that “both shipments and production capacity” were being scaled back to account for the lower-than-expected demand.

Kuo’s note is backed up by reports from other analysts at Mizuho Securities (via MacRumors) and Nikkei Asia. Both of these reports say that demand for the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro models remains strong, indicating that this is just a problem for the iPhone Air and not a wider slowdown caused by tariffs or other external factors.

The standard iPhone, the regular-sized iPhone Pro, and the big iPhone Pro have all been mainstays in Apple’s lineup, but the company has had a harder time coming up with a fourth phone that sells well enough to stick around. The small-screened iPhone mini and the large-screened iPhone Plus were each discontinued after two generations.

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Apple iPhone 17 review: Sometimes boring is best

Apple, Features, iphone 17, iphone 17 pro, iphone air, Tech / DJ Henderson / September 25, 2025

let’s not confuse “more interesting” with “better”

The least exciting iPhone this year is also the best value for the money.

The iPhone 17 Pro isn’t flashy but it’s probably the best of this year’s upgrades. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple seems determined to leave a persistent gap between the cameras of its Pro iPhones and the regular ones, but most other features—the edge-to-edge-screen design with FaceID, the Dynamic Island, OLED display panels, Apple Intelligence compatibility—eventually trickle down to the regular-old iPhone after a generation or two of timed exclusivity.

One feature that Apple has been particularly slow to move down the chain is ProMotion, the branding the company uses to refer to a screen that can refresh up to 120 times per second rather than the more typical 60 times per second. ProMotion isn’t a necessary feature, but since Apple added it to the iPhone 13 Pro in 2021, the extra fluidity and smoothness, plus the always-on display feature, have been big selling points for the Pro phones.

This year, ProMotion finally comes to the regular-old iPhone 17, years after midrange and even lower-end Android phones made the swap to 90 or 120 Hz display panels. And it sounds like a small thing, but the screen upgrade—together with a doubling of base storage from 128GB to 256GB—makes the gap between this year’s iPhone and iPhone Pro feel narrower than it’s been in a long time. If you jumped on the Pro train a few years back and don’t want to spend that much again, this might be a good year to switch back. If you’ve ever been tempted by the Pro but never made the upgrade, you can continue not doing that and miss out on relatively little.

The iPhone 17 has very little that we haven’t seen in an iPhone before, compared to the redesigned Pro or the all-new Air. But it’s this year’s best upgrade, and it’s not particularly close.

You’ve seen this one before

Externally, the iPhone 17 is near-identical to the iPhone 16, which itself used the same basic design Apple had been using since the iPhone 12. The most significant update in that five-year span was probably the iPhone 15, which switched from the display notch to the Dynamic Island and from the Lightning port to USB-C.

The iPhone 12 generation was also probably the last time the regular iPhone and the Pro were this similar. Those phones used the same basic design, the same basic chip, and the same basic screen, leaving mostly camera-related improvements and the Max model as the main points of differentiation. That’s all broadly true of the split between the iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro, as well.

The iPhone Air and Pro both depart from the last half-decade of iPhone designs in different ways, but the iPhone 17 sticks with the tried-and-true. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone 17’s design has changed just enough since last year that you’ll need to find a new iPhone 17-compatible case and screen protector for your phone rather than buying something that fits a previous-generation model (it’s imperceptibly taller than the iPhone 16). The screen size has been increased from 6.1 inches to 6.3, the same as the iPhone Pro. But the aluminum-framed-glass-sandwich design is much less of a departure from recent precedent than either the iPhone Air or the Pro.

The screen is the real star of the show in the iPhone 17, bringing 120 Hz ProMotion technology and the Pro’s always-on display feature to the regular iPhone for the first time. According to Apple’s spec sheets (and my eyes, admittedly not a scientific measurement), the 17 and the Pro appear to be using identical display panels, with the same functionally infinite contrast, resolution (2622 x 1206), and brightness specs (1,000 nits typical, 1,600 nits for HDR, 3,000 nits peak in outdoor light).

It’s easy to think of the basic iPhone as “the cheap one” because it is the least expensive of the four new phones Apple puts out every year, but $799 is still well into premium-phone range, and even middle-of-the-road phones from the likes of Google and Samsung have been shipping high-refresh-rate OLED panels in cheaper phones than this for a few years now. By that metric, it’s faintly ridiculous that Apple isn’t shipping something like this in its $600 iPhone 16e, but in Apple’s ecosystem, we’ll take it as a win that the iPhone 17 doesn’t cost more than the 16 did last year.

Holding an iPhone 17 feels like holding any other regular-sized iPhone made within the last five years, with the exceptions of the new iPhone Air and some of the heavier iPhone Pros. It doesn’t have the exceptionally good screen-size-to-weight ratio or the slim profile of the Air, and it doesn’t have the added bulk or huge camera plateau of the iPhone 17 Pro. It feels about like it looks: unremarkable.

Camera

iPhone 15 Pro, main lens, 1x mode, outdoor light. If you’re just shooting with the main lens, the Air and iPhone 17 win out in color and detail thanks to a newer sensor and ISP. Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone Air’s single camera has the same specs and uses the same sensor as the iPhone 17’s main camera, so we’ve already written a bit about how well it does relative to the iPhone Pro and to an iPhone 15 Pro from a couple of years ago.

Like the last few iPhone generations, the iPhone 17’s main camera uses a 48 MP sensor that saves 24 MP images, using a process called “pixel binning” to decide which pixels are saved and which are discarded when shrinking the images down. To enable an “optical quality” 2x telephoto mode, Apple crops a 12 MP image out of the center of that sensor without doing any resizing or pixel binning. The results are a small step down in quality from the regular 1x mode, but they’re still native resolution images with no digital zoom, and the 2x mode on the iPhone Air or iPhone 17 can actually capture fine detail better than an older iPhone Pro in situations where you’re shooting an object that’s close by and the actual telephoto lens isn’t used.

The iPhone 15 Pro. When you shoot a nearby subject in 2x or even 3x mode, the Pro phones give you a crop of the main sensor rather than switching to the telephoto lens. You need to be farther from your subject for the phone to engage the telephoto lens. Andrew Cunningham

One improvement to the iPhone 17’s camera sensor this year is that the ultrawide camera is also upgraded to a 48 MP sensor so it can benefit from the same shrinking-and-pixel-binning strategy Apple uses for the main camera. In the iPhone 16, this secondary sensor was still just 12 MP.

Compared to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 we have here, wide shots on the iPhone 17 benefit mainly from the added detail you capture in higher-resolution 24 or 48 MP images. The difference is slightly more noticeable with details in the background of an image than details in the foreground, as visible in the Lego castle surrounding Lego Mario.

The older the phone you’re using is, the more you’ll benefit from sensor and image signal processing improvements. Bits of dust and battle damage on Mario are most distinct on the iPhone 17 than the iPhone 15 Pro, for example, but aside from the resolution, I don’t notice much of a difference between the iPhone 16 and 17.

A true telephoto lens is probably the biggest feature the iPhone 17 Pro has going for it relative to the basic iPhone 17, and Apple has amped it up with its own 48 MP sensor this year. We’ll reuse the 4x and 8x photos from our iPhone Air review to show you what you’re missing—the telephoto camera captures considerably more fine detail on faraway objects, but even as someone who uses the telephoto on the iPhone 15 Pro constantly, I would have to think pretty hard about whether that camera is worth $300, even once you add in the larger battery, ProRAW support, and other things Apple still holds back for the Pro phones.

Specs and speeds and battery

Our iPhone Air review showed that the main difference between the iPhone 17’s Apple A19 chip and the A19 Pro used in the iPhone Air and iPhone Pro is RAM. The iPhone 17 sticks with 8GB of memory, whereas both Air and Pro are bumped up to 12GB.

There are other things that the A19 Pro can enable, including ProRes video support and 10Gbps USB 3 file transfer speeds. But many of those iPhone Pro features, including the sixth GPU core, are mostly switched off for the iPhone Air, suggesting that we could actually be looking at the exact same silicon with a different amount of RAM packaged on top.

Regardless, 8GB of RAM is currently the floor for Apple Intelligence, so there’s no difference in features between the iPhone 17 and the Air or the 17 Pro. Browser tabs and apps may be ejected from memory slightly less frequently, and the 12GB phones may age better as the years wear on. But right now, 8GB of memory puts you above the amount that most iOS 26-compatible phones are using—Apple is still optimizing for plenty of phones with 6GB, 4GB, or even 3GB of memory. 8GB should be more than enough for the foreseeable future, and I noticed zero differences in day-to-day performance between the iPhone 17 and the iPhone Air.

All phones were tested with Adaptive Power turned off.

The iPhone 17 is often actually faster than the iPhone Air, despite both phones using five-core A19-class GPUs. Apple’s thinnest phone has less room to dissipate heat, which leads to more aggressive thermal throttling, especially for 3D apps like games. The iPhone 17 will often outperform Apple’s $999 phone, despite costing $200 less.

All of this also ignores one of the iPhone 17’s best internal upgrades: a bump from 128GB of storage to 256GB of storage at the same $799 starting price as the iPhone 16. Apple’s obnoxious $100-or-$200-per-tier upgrade pricing for storage and RAM is usually the worst part about any of its products, so any upgrade that eliminates that upcharge for anyone is worth calling out.

On the battery front, we didn’t run specific tests, but the iPhone 17 did reliably make it from my typical 7: 30 or 7: 45 am wakeup to my typical 1: 00 or 1: 30 am bedtime with 15 or 20 percent leftover. Even a day with Personal Hotspot use and a few dips into Pokémon Go didn’t push the battery hard enough to require a midday top-up. (Like the other new iPhones this year, the iPhone 17 ships with Adaptive Power enabled, which can selectively reduce performance or dim the screen and automatically enables Low Power Mode at 20 percent, all in the name of stretching the battery out a bit and preventing rapid drops.)

Better battery life out of the box is already a good thing, but it also means more wiggle room for the battery to lose capacity over time without seriously inconveniencing you. This is a line that the iPhone Air can’t quite cross, and it will become more and more relevant as your phone approaches two or three years in service.

The one to beat

Apple’s iPhone 17. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The screen is one of the iPhone Pro’s best features, and the iPhone 17 gets it this year. That plus the 256GB storage bump is pretty much all you need to know; this will be a more noticeable upgrade for anyone with, say, the iPhones 12-to-14 than the iPhone 15 or 16 was. And for $799—$200 more than the 128GB version of the iPhone 16e and $100 more than the 128GB version of the iPhone 16—it’s by far the iPhone lineup’s best value for money right now.

This is also happening at the same time as the iPhone Pro is getting a much chonkier new design, one I don’t particularly love the look of even though I do appreciate the functional camera and battery upgrades it enables. This year’s Pro feels like a phone targeted toward people who are actually using it in a professional photography or videography context, where in other years, it’s felt more like “the regular iPhone plus a bunch of nice, broadly appealing quality-of-life stuff that may or may not trickle down to the regular iPhone over time.”

In this year’s lineup, you get the iPhone Air, which feels like it’s trying to do something new at the expense of basics like camera and battery life. You get the iPhone 17 Pro, which feels like it was specifically built for anyone who looks at the iPhone Air and thinks, “I just want a phone with a bigger battery and a better camera and I don’t care what it looks like or how light it is” (hello, median Ars Technica readers and employees). And the iPhone 17 is there quietly undercutting them both, as if to say, “Would anyone just like a really good version of the regular iPhone?”

Next and last on our iPhone review list this year: the iPhone 17 Pro. Maybe spending a few days up close with it will help me appreciate the design more?

The good

The exact same screen as this year’s iPhone Pro for $300 less, including 120 Hz ProMotion, variable refresh rates, and an always-on screen.
Same good main camera as the iPhone Air, plus the added flexibility of an improved wide-angle camera.
Good battery life.
A19 is often faster than iPhone Air’s A19 Pro thanks to better heat dissipation.
Jumps from 128GB to 256GB of storage without increasing the starting price.

The bad

8GB of RAM instead of 12GB. 8GB is fine but more is also good!
I slightly prefer last year’s versions of most of these color options.
No two-column layout for apps in landscape mode.
The telephoto lens seems like it will be restricted to the iPhone Pro forever.

The ugly

People probably won’t be able to tell you have a new iPhone?

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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New iPhones use Apple N1 wireless chip—and we’ll probably start seeing it everywhere

Apple, iphone 17, iphone 17 pro, iphone air, Tech / DJ Henderson / September 10, 2025

Apple’s most famous chips are the A- and M-series processors that power its iPhones, iPads, and Macs, but this year, its effort to build its own wireless chips is starting to bear fruit. Earlier this spring, the iPhone 16e included Apple’s C1 modem, furthering Apple’s ambitions to shed its dependence on Qualcomm, and today’s iPhone Air brought a faster Apple C1X variant, plus something new: the Apple N1, a chip that provides Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support for all of today’s new iPhones.

Apple didn’t dive deep into the capabilities of the N1, or why it had switched from using third-party suppliers (historically, Apple has mostly leaned on Broadcom for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth). However, the company’s press releases say that it should make Continuity features like Personal Hotspot and AirDrop more reliable—these features use Bluetooth for initial communication and then Wi-Fi to establish a high-speed local link between two devices. Other features that use a similar combination of wireless technologies, like using an iPad as an extended Mac display, should also benefit.

These aren’t Apple’s first chips to integrate Wi-Fi or Bluetooth technology. The Apple Watches rely on W-series chips to provide their Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity; the Apple H1 and H2 chips also provide Bluetooth connectivity for many of Apple’s wireless headphones. But this is the first time that Apple has switched to its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip in one of its iPhones, suggesting that the chips have matured enough to provide higher connectivity speeds for more demanding devices.

Apple will likely expand the use of the N1 (and other N-series chips) beyond the iPhone soon enough. Macs and iPads are obvious candidates, but the presence of Thread support also suggests that we’ll see it in new smart home devices like the Apple TV or HomePod.

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Hands-on with Apple’s new iPhones: Beauty and the beast and the regular-looking one

Apple, IPhone, iphone 17, iphone 17 pro, iphone air, Tech / Shannon Garcia / September 10, 2025

i have touched the new phones

A new form-vs.-function spectrum emerges as Apple’s phone designs diverge.

The iPhone Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

CUPERTINO, Calif.—We’re a long way from the days when a new iPhone launch just meant one new phone. It shifted to “basically the same phone in two sizes” a decade or so ago, and then to a version of “one lineup of regular phones and one lineup of Pro phones” in 2017 when the iPhone 8 was introduced next to the iPhone X.

But thanks to Apple’s newly introduced iPhone Air, the iPhone 17 lineup gives new phone buyers more choices and trade-offs than they’ve ever had before. Apple’s phones are now available in a spectrum of sizes, weights, speeds, costs, and camera configurations. And while options are great to have, it also means you need to know more about which one to pick.

We’ve gone hands-on with all four of Apple’s new phones, and while more extensive tire-kicking will be required, we can at least try to nail down exactly what kind of person each of these phones is for.

The iPhone Air: Designed for first impressions

There’s no more iPhone mini, and there’s no more iPhone Plus. Now we have an iPhone Air, and it is very much its own thing.

The phone is just over two-thirds the thickness of the iPhone 17, not counting what Apple now calls a “camera plateau” that stretches across the top of the device. It’s 0.22 inches thick and weighs 5.82 ounces, compared to 0.31 inches thick and 6.24 ounces for the iPhone 17. You have to go back to the iPhone 12 (5.78 ounces) to find a full-size iPhone that’s equally light, and that one had a 6.1-inch screen instead of the Air’s more expansive 6.5 inches.

Those don’t look like huge numbers on paper, but when you’re holding the iPhone Air, it does make a substantial difference. While the camera plateau makes it look top-heavy in photos, in reality, it’s light, and that weight is distributed evenly enough that it feels as well-balanced as any of the other iPhones.

The combination of a large-ish screen and light weight created a strong perception of lightness, compared to the iPhone 17 or especially the 7.27-ounce iPhone 17 Pro. I also found that the shiny titanium frame, while a fingerprint magnet, did slide around in my hand less than an aluminum finish.

It’s a phone built to make a strong first impression, whether you’re holding it in an Apple Store or just after an Apple event in a throng of YouTubers who are all throwing elbows so that they can film each individual phone in the hands-on area for 20 minutes apiece. But I do worry that living with the Air would be frustrating in the long haul, specifically because of battery life.

Again, on paper, the numbers Apple is quoting aren’t so far apart. The Air is rated for 27 hours of local video playback, compared to 30 hours for the iPhone 17 and 33 hours for the 17 Pro. But there’s a bigger gap between the numbers for streaming video—22 hours, 27 hours, and 30 hours for the Air, 17, and 17 Pro, respectively—that suggests that any activity that’s actively using the A19 Pro chip or wireless communication is going to drain the battery even faster.

Extrapolate that out two years, when your battery is going to be operating at somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of its original capacity, and a midday charge starts to sound like an inevitability. It’s telling that a thickness-and-weight-increasing external battery accessory was announced in the same breath as the iPhone Air.

The iPhone Air’s $99 MagSafe battery accessory. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple’s official acknowledgement of and solution to the battery life issue is a $99 external battery that attaches with MagSafe and charges the phone wirelessly; by Apple’s estimates, it adds roughly 13 hours of runtime on top of what you get from the internal battery.

Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of having an iPhone Air, I hear you asking? Maybe so! But it is at least a better aesthetic match for the iPhone than a chunky third-party brick, and one that’s pretty easy to detach and put away once it has done its job and charged your phone. It has its own separate USB-C port for charging, and a small status light (orange when charging, green when charged) below the Apple logo. The magnetic connection feels sturdy enough that it would be hard to dislodge the battery by accident, but I can’t say that it absolutely couldn’t fall off if you were trying to jam the phone into a pocket or bag and caught the battery on something.

I can say that the iPhone Air probably isn’t for me, because the main things I want from a phone are more battery life and better cameras—I can appreciate something smaller and lighter, but only if it doesn’t compromise that other stuff (I got exactly this kind of upgrade when I jumped from an iPhone 13 Pro to a 15 Pro). That’s fine—when you introduce four phones at once, you don’t need to appeal to every iPhone user with every one of them. But I do wonder whether people will find the Air more convincing than they apparently found the now-departed iPhone mini and iPhone Plus.

The iPhone 17 Pro: Industrial design

If you look at the iPhone Air and you say, “I would actually take a thicker, heavier phone if it had a bigger battery in it,” Apple does already make that phone for you.

The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are more of a design departure from the standard iPhones than they have been in years past, with a distinctive aluminum unibody design and a gigantic camera plateau that replaces the old (and already substantial) three-lens camera bump on the older Pros.

Frankly, I’m not in love with the look of this new design—the aluminum unibody design may be good for durability, but it requires Apple to leave cutouts for other wireless-permeable materials all over the phone’s body, and the result is a two-tone design and a lumpy profile that gives the impression that form follows function on this one. It’s the iPhone equivalent of a polished concrete floor—utilitarian with a trendy veneer. It’s a phone I would be happy to put in a case.

It’s also a bit disappointing that the iPhone 17 Pro continues the Pro phones’ drift back upward in weight—we went from 7.27 ounces to 6.6 ounces from the iPhone 14 Pro to the 15 Pro, then to 7.03 ounces for the 16 Pro, and now right back to 7.27 ounces again. But weight is obviously incidental to other features for many Pro users, and the 17 Pro does at least do cool things that make the increased weight worth it.

The two-toned design, festooned with cutouts, makes the phone look a bit uneven to me. Andrew Cunningham

The one feature that’s easy to wrap your arms around in just a few minutes with the new phone is the upgraded telephoto camera lens, which shifts to a 48MP sensor that enables Apple’s Fusion Camera functionality for telephoto shots for the first time.

If you don’t know, the Fusion Camera system shoots 48MP images and then shrinks them to 12 or 24MP, depending on the phone you’re using—benefiting from the extra detail captured by the 48MP sensor, but keeping photo sizes manageable. To create “optical zoom,” the camera instead crops a native-resolution 12MP image out of the center of that sensor. Quality is reduced somewhat because you lose the benefits of the “pixel binning” process that is used to turn 48MP shots into 12MP or 24MP shots, but you’re still capturing native-resolution images without digital zoom.

Adding that to the telephoto lens for the first time doubles the amount of zoom Apple can offer—it starts at 4x zoom, and can go as high as 8x before you start relying on digital zoom.

Standard lens, iPhone 15 Pro. Andrew Cunningham

We were able to do a bit of shooting with the iPhone 17 Pro’s telephoto camera on the Apple Park campus. Compared to my iPhone 15 Pro and its 3x telephoto lens, the default 4x zoom on the iPhone 17 Pro already gets us a little closer, and the 8x zoom option gets you a lot closer. Zoom all the way in to the orange “hello” and you’ll notice some fuzziness and less-than-tack-sharp details, but for photo prints or sharing digitally the results are impressive.

The extra weight and unfinished look of the iPhone 17 Pro don’t make as good a first impression as the iPhone Air did, but I suspect iPhone Pro users (myself included) will find its larger battery and better camera to be acceptable trade-offs. It will be the easier phone to live with in the long term, in other words.

The iPhone 17: Still the default

The iPhone 17: It’s an iPhone! Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In between the industrial chic aesthetic of the iPhone 17 Pro and the lightness of the iPhone Air is the regular iPhone, which looks a whole lot like last year’s but might actually get the most noticeable functional upgrades of all three of them.

I’m mainly talking about the ProMotion screen, a 120 Hz OLED display panel with a dynamic refresh rate that can go as low as 1 Hz when the phone isn’t being used. Both ProMotion and the always-on screen feature that it enables have been exclusive to the iPhone Pro for years, even as higher-refresh-rate screens have spread through midrange and budget Android phones.

That extra smoothness is tough to give up once you’ve gotten used to it, and it pairs especially well with the extra motion and bounciness present in Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface. Fitting 6.3 inches of screen into a phone the same size as the 6.1-inch iPhone 16 also heightens the edge-to-edge screen effect. And both ProMotion and the larger screen help put some space between the iPhone 17 and the iPhone 16e, Apple’s current “budget” offering that comes in at just $200 under the price of the regular iPhone.

From the back: Still an iPhone! Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The other major functional upgrade for people who just walk into the store (or log on to their carrier’s website) and buy the default iPhone is that the base model has been bumped up to 256GB of storage, a reasonably generous allotment that should keep you from having too much trouble with gigantic movie files or years-old gigabytes-large iMessage conversations that you just can’t bear to delete.

This looks like an iPhone, and it feels like an iPhone, and there’s not a lot to convey from a quick hands-on session other than that. In this case, a lack of surprises is a good thing.

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