Going backwards through the presentation, I started by covering the Pro. Now let’s take a look at the Air. There was a moment I got genuinely excited during this section of the presentation, and it was when they showed the polished titanium frame. It reminded me of the Ive era at Apple, and I wondered what he might be thinking about the new iPhone 17 Air?

The thickness

iPhone 17 Air is officially 5.6 mm thick, plus the camera. I have a deep loathing for how companies are measuring phone-thickness these days, and the phone is most certainly not 5.6 mm thin. They went on about how they managed to cram the electronics into the plateau, the thicker part surrounding the camera, which means the phone is as thick as that part, at least! Sure, the rest of the phone is a battery and display, but the phone is thicker, and the camera sticks out like a mountain. It is not a thin phone; it is a thin display and battery with a phone stuck to the top edge.

The Chips

With the Air, Apple introduced the A19 Pro chip, which is more energy efficient than last year's chip. It also sports “Neural Accelerators” as part of each GPU core, enabling very impressive performance. The Pro makes use of this with the vapor chamber; the Air will presumably be able to have short bursts of performance, before it has to throttle because it’ll probably get hot quickly. Also new is the N1 chip, Apple’s new networking chip that packs WiFi, Bluetooth, and Thread into one dedicated chip. The C1 modem, introduced with iPhone 16e, gets an update and is now the C1X, which is more efficient and 2x faster than the C1.

These new chip advancements are significant and impressive. Apple definitely has an edge over the competition here, and they’re happy to let the world—and their investors—know.

The battery algorithms

I truly hope that Apple’s flaunted smart battery usage works better than their battery algorithms in other devices. Supposedly, the iPhone will predict if you’re going to need more battery later in the day and save some energy by rescheduling background tasks. Considering Apple can’t even reliably limit charging to 80% in MacBook Pros and Apple Watches, I have my doubts.¹

Battery life

This was a very Apple-ish thing to do: the first time I heard them say a number of hours for how long the battery would last was when they showed off their external battery extension backpack. With this secondary battery, the iPhone Air is supposed to get 40 hours of battery life. After giving that number, the presentation immediately went on to discuss something else, and I never heard any number for how long the internal battery would actually last.