Apple just announced the thinnest iPhone it has ever made: the iPhone Air. At just 5.6mm thick, it’s a full millimeter-and-then-some thinner than the 6.9mm iPhone 6, and only a little thicker than the 5.4mm M4 iPad Pro. The iPhone Air will be available for preorder starting September 12th for $999, and will be officially out on September 19th.
The new phone comes in four colors: Sky Blue, Light Gold, Cloud White, and Space Black. It’s got a 6.5-inch, 120Hz ProMotion OLED display, which has a variable refresh rate ranging from 1Hz for its always-on display feature to 120Hz, just like the rest of this year’s iPhone lineup. It can also reach up to 3,000-nit peak outdoor brightness, with 1,000 nits its typical maximum and 1,600 nits its peak HDR brightness. The frame is a polished, glossy titanium, and the phone uses Ceramic Shield 2 glass on the front and back, which the company claims will be 4 times more scratch resistant to previous iPhones’ back glass, while the frame is made up of as well as single camera embedded within an elevated bar that stretches across the top of the phone’s back.
Battery life is a huge concern with a phone this thin, but incredibly, it will have battery performance similar to the iPhone 16 Pro, at least according to the specs on Apple’s site. The company claims up to 27 hours of video playback and 22 hours of streaming. Those are identical to numbers the company claims for the 16 Pro. Apple also announced a new, slimmer MagSafe battery pack – the phone supports MagSafe, by the way – to coincide with the phone’s release, and with that the company says you’ll get up to 40 hours or 35 hours doing those activities, respectively. The phone can reach 50 percent charge in 30 minutes with a 20W adapter via its USB-C port, the company says.
The phone features just one 48MP camera on the back, called a “Fusion camera system” that Apple says makes it effectively function as four lenses. It can shoot 24MP and 48MP photos using the “main” camera, or it can take 12MP “optical-quality” photos when you switch to 2x telephoto mode, which still has optical image stabilization. The phone also supports up to 10x digital zoom. The iPhone Air can also record Dolby Vision video at 4K, between 24fps and 60fps, 1080p between 25fps and 60fps, and 720p at 30fps. It supports the iOS Action mode for recording 30fps video of fast-moving things like sporting events, at up to 2.8K Dolby Vision. In video mode, its digital zoom goes up to 6X.
On the front, you’ll find an 18MP selfie camera that supports Center Stage, Apple’s digital panning feature, also found on Macs and iPads, that keeps you centered in frame. The company says it will automatically zoom out if more people jump into frame, saving you a little bit of effort when trying to take group shots and others join.
The phone comes with 256 GB of storage, an A19 Pro chip – the same that’s in the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max – and a 5-core GPU with AI accelerators built into each core. Apple says the phone will have MacBook Pro-level compute. Also, it uses Apple’s in-house cellular modem, the C1x, which Apple claims is two times faster than the C1 that debuted in the iPhone 16e earlier this year. It supports Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and has a radio for Thread, a smart home wireless protocol that’s a big part of the universal Matter smart home standard.
To find out everything announced at the September 9 Apple Event, check out all of the reveals from our live blog. You can also check out a full history of iPhone releases for a deeper look into Apple phones over the years.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
