Article URL: https://christianselig.com/2026/07/iphone-air-review/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49107145 Points: 34 # Comments: 34

Hard to believe, but it’s been over 9 months since the current crop of iPhones came out, and I elected to grab the (apparently not super popular) iPhone Air, a new model of iPhone introduced for the first time. Rumor season for the new iPhones is in full swing, so it seemed like a good time to jot down my thoughts on the current model. Immediately, it’s really something to behold when you pick it up for the first time, it feels weirdly thin, pretty much everyone I’ve showed it to has been like “whoa”. You sacrifice a fair bit to get to that, from cameras to battery life, but I’ve always been a sucker for something novel, so when something as huge as the iPhone had a quirky new model I was really stoked to check it out. Heck, part of my frame of mind was that this device is going to have some serious limitations, which will probably also apply to the rumored upcoming folding iPhone which I also really want to check out, so it’ll almost be a warmup round to get me in the right headspace for a folding iPhone. I think that makes sense? Either way, over the last 9 months it’s been my primary phone day in and day out, and I wanted to jot down my thoughts on what it’s like to live with as someone who normally goes with the Pro phones, because there’s been some surprises. Picking up an iPhone Air for the first time is almost weird. Phones have had such a consistent slab design for so long that making it so, so dramatically thinner almost confuses your brain a little bit, like it’s an illusion or something. Forget putting a case on it, live with the danger. My favorite example was handing my phone to an employee at a local store to show her a product I was looking for, I could see kind of a confused look when I handed it to her followed by a “your phone is so thin”, almost like she thought there was something wrong with it. But, here’s my hot take. After the better part of a year it no longer feels thin, it just feels normal. Sure, when I pick up an older iPhone I’m lke “whoa this is so thick it feels like a relic”, but the Air doesn’t really feel noteworthy to me anymore. It’s like if you live in a cinnamon factory, I assume day one you’d be like “this is the best smelling place ever” but after a few months you’d go nose blind to it. That gives me pause, because it kinda makes me wonder that if any reasonably thin phone just feels normal after awhile, is it worth a bunch of compromises just to get it even thinner, when even that thinness feels normal eventually? I kinda feel like I thought about the thinness of my Pro iPhone the same amount after 9 months as I do now with the Air (which is to say, not really at all) but had a less compromised phone to show for it.