Go Out & Get Some Air 

Over the weekend, I got a surprise package from the folks at Apple: a review unit of the iPhone Air. I don’t tend to get smitten by something so quickly, but the “Air” is really up there. It’s so thin you think a strong gust of air could really blow it away from your hands. (These puns keep coming on their own. I swear I’m not trying.) It ranks as one of the most beautiful objects—not just phones—that I have ever held.

“It does seem like it’s going to fly away when you’re holding it,” Apple chief executive Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal after the keynote. Normally, you would dismiss an Apple CEO’s typical product praise, but this time he’s spot-on. At about 5.6mm thick, I found myself often wondering if it was actually there.

The more I use it, the more I’m convinced this is the fully realized version of the iPhone X, a phone that was released in 2017 and, in my opinion, one of the best iPhones ever. It was sublime. The way it fit in my hand—I still can’t forget my first impression. I really regret selling my iPhone X.

When the iPhone X launched, I wrote that “the iPhone X is how the rest of the iPhones will look in 12-18 months,” and that it was a “prototype of future models, and a perfect showcase of Apple’s power as a hardware company.” As usual, I was way too early with my prediction.

In another piece extolling the genius of Apple’s silicon team, I argued that the iPhone X represented Steve Jobs’s true legacy: Apple’s masterful ability to engineer the unseen—the chips and internal architecture that allow the exterior to appear as effortlessly beautiful and nonchalant as a runway model. 

“Apple’s chip and hardware teams have to peer almost two-to-four years into the future, predict what could be possible, what they can make possible, and then make it work,” remains as true today as it was then.

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It took about seven years of design evolution for Apple to come up with a worthy successor to the iPhone X. Everything that made the X extraordinary lives on in the Air. “From chips to materials to improved interactions, it is what you don’t see that makes the X a great phone,” I said. The Air is that vision fully realized, enhanced by seven years of technological progress.

The evolution from X to Air tells a compelling story about Apple’s relentless pursuit of refinement. The iPhone Air’s larger screen (6.5″ compared to the X’s 5.8″) somehow feels more compact, perhaps because it is so thin at just 5.6mm—27% thinner than the X’s 7.7mm. It makes the new iPhone 17 Pro look positively chunky by comparison.

The camera system tells a similar story of evolution. Where the X pioneered with its dual 12-megapixel setup, the Air now boasts a 48-megapixel main shooter and an 18-megapixel front camera, with innovative two-in-one lens technology. Yet remarkably, despite seven years of increased power demands from brighter screens and power-sucking 5G connectivity, the Air still manages to deliver nearly the same battery life as its predecessor—twelve hours compared to the X’s thirteen.

Apple says the battery will last about a day. I don’t know. After 12 hours of use, panic set in, and I put mine up for charging. I panic-bought the new battery, just in case. I know, I know. Call it range anxiety, a malady well-documented among electric car owners that’s now apparently affecting iPhone Air users.

While the ProMax represents Apple’s obeisance to market realities, the Air embodies Apple’s purest design philosophy. I love my ProMax and its capabilities, but the Air is peak Apple. As Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of human interface design, told the WSJ, this is truly “the singular piece of glass that Steve Jobs talked about back in the day.” I can’t dispute that comment.

Despite my usual practice of running iPhone setups overnight, curiosity got the better of me. The setup process proved revealing: the device ran hot and depleted 40% of its battery. Oh baby did it get hot! But once finished with the heavy lifting of syncing messages and photos, it cooled to the temperature of a San Francisco evening and has maintained remarkable efficiency since.

I have to admit, I miss the better macro lens capabilities of its beefy brethren. I am also constantly worried about dropping it on the floor and shattering it to pieces. But I like the feeling of holding air in my hands or in my pocket. (See what I did there!)

The iPhone Air has put me in a quandary. I was going to order a Blue ProMax, but I am going to wait a month. I plan on using this loaner to see if it works for me or not. Can the elegant minimalism overcome the practical heft of its chunkier, beefier sibling?

I need to go out and get some air and think it over. And I mean the oxygen kind!

September 22, 2025, San Francisco