There was a time when thickness and weight were two main questions when buying new technology, maybe even the most important. That is why, when Apple founder Steve Jobs slipped a MacBook Air out of an envelope in 2008, we all oohed. It was a new dawn for laptops: finally some mercy for the world’s shoulders.
There were some performance trade-offs, but they were seen as worth it. The MacBook Air redefined expectations of how a laptop could look and feel, and it only got better from there. As well as MacBook Air, by 2013 we had the iPad Air, too.
Continuing the trend on Tuesday, Apple Inc introduced the 5.64mm-thick iPhone Air to answer those critics who said that at 7.95mm, the new iPhone 17 is too thick, a certified whopper. If you could locate any of those critics, please send them to me, because I do not believe they exist. Nor do I believe many consumers would care about thickness when they learn the iPhone Air sacrifices things they worry about more than any other factor: battery life and a more capable camera.
These consumers also care about price. At US$999, the iPhone Air comes in at US$200 more than the more powerful 17, or just US$100 less than the full-featured 17 Pro. Is that a good deal to achieve thinness when you are only going to stick this phone into a case immediately anyway? This is one of the stranger products Apple has ever released. The company did not elaborate on what it meant by “all-day battery life,” but here is a clue: Alongside the launch of the device, Apple showed off an accompanying external battery pack for “life’s busier days.” (It is US$99.)
So what is the deal? International Data Corp (IDC) analyst Francisco Jeronimo said that the design refresh — which includes a new look for the other iPhones in addition to the iPhone Air — is about shortening the amount of time consumers wait to upgrade their devices, which has been trending longer and longer, as the phone and its components have improved and the phones have started to look very similar from one year to the next.
As CCS Insight chief of research Ben Wood put it: “It has been a few years since Apple has had new iPhones that you could put on the table in a coffee shop, meeting room or pub, and people would ask, ‘Is that the new iPhone?’”
So it was good news if that is the sort of thing that matters to you: The new Pro lineup looks distinctly different from the models of the past few cycles, with its massive new camera bump — the company called it a “plateau” — and distinct new colors.
On matters of thinness, Jeronimo points to Samsung’s S25 Edge — 5.8mm — which sold more than a million units in the second quarter, making it the sixth-most popular smartphone globally in IDC’s “high-premium” category of US$1,000 to US$1,600 — although online reviews, professional and from regular people, bemoan the poor battery performance.
Those kind of sales numbers would be table stakes for Apple, but the S25 Edge at least signals an audience for thinner phones, Jeronimo said.
The iPhone Air, then, might be a consumer-testing and market research opportunity for Apple ahead of some truly large upgrades coming next year. The iPhone Air makes use of Apple’s own wireless chip and modem. Spinning up the supply chain that produces them would be useful as Apple prepares for products such as the highly anticipated folding iPhone, which would ultimately feel like two iPhones fused together. That device, far more than anything on show today, would be what gets people upgrading their iPhone more quickly.
All this leaves the iPhone Air as a niche product, built for those who simply must buy every new Apple product or those who wear their jeans too tight (there is probably plenty of overlap in that particular Venn diagram). Like the experimental Vision Pro — another case of Apple doing a little research and development, and market research out in the open — it is perhaps less about this first version of iPhone Air and more about the second one.
As Apple CEO Tim Cook wrapped up the launch event on Tuesday, Apple’s shares were trading marginally down — about 1.5 percent. It was a muted response from investors who know the real litmus test of Apple’s strategy — on artificial intelligence and the future of the iPhone — would not come until next year.
Dave Lee is Bloomberg Opinion’s US technology columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the Financial Times and BBC News.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS