Watching Apple's presentation, the iPhone Air seems to be the product it is most proud of. It's new, it's impressively thin and it does look pretty sexy – insofar as tech can.
During the presentation, I even really found myself starting to lust after it. Well, right up until the point at which the camera was described – whereupon I had to hold in a kind of angry laugh.
It's not that Apple's Fusion Camera with one image sensor isn't good or powerful but, as a writer on a camera website, hearing it described as "like multiple advanced cameras, in one" seemed to verge on the dishonest. There is a reason, after all, that the Pro phone has three cameras.
There is also a reason that the Pro – not the Air – was the last device presented. Save the best till last. That clearly isn't the Air, for most folk, for whom camera quality and battery life are significant.
So, who actually does benefit from a phone that's really, really thin? Companies that are planning to make folding phones.
If you can make a really thin phone then you can put two together, with a hinge, and even when folded it still won't be too fat to fit in the pocket.
Samsung, worked this out the other way – which might explain the Samsung S25 Edge, a very thin phone that came out back in May (but apparently hasn't flown off the shelves).
The iPhone Air is even thinner (5.6mm to 5.8mm), ignoring the respective camera bumps, but who honestly notices that kind of thing except for people comparing things in tables? It's grain-of-sand territory.
Add a whole millimeter to a phone and it can be hours of extra battery time – and that's something that most people with phones do notice. On a folding phone, the whole second half can have a second battery – so despite the bigger screen area, there is more power.
That half of the equation isn't well handled when you get down to one thin bit of phone, because you need all the other gubbins – processor, modem chip, antennas, cameras – in the device.
So, this is my theory. While Samsung had already got the Galaxy Fold series out there, and just took advantage of the thin phone research and development it had already done, Apple saw things the other way.
Apple has mastered thin, insofar as it is possible, with the iPhone Air – but there are clear compromises with battery life.
Apple has also, if you ask me, compromised needlessly when it comes to cameras; Samsung, as you'll note, has a phone a few sheets of paper thicker and managed to get two cameras and lenses on the back. So, frankly, Apple is failing photographers – and users of all but the most basic phones.
But Apple will, nonetheless, sell a good few of these into the real world. And that will have people testing the tech and confirming things.
All Apple now needs to master is the most difficult part of the folding phone: the hinge. Rumors tell us that it's working on one – so to me the Air seems to be an attempt to get the money flowing from what is clearly a longer, slower development plan than perhaps the company would have liked.
Perhaps I'm just being a cynic. But you can't say that I haven't spent a lot on iPhones over the years – well over $34,800, in fact.
And I certainly won't be buying the iPhone Air – though I do concede that it looks very nice. I am not remotely concerned that my Pro is slightly fatter.
