Apple iPhone Air
tl;dr: I bought an Apple iPhone Air , not because I believe in Apple ’s self-congratulatory “privacy is a fundamental human right” marketing, but because after years of replacing Google Pixel hardware roughly every 18 months I have, again, reached the point where I need exactly one mobile device that will reliably run the closed-source financial, corporate and government apps that modern societies insist on. The Air is a fascinating piece of engineering, despite the new Liquid Glass in iOS being the UI equivalent of a bad car accident , and the device’s raw performance for things like mobile RAW photo development is, sadly, significantly ahead of anything Android offers in 2026. I still do not recommend using an iPhone as a primary device, because Apple remains a surveillance company. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have spent the better part of the last decade trying to engineer my way out of the surveillance economy. I switched away from iOS and stock Android to GrapheneOS a long time ago, I run my own infrastructure , my own cloud , my own mail , my own Lastpass ( update ), my own Dropbox , my own search , my own Spotify , my own messenger , heck, even my own Zapier (sort of), and have generally tried to minimize the surface area that any single vendor has on me. The fact that I just spent a frankly absurd amount of money on a brand-new Apple phone should therefore probably come with an explanation, which is what this post is. It’s also a review of the iPhone Air itself, and a brief tour of how badly iOS has aged on a device that costs roughly the same as a decent used car in many parts of the world. Disclosure: I paid for the device with my own money. I have no relationship with Apple , and would honestly prefer not to give them my money in the first place. The opinions in this post are entirely my own. To understand why a GrapheneOS apologist would willingly buy a brand-new iPhone , it helps to know the road that led me here. The tl;dr is that for the past four years I have run a compartmentalized multi-phone setup , with one primary device on GrapheneOS that is as clean of corporate spyware as it gets, and one dedicated spyware phone that runs all the banking, travel, government identity, and other apps that I have to use to participate in modern society , but that I refuse to have anywhere near my actual life. The iPhone Air is the latest incarnation of that second device. Before the Air I kept an iPhone 11 Pro Max around for almost seven years. Of every smartphone I have ever owned across the past two decades, the only two devices that survived such long periods of time without a single hardware-level fault were the Motorola Razr V3i (yeah, I’m that old) and the iPhone 11 Pro Max . And with most of the banking, government, and corporate know-your-customer software that I am forced to interact with on a regular basis simply refusing to run on a de-Googled device, and, more importantly, being a gigantic PITA to recover onto any new phone if the current one should ever give up, it made sense to keep one rock solid device around that I could rely on. And because iOS is the best-supported target for specifically these apps, the iPhone is the only realistic alternative for someone who refuses to deal with Google Play Services . Running this kind of software on a separate physical device, that is kept in a Faraday bag when not in active use, is the cleanest way I have found to limit the blast radius of surveillance capitalism. In other words, the iPhone 11 Pro Max was not my phone , but more like my spyware appliance . The decision to specifically go with the iPhone (17) Air , as opposed to a more mainstream iPhone 17 or even a used predecessor, came down to two things: form factor, and longevity. I wanted a device that wouldn’t add a ton of weight to my travel setup , yet was still capable enough to survive (ideally) the next decade. I intentionally didn’t buy a used iPhone , because I’m planning for this device to hold up for a very long time, so I wanted Apple ’s initial one-year warranty, plus the reassurance that no previous owner had beaten up the battery, burned in the screen or let the device melt or freeze in their car for hours. For a spyware phone that occasionally rides along in a pocket as a backup, or that travels along in my carry-on, I do not want a brick. The iPhone 11 Pro Max that I am retiring weighed a frankly miserable 226 grams and the current iPhone 17 Pro Max is even heavier at 233g. The non- Max variant is only slightly lighter at 206g, and even the regular iPhone 17 , despite having a .2" smaller screen, is still 12g heavier than the Air . The iPhone Air , by contrast, is 5.64mm thin (excluding the camera plateau) and weighs only 165 grams, all while carrying a 6.5" OLED display. For comparison, the Google Pixel 6a , which for some time had been my spyware device and that the Air is also replacing, is a 6.1" device made predominantly of cheap plastic and glass, and weighs 178g. That’s 13g more than the larger and sturdier iPhone . The Air is, by far, the lightest 6.5" flagship I have ever held. While its footprint is significantly larger than I had expected from photos, and it is definitely not a one-handed device for people with small- to medium-sized hands, if you, like myself, are coming from a Pro Max , you will probably feel like you are holding a piece of cardboard, and I mean that in a positive sense. With most of the mobile phone industry having converged on the same slab-of-glass-with-a-camera-bump template, and the differentiators usually being marketing language rather than actual engineering, the iPhone Air is somewhat of an exception. The frame is Ti-6Al-4V , which is supposedly made with 80% recycled titanium . And while Apple has used titanium on Pro -line iPhones since, I believe, the 15 Pro , the Air clearly pushes the thickness budget to a different level. The closest competitor in the realm of well-established premium smartphones, which I believe is the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge , is slightly thicker and is shown in many reviews to have build-quality compromises. Because the Air is too thin to fit a conventional stamped USB-C connector, Apple ’s engineers 3D-printed the metal connector frame out of titanium powder, fused with a laser, and machined to spec. As reported by Engadget , Apple ’s justification is that at this thickness, there is no other way to fit a standard-compliant USB-C connector. I am skeptical of the claim that this was the only option (a redesigned stamped part would presumably also work), but the fact that they shipped a 3D-printed titanium structural component in a consumer phone is an interesting engineering choice. Another interesting engineering choice is the camera plateau . Rather than the widespread camera trypophobia bumps , the Air has a raised horizontal rail at the top of the back, under which sit the A19 Pro SoC , the new C1X modem, the networking silicon, and the single 48MP Fusion camera. This concentration of components in a thicker strip is what makes the rest of the chassis flat. From a thermal perspective it makes total sense, as it concentrates the device’s heat generation in a region that is the easiest to keep away from the user’s hand. This is one thing that always bugged me about the 11 Pro Max , which is that the moment the device is under load (which is pretty much all the time when running a recent iOS version) the backside area, where your fingers naturally rest when holding the phone, will get uncomfortably hot. On the Air you need to actively move your fingers underneath the plateau to feel the heat. However, because the Air does not have the vapor chamber that the Pro line introduced this generation, it throttles more aggressively under sustained load than the 17 Pro . For my use case (banking apps, occasional photo editing, very occasional video) this is irrelevant, but for someone trying to play a demanding game for two hours straight, it probably isn’t. Speaking of heat, the Air packs quite a lot of it with its 6-core CPU with 5-core GPU and the Neural Accelerators , which in benchmarks scores 9,497 points in Geekbench 6 multi-core. For comparison, the Pixel 10 Pro ’s Tensor G5 , in the same benchmark, sits at roughly two thirds of that number . The C1X modem, which is Apple ’s second-generation in-house cellular modem, is also an interesting piece of engineering. It has replaced the Qualcomm silicon that has been in every iPhone since the 12 and in real-world testing the C1X appears to be noticeably more power-efficient than both the Qualcomm modem in the 16 Pro and the Samsung Exynos 5300 modem that has been making the Pixel family miserable for the past several generations. For a device whose battery is a comparatively modest 3,149 mAh , that efficiency gain is what makes the Air ’s battery life usable at all. One big difference from literally every phone that I have ever owned is the fact that the Air has no physical SIM tray. If I were planning to use this phone as my primary phone, this would be a huge PITA for travel . Pre-paid SIMs in many countries are usually not available as eSIM, or when they are, they’re significantly more expensive and privacy-invasive due to KYC measures. I have written before about why I strongly prefer physical SIMs for both privacy and practical-travel reasons, and Apple ’s decision here is a real downside for any full-time traveller . The reason for the lack of a physical SIM tray appears to be that Apple needed the volume for the already small enough battery, which makes sense. It is nevertheless a regression. Another engineering decision that somewhat made me question the whole thing is the USB port. In 2026 the world’s most valuable company decided that, on a flagship-priced device, you still only get USB 2.0 transfer speeds out of the USB-C port. For whatever reason, Apple reserves USB 3 speeds for the Pro line. This means that transferring 50MB RAW files off an SD card via a USB-C card reader is not exactly slow , but it is also not fast , and it is straightforwardly insulting on a device as expensive as the iPhone Air . Plus, the whole USB design choice also leads to absurd incompatibility issues with plenty of built-in USB controllers within SSDs, making a good number of external drives simply unusable with the Air . One big letdown at this price point for many people seems to be the single 48MP rear camera. Coming from an iPhone 11 Pro Max , or even the cheaper Pixel 6a , both of which had multi-camera arrays, I understand that the average user might perceive this as a step down for photography. However, personally, I don’t care too much as I take essentially all of my photos on dedicated cameras anyway. GSMArena ’s review calls the single rear camera the device’s “big pain point” , and I think that is fair at this price. Taken together, the Air is probably the most opinionated phone Apple has shipped in a long time. The company was willing to sacrifice camera count, port performance, and thermal headroom to deliver a piece of hardware that is as thin and light as it is, and that is built around in-house silicon. Whether this approach turns out to be a good idea, history will tell. As a piece of standalone consumer electronics, however, it is pretty impressive, and I say that as someone who, in almost every other domain , finds modern consumer hardware profoundly depressing . And then there is the software. iOS 26 ships with Liquid Glass , Apple ’s new design language, which applies a translucent, light-refracting, glass-like aesthetic to basically every system surface, from the lock screen to the notifications, Control Center, app icons, menus, and even system alerts. Apple ’s clearly high af marketing department describes it as “a new material that combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluid, responsive feel that brings depth and dynamism to every interaction” … whatever that is supposed to mean. What it actually feels like, in daily use, is sadly less flowery , and the user backlash and performance issues have been covered extensively . The kindest thing I can say about Liquid Glass is that, despite it being the Ferrari Luce of UIs , the engineering underneath it is impressive. The amount of real-time blur, refraction, and material simulation Apple is pulling off on the A19 Pro at 120Hz is a graphics feat that the Android system can only dream about. Having said that, however, I don’t think that any of that engineering would be truly necessary if somebody at Apple had asked the question “does this design language actually make the device easier to use?” before shipping it on a billion devices. The primary purpose of the Air for me, as with its predecessors, is to host all of the closed-source corporate spyware that I refuse to put on my primary GrapheneOS device . This includes: On the Air , all of this just works . Apps launch instantly, attestation succeeds, and the device does not get anywhere near as hot as the average Pixel phone doing any of it. After four years of fighting with Google ’s hardware and Android ’s gradual decay, I am, embarrassingly, enjoying the boring reliability of iOS . The thing I did not expect, and the thing that has surprised me about the Air , is how good it is at mobile RAW photo development. For a long time I had been doing all of my photography workflow on a Pixel Tablet running GrapheneOS , using Lightroom Mobile . The arrangement worked, but it didn’t work well. Lightroom Mobile on the Tensor G2 -powered Pixel Tablet has increasingly become a sluggish, crash-prone mess , with editing operations that take noticeable seconds to render preview updates, occasional import failures, and a battery life under heavy editing that is less than three hours. On the iPhone Air , the same workflow (using a USB-C SD card reader, plus the free Snapseed app) is vastly faster. Importing a card full of 50MB RAW files from my Fuji is bottlenecked by the USB 2.0 port rather than the phone. Edit operations on RAW files are essentially instantaneous, even with multiple layered adjustments. Exporting to JPEG happens in well under two seconds per image. Obviously the Air ’s A19 Pro SoC was released several years after the Tensor G2 , and it is orders of magnitude faster on graphics workloads, but the Pixel Tablet is nevertheless a 2023 product that Google is still selling new in 2026. The fact that an in-pocket, 5.6mm-thin iPhone runs circles around it on the same workload is, frankly, embarrassing for Google . The mobile content-creation software ecosystem on iOS is also significantly better than what is available on Android , and not just because the hardware is faster. Lightroom Mobile on iOS is more polished than the Android version, and even Snapseed , an app by Google , runs noticeably more smoothly on iOS than it does on Android . Even free, ad-supported photo apps tend to be visibly better on iOS than anything on Android . Some of this is because developers prioritize iOS for revenue reasons, because literally every little sh.t app on iOS these days can seemingly charge a price or, worse, a subscription fee. However, some of it is also because Metal and Core Image are better-integrated graphics and imaging stacks than what Android exposes to third-party developers. Whatever the reason, in the specific category of mobile RAW photo development, iOS is not just ahead, but it is literally pulling Android ’s pants down and slapping its Baklava . Even setting RAW editing aside, the device feels noticeably snappier than any Android phone I have used, including the Pixel 8 . App launches are faster, animations are smoother, and background apps stay in memory longer. Apple ’s memory management on iOS , even with comparatively modest RAM (the Air has 12GB), is more aggressive about keeping apps warm than Android ’s. Tom’s Guide ’s real-world performance testing shows iPhones consistently lapping Android flagships on workloads like video transcoding, where the iPhone 17 Pro models complete a standard test in 22 seconds, while every Samsung Galaxy S25 variant takes over twice as long. On purely synthetic Geekbench 6 multi-core, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 does outperform the A19 Pro , but the Snapdragon ’s lead in synthetic CPU benchmarks does not translate consistently into real-world responsiveness, because Android as an operating system still carries a significant amount of overhead that even the fastest silicon cannot entirely paper over. On the iOS side, the A19 Pro ’s single-core performance (around 3,871 points in Geekbench 6 ) is still the highest of any shipping mobile SoC. A heuristic that I have used for years, and that has consistently held up, is that an iPhone from year N tends to feel as snappy in everyday use as an Android flagship from year N+1 or N+2 , and I’m certain that the iPhone Air is no exception to that rule. This is a generic OS observation rather than a comment on the Air specifically, but it is a real observation, and it is one of the reasons why iOS devices keep getting recommended even by people who would much rather be using something else. Besides the superior hardware of Apple ’s phones over specifically the Google Pixel devices, the ecosystem of accessories that are intentionally designed to fit the iPhone lineup is another thing that Google , as well as most other Android manufacturers (with the exception of Samsung and Xiaomi ), has failed to establish. In recent years, Apple managed to further increase their ecosystem’s lead with their MagSafe quick-attach feature, for which you can find literally everything, from snap-on card holders through powerbanks all the way to actual stands. Because I was curious to give the MagSafe system a try, I decided to pick up a powerbank that unintentionally fits the “Space Black” iPhone Air better than Apple ’s own, plain white iPhone Air MagSafe Battery . I chose the Xiaomi UltraThin Magnetic Power Bank 5000 not only because its design was clearly targeted at iPhone Air users, but also because it is the thinnest (6mm) and lightest (98g) 5000 mAh power bank on the market, thanks to its relatively new high-energy-density silicon-carbon battery. When attached to the back of the Air it brings up the device’s weight to 263g in total, which is noticeably heavier than most other smartphones, but it also almost doubles the phone’s battery life. While the Xiaomi power bank can deliver 22.5W, it only does so via USB-C, and because it is not MagSafe -certified, it drops to 7.5W when charging the phone wirelessly (by snapping it on using MagSafe ), rather than the 15W that Qi2 phones get out of it. With the Air locked and inactive it takes about two to three hours to charge it to around 92%. It never reaches 100%, despite the power bank carrying considerably more capacity than the phone’s integrated battery, due to the inefficiency of wireless charging . Note: I’m aware that Google introduced MagSafe compatibility into its Pixel line with the Google Pixel 10 , however, there is no dedicated ecosystem targeting specifically the Pixel and its hardware design . For the narrow use case that I have personally been struggling to solve, which is “I need a single, lightweight, and highly reliable device to host all the closed-source corporate spyware I am forced to interact with, and I already have a primary GrapheneOS device for my actual life” , the iPhone Air seems like a very good option, at least ignoring the absurd price tag. It is light enough to carry in a Faraday bag inside my cabin luggage with me and it’s flat enough to occasionally bring it alongside a Pixel without making my pockets look like I pack big data. It appears to be reliable enough that I do not expect to repeat this exercise for at least another five to seven years, and it runs every attestation-dependent banking, travel, and near-future dystopian government app I might need it to run. On top of that, the mobile content-creation software story on iOS is, sadly, lightyears ahead of Android , as well as Windows and Linux . For anybody whose use case is “I want this device to be the primary, always-with-me phone that handles my nudes photography, my manifestos notes, my 4chaning web-browsing, and my doomscrolling actual life” , I cannot in good conscience recommend the Air , or any other iPhone , for exactly the same reasons I have been writing about for the past years . Apple is, with all due respect to its marketing department, a surveillance company . The fact that it chooses to surveil its users somewhat more politely than Google does is not, by itself, a reason to grant it custody of your private life. You cannot audit the OS, you cannot disable any hidden surveillance subsystem, and you most certainly cannot install a hardened replacement. The iPhone Air is a fascinating piece of engineering and a perfectly competent spyware appliance . It is however not, and will never be, my primary phone. Banking apps for several jurisdictions, most of which now require Google Play Integrity or equivalent attestation on Android and basically refuse to function on GrapheneOS without disabling the very protections that make GrapheneOS worth running in the first place. Apple Wallet for boarding passes and, in some jurisdictions, virtual VISA and MasterCards. Luckily I’m neither a citizen nor a resident of a country that imposes the absurdity of digital state-issued identifiers . Corporate apps that some clients might use and require, as well as privacy-invasive bs like WhatsApp , using throwaway phone numbers, in jurisdictions in which large parts of public life run on it . Travel apps (airlines, hotels, rental cars), most of which are technically available on GrapheneOS but which are also ill-behaved, ad-laden, and absolutely should not be on the same device as my personal data.
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