Preorders for the new iPhones opened last Friday at 5am Pacific, which meant I was lying in bed at 8am my time refreshing the Apple Store app like it was going to tell me something new if I just tapped hard enough. I've done this every September since 2011, more or less, and I still fall for it every single time.
This year the phone I actually wanted to want was the iPhone Air. You've probably seen the numbers by now: 5.6mm thick, starts at $999, and it is genuinely a strange object to hold. I got fifteen minutes with one at a friend's dinner Sunday night (he works retail, don't ask) and it felt less like a phone and more like a very expensive playing card. In a good way, mostly. My current phone has a case that's basically a small brick at this point, so anything thinner feels like a magic trick.
But here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud during launch week: the Air has one rear camera. One. A 48MP main lens and that's it, no ultra-wide, no telephoto. Apple's whole pitch is that the sensor is good enough that you don't need the others, and maybe for most people that's true, but I take a lot of photos of my kid from across a room because getting close makes her camera-shy, and losing the 2x optical zoom I've gotten used to on the Pro models is a real loss for me specifically. Not a marketing loss. An actual "I will miss this" loss.
There's also no physical SIM tray at all, anywhere, on the Air. The US models dropped the SIM slot back with the iPhone 14 in 2022, but this is the first time Apple's done it worldwide on a phone, and it means the whole "just pop your SIM into a loaner phone" trick I've relied on twice while traveling is gone for anyone who buys this one. eSIM transfer works fine 95% of the time. It's that other 5%, standing in a random T-Mobile store in a country where nobody wants to help you, that I think about.
And then there's the battery thing, which I find almost funny. Apple is also selling a matching MagSafe battery case for the Air, priced separately, because making the phone this thin apparently meant sacrificing battery capacity in a way that a decent number of buyers are going to want to compensate for immediately. So you buy the thinnest iPhone ever made and then strap an extra lump onto the back of it within a week. I get the engineering tradeoff, I really do, but there's something a little absurd about a product whose entire identity is "impossibly thin" shipping alongside an official accessory that undoes the bit.
I ended up ordering the iPhone 17 Pro instead, the boring choice, $1,099, camera bump and all. I've made my peace with camera bumps. I've had a case on every phone I've owned since a Nexus 4 I dropped on concrete in 2013, so the extra millimeter of thickness the bump adds has never once mattered to my actual pocket experience. What matters to me is that when my daughter does something worth photographing, I have three lenses to choose from instead of one.
Delivery is supposed to be Friday. I'll believe it when the FedEx guy is standing at my door, because two years ago my "preorder day one" shipment slipped to the following Wednesday with zero warning, and Apple's tracking page just sat there saying "Preparing for Shipment" like it was stalling for time. If you ordered an Air this week, genuinely curious how the single camera feels in daily use once the novelty wears off. Report back.
One last small complaint while I'm here: the Air only comes in four colors and every single one of them is some flavor of muted pastel. I wanted the black one. There is no black one. I don't know who decided the thinnest phone Apple's ever made should also be the least willing to just be black, but I have opinions about it and nobody asked.