The only thing I disagree with here is about the Air. I think Apple's strategy with the Air is to split the Pro line. Previously the Pro phones were for people who wanted a premium feeling and who wanted premium features, but those are often in tension, and might hold each other back. Now the Air is for those who want premium feel (you might call it flashy, looks great, feels great, but has trade-offs), and now the Pro is an uncompromising set of features, at the expense of being bigger and having a comical camera ~bump~ ~plateau~ continent. This is the same as the Watch, where you have the stainless steel models for the premium feel, and the Ultra for the premium features.
I suspect many on HN may not differentiate between the premium features and feel as much – I know it's not what I jump to – because "design is how it works" and many here aren't as fashion conscious, but a lot of folks buy new phones based on the colour, or how thin it feels, or other details that are easily written off when you know more about the hardware. I think the Air might be a big hit, while getting very little of the enthusiast market.
When "you can't use it outside anyhow" expands to phones, which are only useful because you can take them outside.
If you're one of those people who goes "why can't they make the phone thicker and heavier with more battery life", you should be overjoyed at the Air, because now that those buyers are peeled off to a different SKU, the product line for you doesn't need to find a happy medium with them.
The iPhone Air tests none of those things.
I've also seen speculation that it's an engineering experiment to see if they can squeeze all the essential components of a high-powered computer into a space the size of the camera plateau. Which may eventually lead to viable AR Glasses (or a cheaper Vision).
I do find that wireless earbuds actually last much longer than the wired variety, despite the non-replaceable batteries. Back in the day I went through one or two sets of earbuds a year because the wire failed internally, whereas I've only had two TWS pairs in ~six years (admittedly, it was the battery that became a problem in the first set). There's undoubtedly a lot more e-waste gubbins in each though.
A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout.
A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen? It would be sold out.
Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular.
A best-in-class TV powered by Apple TV? Would probably sell well.
But all of these products would cannibalize sales of some other expensive iDevice.
The number of people who might actually like this is very tiny. Most of them do product reviews. But their audience is not going to care. Think about your older uncle. Your niece in her 20s who loves to paint and read but doesn't want to replace hardware. That's what most people are like.
Those are the people who Jobs focused on impressing and enabling to do things they wouldn't do otherwise. That is the focus that has been lost without Jobs, IMHO, and it's the focus that makes the products better for people who want to get the most out of their products per unit of time invested in learning how to use it.
In particular, I'm thinking that I (a person of reasonable technical skill) would love to help them out by changing the designed-to-be-swapped screen on the phone they dropped instead of them paying someone else to conduct surgery on it.
And probably a regression on the waterproofing efforts they've made over the last decade. If you're gonna make it thicker, just put a bigger battery in.
Go the other way. Hermetically sealed, no connectors, inductive charging, rugged, with a solid state battery that will outlive the rest of the phone. Solid state batteries are more expensive, but that's a cost issue for car-sized batteries, not phone-sized batteries for US$1000 phones.
Samsung expects to have 20-year battery life in 2026.
LiDAR was cool.
They could buy Oura and let you write apps with programmable micro LEDs, and that would’ve been cool.
If iPhones had Star Wars style holographic projector, that’d be cool.
They could just be content with keeping the lights on without unnecessary UX changes that literally no one asked for, and that would be cool.
I’m still happy with Apple, but the problem is that they now perceive staying relevant is wasting battery on visuals and making the phone thinner. Those are recycled old-ass ideas. They need to find the new Jony Ives.
I'm not a apple fan (been windows most of my life till moving to a new company that is Mac only, and have been on android for about 13 years at this point) but the airpods pro are maybe apples greatest product in a while (other then the M1 macbooks).
The audio quality+noise cancellation+transparency quality made them a super easy buy and I would buy the app3 as soon as my app2 die that's how much I love them as a android user. This is coming from someone who owns multiple iems and very expensive over the ears.
From everything reported so far, the app3 look like a solid spec bump at the same price, there isn't many products that keep that formula.
Edit: I am disappointed that the OP didn't talk about how all the iPhones now have "pro-motion" aka high refresh rate screens.
This is (personally) one of the biggest step up in quality, I would never buy a baseline iPhone because 60 Hz just looks gross to me now, it's immediately noticeable.
1. It’s primarily for the people at Apple and their partner manufacturers to realize and be reminded of the value of the work that they do.
2. It’s a message to the broader tech community that if you’re going to copy most of what we do, here’s a few that actually save lives.
Now will it sell more watches… probably. Is it a net positive? I think so.
I'm hoping that the iPhone Air will make them prioritise eSIM support!
I’m not sure what the issue is though, could it be a standards issue? Government tracking phone users? Someone being cut out of the money?
Answers please on a postcard.
AirPods becoming e-waste? Seriously? Pick a better idea to make your point, because pretty much everyone I know has had their AirPods for 2-3+ years, and even if that was _when_ they decided to move onto another, that's an _incredibly_ long amount of time to have wireless earbuds of those quality at that price point.
And as for disabling features on the Apple Watch - again, seriously? Most techie, HN'y complaint ever. There's a reason the Apple Watch and AirPods sell as well as they do - people love them.
As for awe at new features - AirPods live translation, standard iPhones being ProMotion, one of the thinnest phones ever created?
This is just a terrible opinion piece.
I won’t defend HomePods much, but skipping the other three misses a lot of the ecosystem value less technical consumers are getting. Turn your lights off with your TV remote. Go to a run with just your watch and headphones and take a call at mile 3. Approve a payment (or a sudo!) by double tapping your watch. Start a channel on your TV from Siri. And so on.
I’m not sure if Liquid Glass (that iOS 26 just insisted on capitalizing) is going to be worth anything, and definitely doesn’t merit the marquee. But the some of the design thinking is still there, beneath the surface, in the delightful interactions between parts of their ecosystem.
At least in tech circles.
I've been hearing that since before Slashdot dubbed the iPod lame. So I just kinda tune it out and wait to see whether people buy it or not.
A child born on the day the first iPhone launched is old enough to vote now.
Many of those posts are being written by people who have been along for that ride, too, so it’s going to be hard to recapture that excitement after experiencing past hot products not changing your life. It’s like a middle aged American buying a new car - yeah, it’s nice but fundamentally nothing changes in your life and you’re never reclaiming the excitement of being 18 and going from marooned in a boring suburb to being able to travel, which is a transformative change even if it was in a clunky old hand-me-down.
Come on. These are all minor improvements on existing products. Yawn.
The C1, while slower, was a little more energy efficient. Signal Reception seems to be ok too. I am expecting the C1X to be even better.
Combined with A19 Pro, C1X, N1. I would expect Air to be more efficient than 16 Pro. So with that in mind,
The Air ~3100 mah, the 16 Pro ~3600 mach should have similar battery life, or may be just slightly less than 16 Pro, a little bit better than iPhone 15 Pro with 3274mah.
If that is the case I say Air is actually not bad. And we can look forward into the future for even more energy efficiency OLED, SoC and newer Battery Tech. That would make Air perfect.
Not to mention iPhone Air is a required training for foldable iPhone. Their competitors are already making foldable phone with one side at less than 5mm. And is currently being held back by USB-C port. Apple needs at least one or two generation of learning to move in that direction. And iPhone Air is exactly that.
I am really looking forward to al the iPhone review this year. It has been a long long time since the iPhone produce range was exciting.
List of iPhone Battery Capacity.
Model/Battery Life Battery Capacity (mAh)
iPhone 17 Pro Max: 5088 mAh (100%)
iPhone 16 Plus: 4,674 mAh
iPhone 15 Plus: 4,383 mAh
iPhone 17 Pro: 4252 mAh (84%)
iPhone 17: 3692 mAh (73%)
iPhone 16e: 4,005 mAh
iPhone 16 Pro: 3,582 mAh
iPhone 16: 3,561 mAh
iPhone 15 Pro: 3,274 mAh
iPhone 15: 3,349 mAh
iPhone 14 Pro: 3,200 mAh
iPhone Air: 3149 mAh (62%)
Gualdrapo•1h ago
worthless-trash•1h ago
I too have experienced this. I expect that i have been too direct in my dislike of apple in this post.
You have to come at the problem sideways. To allow for any real hope of not being down voted the crowd.
I dont know what the root cause is.. if Cupertino corp has a really expensive pr team or apple devices are laced with some kind of mind altering drug.. the effect is the same.
api•1h ago
I’m kind of indifferent to it so far but I can see what someone might have been thinking.