The smaller screen sizes doesn't seem to be something that anyone really tests for anymore. If I have to lookup something on my phone it's pretty often that I just give up in anger. Websites will have a header, and maybe a footer or some sticky element and even on the iPhone SE2/3 the result is having maybe 25% of the screen for actual text/content.
In the review the author write:
> The iPhone Air is the perfect solution to this, its screen size sits right in the middle of the normal Pro and Pro Max sized phones
That's probably true for them, and a lot of other people, but I'd argue that it's WAY to large. The Air is larger in all dimensions, except it's 1,7mm thinner, it even weighs more than the SE. It's also larger than the iPhone 17, but lighter and thinner. I don't really get the need for the phone to be thinner, if you're just going to make it larger in all other directions.
To some extend I get the larger screen, because it's just because it's not made for me. I don't use my phone for much other than calls and a few apps, but for a ton of people it's their only computing device, so a slightly larger screen makes a difference. I just wish that Apple would also make a device for people who just needs their smartphone or the occasional parking app and mobile payments, but who doesn't care about the browser, video and to some extend the camera.
Thank you! Even Apple seems to forget the SE, I frequently see UI elements in Apples own software overlap, so I think it's even rarere to see 3rd parties care.
All phones need to do phone-stuff that uses power, and (for any given generation of tech) battery capacity scales with volume.
If all else is the same, then: A thinner phone has less internal volume for things like the battery than a thicker phone does. Perhaps if it had the XY dimensions of an SE at this thickness, it would have bad battery life. (We all remember phones with bad battery life, yeah? It was an awful time.)
But if it's also made wider/taller ("bigger"), then: There's more volume for a battery.
And, of course: This increases the frontal area.
But because people make fun of bezels, this means that the screen should also increase in size accordingly.
And so we have it: The iPhone Air. It's both big and skinny, it does all the usual phone stuff without giant garish bezels, and the battery life is pretty OK (instead of terrible).
I had a Mini 13, and traded it for a 17Pro. I thought I’d be missing the form factor -and I do, but not much. The 17 definitely feels “clunkier,” especially with its Casekoo, but I now find that comforting. I’ve dropped it, several times, and it hasn’t a scratch.
I wish Apple had released a Mini Pro. Aim at the high end and give it the top CPU and the better camera. And quit making the thin part thin — just make the whole body as thick as the camera bumps or even 0.5mm thicker to protect the camera lenses a little bit (and use the added volume for more batter capacity).
Exactly this. And the profit would be huge compared to any Mac. I suspect Apple dropped it just because they're making even more from selling oversized and over-specced phones.
Yeah, they probably lost almost zero customers by cutting the mini from the lineup. The people buying iPhones, in my experience, tend to just pick another iPhone. So they could simplify manufacturing, testing and so on and still sell the same number of phone, just more profitable ones.
I have thoughts on the Air and all other iPhone models: They're too large. The iPhone 4 was perfectly sized and we have the technology now to build a super powerful phone of that size. I simply don't use my phone for anything that requires a larger screen. Smaller screens also encourages better UI design.
> The ultrawide lens is not one I used a ton on previous iPhones, so outside of macro mode I don’t really miss it. I’m surprised though that I really miss the telephoto lens. There’s so many options where I want to see something that’s further away, like something when watching sports, or even a cool bird, and cropping in on the main sensor is such a far cry from a 5x telephoto lens.
I think this is a situation where the enthusiasts care more about the telephoto (for intentional photographic compositions), but the mainstream user base uses the Ultrawide more (for inside shots, group photos, etc) - so Apple caters to the latter, to the dismay of the former.
(the clear wide > tele > ultrawide hierarchy of optical/sensor quality doesn't help either)
> Camera quality feels as good as ever, it’s apparently not as good a main sensor as the Pro iPhones but I can’t really tell. It still has that distinctly over-processed look plaguing modern smartphones
Same here - photography-minded users hate the over processed look, but the general population must like them, otherwise there's no way that manufacturers would persist doubling down on it year-after-year.
For a while now I've been working on a Bayer RAW only pro camera app (https://bayercam.app) specifically because I'm a photography nerd and care about full control, but I realize it's a pretty niche thing.
It's Bayer RAW: not yet demosaicked sensor information from a single exposure, without any of the extra steps you get shooting a format like HEIC/JPEG (or even ProRAW [0]), where lots of additional processing is done, including combining multiple frames to get extra dynamic range, detail, reduced noise, etc.
There's still some amount of denoising/sharpening/etc happening in the ISP, but essentially shooting Bayer RAW gets you the output of just the small first part of the pipeline, rather than the whole pipeline.
[0] Despite the confusingly similar names, Bayer RAW and Apple ProRAW are quite different - I wrote about it on this page because I frequently get emails from confused customers.
I would love for someone to design a great case with a built in e-reader on the back. Most of the existing ones seem geared for displaying colour photos; I'd like one built for reading, powered by NFC. It should easily sync up with the phone itself to send over articles, books, etc. Bonus if I can write on it.
I bought one as it was on sale at the same price as the normal iPhone. Pretty good: 8/10. I have no interest in photos, don't need long battery life, and the lighter/thinner the better.
That said, I'd prefer something smaller but thicker with no protrusions/camera bump at all. I hate the wonkiness of all modern iPhones when sat on a table. I think the last totally flat one was the iPhone 5s!
I really want to try taking one and removing the camera/flash, to produce a bumpless (or at least bump-reduced) version. I'll probably wait for the price to come down some more first, though.
Got the iPhone Pro Max in beautiful orange... and could't get use to it. It feels heavier that the previous titanium versions, so sold it and got the Air. The lack of telephoto is indeed one of the things i miss the most, but the single speaker is surprisingly good IMO. Really enjoying the design of it, feels like what i remember felt holding one of this really cool iPod nano back in the day, like old Apple magic.
I’d buy it if it had a SIM-card slot and video-out. Shame those had to be sacrificed for thin-ness. I travel plenty and those features are really nice to have. The regular 17 is better suited for me now.
The iPhone Air is a weird phone but that's mainly because it's a test device in production.
Everything on the Air is something Apple wanted to test ahead of the foldable iPhone. The weird big battery, the single speaker, the mainboard under the bump, and all of the custom silicon they threw at it (from the modem to the WiFi chipsets).
Same reason the 16e existed, not to sell a cheap iPhone, but to test the C1 modem in production as a "finally ready to ship in beta" product they didn't slap the beta label on.
> And it’s weird, because with the old wedge-style MacBook Airs this feeling never went away for me, I loved those machines and every time I picked it up I kinda marveled
I hate typing on my phone (iPhone 16e). It actually never occurred to me that maybe I'd have a better time with a larger screen. Although I don't remember ever feeling the disdain I have for typing back when I had an iPhone 3GS which had a much smaller screen than the one I have now.
> Although I don't remember ever feeling the disdain I have for typing back when I had an iPhone 3GS
The touch targets on the keyboard are sloppier, and autocorrect has become a lot more opinionated since those days. It may not be the hardware you are noticing
In the review the author write:
> The iPhone Air is the perfect solution to this, its screen size sits right in the middle of the normal Pro and Pro Max sized phones
That's probably true for them, and a lot of other people, but I'd argue that it's WAY to large. The Air is larger in all dimensions, except it's 1,7mm thinner, it even weighs more than the SE. It's also larger than the iPhone 17, but lighter and thinner. I don't really get the need for the phone to be thinner, if you're just going to make it larger in all other directions.
To some extend I get the larger screen, because it's just because it's not made for me. I don't use my phone for much other than calls and a few apps, but for a ton of people it's their only computing device, so a slightly larger screen makes a difference. I just wish that Apple would also make a device for people who just needs their smartphone or the occasional parking app and mobile payments, but who doesn't care about the browser, video and to some extend the camera.
I do. I write iOS apps.
I just recently stopped using an original SE as my low-end test (because of the OS support). I now use a Mini 12 as my low-end test.
The new iPadOS lets you resize windows into weird shapes.
I understand the new foldable will likely have challenging dimensions.
All phones need to do phone-stuff that uses power, and (for any given generation of tech) battery capacity scales with volume.
If all else is the same, then: A thinner phone has less internal volume for things like the battery than a thicker phone does. Perhaps if it had the XY dimensions of an SE at this thickness, it would have bad battery life. (We all remember phones with bad battery life, yeah? It was an awful time.)
But if it's also made wider/taller ("bigger"), then: There's more volume for a battery.
And, of course: This increases the frontal area.
But because people make fun of bezels, this means that the screen should also increase in size accordingly.
And so we have it: The iPhone Air. It's both big and skinny, it does all the usual phone stuff without giant garish bezels, and the battery life is pretty OK (instead of terrible).
It isn't like I would be rushing to upgrade anyway but the refusal to cater is tiresome
I had a Mini 13, and traded it for a 17Pro. I thought I’d be missing the form factor -and I do, but not much. The 17 definitely feels “clunkier,” especially with its Casekoo, but I now find that comforting. I’ve dropped it, several times, and it hasn’t a scratch.
I still miss it so much. Perfect size, and touch ID is so much better than faceID.
It's under appreciated because of the "Pro" label of the Pro, and because of battery-hell.
I think this is a situation where the enthusiasts care more about the telephoto (for intentional photographic compositions), but the mainstream user base uses the Ultrawide more (for inside shots, group photos, etc) - so Apple caters to the latter, to the dismay of the former.
(the clear wide > tele > ultrawide hierarchy of optical/sensor quality doesn't help either)
> Camera quality feels as good as ever, it’s apparently not as good a main sensor as the Pro iPhones but I can’t really tell. It still has that distinctly over-processed look plaguing modern smartphones
Same here - photography-minded users hate the over processed look, but the general population must like them, otherwise there's no way that manufacturers would persist doubling down on it year-after-year.
For a while now I've been working on a Bayer RAW only pro camera app (https://bayercam.app) specifically because I'm a photography nerd and care about full control, but I realize it's a pretty niche thing.
There's still some amount of denoising/sharpening/etc happening in the ISP, but essentially shooting Bayer RAW gets you the output of just the small first part of the pipeline, rather than the whole pipeline.
[0] Despite the confusingly similar names, Bayer RAW and Apple ProRAW are quite different - I wrote about it on this page because I frequently get emails from confused customers.
https://bayercam.com/understanding-bayer-raw
I would love for someone to design a great case with a built in e-reader on the back. Most of the existing ones seem geared for displaying colour photos; I'd like one built for reading, powered by NFC. It should easily sync up with the phone itself to send over articles, books, etc. Bonus if I can write on it.
A few options exist in the market
That said, I'd prefer something smaller but thicker with no protrusions/camera bump at all. I hate the wonkiness of all modern iPhones when sat on a table. I think the last totally flat one was the iPhone 5s!
Hopefully Apple can improve the Air.
Everything on the Air is something Apple wanted to test ahead of the foldable iPhone. The weird big battery, the single speaker, the mainboard under the bump, and all of the custom silicon they threw at it (from the modem to the WiFi chipsets).
Same reason the 16e existed, not to sell a cheap iPhone, but to test the C1 modem in production as a "finally ready to ship in beta" product they didn't slap the beta label on.
I would love one of those again
Huh.
I hate typing on my phone (iPhone 16e). It actually never occurred to me that maybe I'd have a better time with a larger screen. Although I don't remember ever feeling the disdain I have for typing back when I had an iPhone 3GS which had a much smaller screen than the one I have now.
The touch targets on the keyboard are sloppier, and autocorrect has become a lot more opinionated since those days. It may not be the hardware you are noticing
When the 12/13 minis stop receiving updates I guess I’ll stop carrying a phone around. Which will actually be a good thing
Nothing (handheld) is as good as typing as my old blackberry curve though. Not even my psion5
"Not having a OLED display and GPS in a 40k Rolex is insanity".
Seriously, what do you find SO ironic about what they said?
This sarcastic, no-effort criticism on HN these days is seriously annoying.
This is just... not a life well-lived.