Apple’s iPhone Air was the company’s most interesting new iPhone this year, at least insofar as it was the one most different from previous iPhones. We came away impressed by its size and weight in our review. But early reports suggest that its novelty might not be translating into sales success.
A note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, whose supply chain sources are often accurate about Apple’s future plans, said yesterday that demand for the iPhone Air “has fallen short of expectations” and that “both shipments and production capacity” were being scaled back to account for the lower-than-expected demand.
Kuo’s note is backed up by reports from other analysts at Mizuho Securities (via MacRumors) and Nikkei Asia. Both of these reports say that demand for the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro models remains strong, indicating that this is just a problem for the iPhone Air and not a wider slowdown caused by tariffs or other external factors.
The standard iPhone, the regular-sized iPhone Pro, and the big iPhone Pro have all been mainstays in Apple’s lineup, but the company has had a harder time coming up with a fourth phone that sells well enough to stick around. The small-screened iPhone mini and the large-screened iPhone Plus were each discontinued after two generations.
None of this means that the iPhone Air is in immediate danger of disappearing; if Apple discontinues it instead of releasing a follow-up, it’s the most likely to happen next September when the company introduces its next round of hardware updates. The engineering work Apple did to make the Air work could also be reused in other products, including a possible foldable phone that rumors have said is coming.
But if the Air is really selling as slowly as these reports indicate, it would strongly suggest what some Air skeptics believed from the beginning: that people will gladly carry around a couple extra ounces of phone if it means better battery life and a more flexible camera.
It doesn’t help the Air that both the iPhone 17 and the iPhone 17 Pro are strong refreshes. The regular iPhone 17 gets a high-refresh-rate ProMotion screen for the first time while doubling the base storage from 128GB to 256GB without increasing the price. And the iPhone 17 Pro is the opposite of the iPhone Air—it’s both thicker and heavier than its immediate predecessors, but it delivers a significant camera upgrade and excellent battery life.
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