The new iPhone Air features a stunningly thin design, comprising a 5.6mm thick chassis with a protruding camera plateau. But ultra-thin phones come with tradeoffs, and there’s been a lot of consternation about the battery life of the iPhone Air.
Here’s what Apple says about the kind of battery life you can expect from the new iPhone Air …
Firstly, if you watch Apple’s event video or read the press release, Apple says the iPhone Air has great “all-day battery life”.
The company says it achieved this using a combination of custom silicon (including the new C1X modem and N1 wireless radio chip), software optimisations (Adaptive Power Mode in iOS 26), and a revamped internal chassis layout that maximises battery space.
But, concretely, all-day battery life does not really give you something to compare against. So, here’s what Apple says in the tech specs for its battery life testing.
For standard offline video playback, the iPhone Air is rated for 27 hours. For streamed video playback, which is the most real-world test Apple offers, iPhone Air achieves 22 hours.
These numbers are certainly less than the rest of the iPhone 17 line (of which longer battery life is a much-promoted feature). The base model iPhone 17 gets 27 hours on the streaming video playback benchmark, for instance, and the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max excel with 30 hours and 35 hours respectively.
However, if you believe Apple’s testing as being representative, the iPhone Air actually matches the battery longevity of last year’s iPhone 16 Pro. Both the Air and the 16 Pro report 22 hours battery life on streaming video playback. It also beats the claims for the iPhone 16e (21 hours) and iPhone 16 (18 hours). Only the 16 Plus and 16 Pro Max have better battery life than the new Air, according to Apple.
Similarly, if you are upgrading from an earlier generation, the comparisons are even more favourable. The iPhone Air beats the quoted battery life of the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, and iPhone 15 Pro. So, if you are upgrading from anything from the 15 era but the Pro Max, you shouldn’t expect to notice worse battery life.
And if you are upgrading from an iPhone 13 or iPhone 14 series, again, the quoted battery life for the iPhone Air is beaten only by the Pro Max.
That should give prospective buyers some confidence that their iPhone Air battery will be able to last the day, assuming the phone you are used to right now is not a Max model. Of course, we’ll have to wait until people get hands-on time to really know about how efficient the iPhone Air is in the real world.
It’s also worth noting that Apple made a new MagSafe Battery pack accessory, just for the iPhone Air. Clearly, Apple thinks some percentage of iPhone Air users will need more battery life than what the phone has internally.