The iPhone Air has been available for a week as of the publication of this post, and the top complaint I keep hearing about the super-skinny phone is not even that its battery may not last long enough or that it may scratch easily, but that there’s only one back camera. Everyone seems willing to wait for Apple to add an ultrawide lens to next year’s presumably named iPhone Air 2. I wouldn’t bet on that. Get the iPhone Air now, or buy an iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Pro if you really need an ultrawide camera. I don’t think the iPhone Air is getting a second rear camera anytime soon.
Once you’ve held the iPhone Air in your hand, you’ll understand why I called it a magical sheet of glass in my review. It truly feels like you’re holding a screen and nothing more. Its camera “plateau” is thicker than the rest of the iPhone Air, not only because it houses the 48-megapixel “Fusion camera,” which itself has a lens and optical image stabilization module that requires more girth, but it also—importantly—contains pretty much all of the phone except for the battery.
“To make something this thin, we had to redesign our iconic plateau,” waxes Abidur Chowdhury, an industrial designer for iPhone in Apple’s “Awe Dropping” keynote. “Precisely machined from both sides, it’s sculpted to fit our custom-made cameras, chips, and key system modules.”
John Ternus, Apple’s SVP of hardware, added, “The inside was precision-milled for more space, creating room for the rear camera, front camera, speaker, and even Apple silicon.”
Are you getting it? No? Let me translate that in normal lingo: there’s no f*cking room to fit an ultrawide camera. This image showing everything inside the plateau has been stuck replaying over and over in my head as people tell me why they aren’t getting an iPhone Air despite loving the feel. There is literally no more space for another camera sensor and lens.
By cramming the A19 Pro chip, N1 wireless connectivity chip, C1X modem, speaker, the 18-megapixel Center Stage camera, and other phone stuff into the plateau, the rest of the iPhone Air is nearly all battery. But unless Apple can figure out how to shrink the already tiny components even smaller, there’s just no way future generations of the iPhone Air will get the camera.
You’re probably thinking: but Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge has two cameras in its own camera plateau. While they may both house cameras, the plataeus are different. The iPhone Air’s plateau houses more than just its camera sensors; the S25 Edge only contains the cameras.
Apple could grow the iPhone Air plateau, extending it further down the body, but then it wouldn’t be able to fit as large a battery. Now, it’s possible Apple could use a silicon-carbide battery in future iPhone Airs. These kinds of batteries just started making their way into phones in the last year or so. They’re smaller and thinner, while having just as much capacity as regular lithium-ion batteries. A silicon-carbide battery would allow Apple to rearrange the components in the iPhone Air to make room for a second camera sensor, but that would also come with one potential downside: thermals. In the first-gen iPhone Air, the A19 Pro is inside the plateau, which keeps heat away from the backside. There’s no vapor chamber like there is in the iPhone 17 Pros to keep the chip from frying an egg when it’s pushed hard.
The plateau is even more of a “pragmatic optimization,” as Ive once said of the iPhone 6’s camera bump, which now seems inoffensive in comparison to the iPhone Air’s and iPhone 17 Pros’ mounds. Even with so many Apple industrial design vets having defected to Jony Ive’s LoveFrom or simply retiring, Apple is worth $3 trillion and has some of the best designers and engineers. It can redesign the iPhone Air to fit an ultrawide camera if it really wants to, but it probably won’t. It’s easier to sell “Pro” iPhones with the extra camera lenses. So don’t sleep on the iPhone Air if you’re holding out for the extra lens. You’ll just be disappointed when it doesn’t happen.