Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
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Title: iPhone Air hands-on: The super sleek precursor to AppleΓÇÖs upcoming
foldable

Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:58:52 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/i...

Apple might not admit it (at least not yet), but the iPhone Air is more than
just a slimmed-down version of the company's latest handset or a more
sophisticated take on its usual Plus model. It's a super sleek preview of its
upcoming foldable.

Now this might seem like a stretch and there's something to be said about the
difference between a traditional OLED display and one that's meant to be
bent. However, the arrival of a foldable iPhone has become one of the tech
world's worst-kept secrets. Still not convinced? Well, consider this. If you
were in charge at Apple and were faced with the task of figuring out how to
engineer and design the company's first phone with a flexible display, how
would you do it? Would you try to re-invent the wheel? No, you'd check out
your competitors to see if there was a formula that you could re-purpose for
your needs. Enter Samsung, which is not only one of Apple's biggest rivals
but also a foldable phone maker that's already seven generations deep.

Sam Rutherford for Engadget

Furthermore, if we look back to this spring when Samsung released the Galaxy
S25 Edge, you might already be noticing some similarities. Just like the
iPhone Air, the S25 Edge is a thinner, more elegant take on Samsung's middle-
child flagship phone: the S25+. It has a lot of the same shortcomings like a
smaller battery and fewer cameras than you'd otherwise expect on a premium
device that costs around $1,000.

But the biggest clue that Apple might be taking a page out of Samsung's
playbook is the iPhone Air's thinness. The idea of simply making a slimmer
iPhone with worse specs without lowering its price doesn't really make sense
in 2025. Unless you're doing so in preparation for a future product. So if we
consider the S25 Edge again (which measures just 5.88mm thick) and then
compare that to the Galaxy Z Fold 7 (which came out just a couple months
later and measures 4.2mm thick when unfolded), suddenly an unmistakable
pattern begins to form. The iPhone 17 Air is one half of Apple's upcoming
foldable and if the rumors are correct, next year Apple is essentially going
to smash two of them together while adding a hinge and a flexible screen.
Voila, there's your iPhone Fold (or whatever Apple ends up calling it).

When viewed side-by-side next to Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 7, it's not hard to
see how the iPhone Air's design might translate into a foldable iPhone.Sam
Rutherford for Engadget

OK, enough speculation, what about the iPhone Air itself? In short, this
thing is deliciously thin at just 5.6mm. It really is one of those things
that you can't fully appreciate until you hold it in your hand. It has
beautifully polished edges and while I don't love the term camera plateau,
there's a lot of sophistication in the subtle slope that rises up to meet the
phone's lone 48MP rear camera.

This story is still developing...

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/i...
sleek-precursor-to-apples-upcoming-foldable-185851102.html?src=rss

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