Innovation at Apple has always been about making technology more personal and intuitive, and today that journey takes its most dramatic step forward with the iPhone Air. This isn’t just a new iPhone; it’s a new category of experience, born from a challenge to fuse pro performance into the thinnest and lightest design imaginable. The result is a device that feels almost like an extension of your hand, thanks to a breakthrough titanium construction and an innovative internal architecture that defy its powerful capabilities.
To protect this elegant form, we’ve engineered Ceramic Shield 2 for the front, delivering 3x better scratch resistance, making iPhone Air the most durable iPhone we’ve ever built. That strength protects a brilliant 6.5-inch Super Retina XDR display with ProMotion, bringing unparalleled smoothness to everything you do. The story of its power is written in silicon, with the custom-designed A19 Pro, N1, and C1X chips orchestrating a symphony of speed and efficiency that allows for fantastic all-day battery life.
This power completely redefines mobile photography through a 48MP Fusion Main camera with the capabilities of four pro lenses and an intelligent 18MP Center Stage front camera that will change how you capture and share your life. The all-new iPhone Air, in four stunning finishes—space black, cloud white, light gold, and sky blue—is what John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, calls “a huge leap in design and engineering.” You can experience this leap for yourself when pre-orders begin on Friday, September 12, ahead of its availability on Friday, September 19.
Design, Redefined
To hold the iPhone Air is to experience a paradox, a device so impossibly thin at just 5.6mm and so feather-light that it almost defies its own powerful existence. It begins with the cool, unyielding touch of the grade 5 titanium frame, polished to a liquid-like, high-gloss mirror finish that seems to capture and bend the light around it. Your fingers will naturally discover the subtle, raised plateau on the back—a single, unified form precision-milled on both sides to seamlessly house the eyes of the camera, the voice of the speaker, and the mind of the Apple silicon.
This is not merely a design choice but a stroke of genius that carves out a cavern of space for a battery that breathes life into the stunningly large display from dawn until dusk. Interacting with it is just as tactile; the configurable Action button awaits your touch to spring into your favorite function, while the dedicated Camera Control becomes an extension of your creative intent, ready to capture a fleeting moment or unlock a deeper visual intelligence in an instant.
Behold a canvas of pure potential, a 6.5-inch Super Retina XDR display that breathes with life through the magic of ProMotion. Every scroll, every swipe, every animation flows with an unprecedented fluidity, its adaptive refresh rate dancing up to a seamless 120Hz for breathtaking graphics and then intelligently resting at a mere 1Hz when still, preserving power with its intuitive Always-On intelligence.
Venture into the world and witness this brilliance defy the sun itself, erupting with 3000 nits of peak outdoor brightness—the most ever on an iPhone—painting your content with twice the contrast against the harshest glare. This is not just a screen you look at; it’s a window you look through, a portal to your digital life made virtually impervious to the physical world.
For the first time, the revolutionary Ceramic Shield 2 acts as an invisible guardian on both the front and back, a new Apple-designed coating offering three times the scratch resistance and a crystal-clear, anti-reflective view. Encircling this marvel is a robust titanium frame, engineered to surpass Apple’s most demanding standards for strength, culminating in a device that doesn’t just push the boundaries of technology, but fortifies them, creating the most durable iPhone ever conceived.
Beyond the Lens: A Symphony of Light
Introducing a revolutionary new perspective in mobile photography, the iPhone Air debuts an all-new Center Stage front camera, fundamentally transforming the way you capture and share your world. This is not merely an upgrade; it is a complete reimagining of the photo and video experience, centered around the first-ever square front camera sensor on an iPhone.
This innovative design offers an expansive field of view, capturing breathtakingly detailed photos up to 18 megapixels. Imagine a world where you no longer need to awkwardly rotate your device for that perfect landscape selfie; with the iPhone Air, you can effortlessly take both portrait and landscape photos and videos while comfortably holding your phone vertically. For those moments with friends, Center Stage leverages the power of AI to intelligently expand the field of view, and can even dynamically shift from a portrait to a landscape orientation to ensure everyone is included in the shot.
The innovation doesn’t stop at still images; the Center Stage front camera delivers incredibly smooth, ultra-stabilized video in stunning 4K HDR. Furthermore, with the groundbreaking Dual Capture feature, you can simultaneously record on both the front and rear cameras, creating a truly immersive storytelling experience that documents not just the world around you, but your genuine reactions to it. And during your FaceTime or third-party app video calls, Center Stage keeps you perfectly positioned and steady within the frame, allowing you to move and express yourself freely. The iPhone Air’s camera system is more than just a tool; it’s a new way of seeing and being seen.
Envision a photographic revolution tucked neatly into your pocket, where the boundaries between professional gear and everyday convenience simply dissolve. The iPhone Air introduces a paradigm-shifting 48MP Fusion camera system, a singular piece of hardware that ingeniously multiplies its capabilities to feel like a quartet of distinct lenses at your command.
This masterful main lens offers you the artistic freedom to frame your world through two of the most cherished focal lengths in photography—the classic, expansive 28mm and the intimately cinematic 35mm—granting you unparalleled control over your composition. As daylight surrenders to dusk, the camera’s prowess truly awakens; a colossal 2.0µm quad-pixel sensor, flawlessly stabilized by sensor-shift OIS, drinks in every last photon to render scenes with astonishing clarity and life, banishing low-light noise to a distant memory.
For moments that demand a closer look, the optical-quality 2x Telephoto lens beckons, powered by an updated Photonic Engine that doesn’t just magnify but meticulously reconstructs the scene with more vibrant color and lifelike detail than ever before.
This entire symphony of hardware is conducted by a new, intelligent image pipeline, which enables the magic of next-generation portraits with Focus Control. It intuitively captures rich depth information in the background of your shots, giving you the remarkable power to artfully transform any standard photo into a stunning portrait with an adjustable, gallery-worthy blurred background, long after the moment has passed.
To complete this creative suite, the iPhone Air debuts a new “Bright” Photographic Style, a sophisticated setting designed to bathe skin tones in a flattering light while infusing the entire image with a captivating pop of vibrance, ensuring every memory you capture is not just seen, but felt.
Envision a world where your memories are not just replayed, but relived in breathtaking clarity and immersive sound with the iPhone Air. Every frame is a masterpiece, captured in the stunning fidelity of 4K60 fps Dolby Vision, transforming everyday moments into cinematic experiences with vibrant colors and dramatic contrast.
Whether you’re navigating a bustling city street or mountain trails, Action mode ensures your footage remains incredibly smooth and stable, eliminating jarring shakes and jitters to produce professional-grade tracking shots. But the visual story is only half of the experience. The iPhone Air records with Spatial Audio, creating a rich, three-dimensional soundscape that places you right back in the moment. And for those times when the environment is less than perfect, you have ultimate control.
With Audio Mix, you can retrospectively become your own sound engineer, elevating dialogue above the clamor of a crowd or dampening distracting background sounds. Even the most persistent gust of wind is tamed by an advanced wind noise reduction algorithm, ensuring that the stories you tell are heard with the same clarity and impact as they are seen.
Silicon Redefined
The very existence of the iPhone Air, with its impossibly slender profile and ethereal feel, is a narrative written in silicon. Its design wasn’t merely sketched on a page; it was forged from the foundational principle that true innovation begins at the core. This breakthrough was only achievable through the deep integration of Apple silicon, a symphony of custom-designed chips working in perfect unison. At its heart lies the A19 Pro, a powerhouse that redefines the balance between might and moderation.
Its new 6-core CPU architecture doesn’t just make daily tasks faster; it intelligently sips power, preserving energy for when it matters most, solidifying its claim as the fastest and most efficient brain in any smartphone. This efficiency allows the graphical prowess of the 5-core GPU to truly shine, its upgraded architecture painting entire worlds in the palm of your hand and bringing the immersive depth of AAA gaming titles to life.
Yet, the true revolution is woven directly into the fabric of this GPU, with Neural Accelerators built into each core, unleashing a threefold increase in peak compute. This isn’t just power for the sake of power; it is intelligent, intuitive energy, capable of running complex generative AI models directly on the device, making the iPhone Air not just a tool you command, but a creative partner that learns and grows with you.
At the very core of the iPhone Air lies a revolution in unseen engineering, a silent yet profound rethinking of how a device connects to the world and to itself. This connectivity is orchestrated by the N1, a new, Apple-designed wireless networking chip that serves as the central nervous system for all local communication. It doesn’t just enable the next generation of standards like Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and the smart-home-centric Thread protocol; it weaves them together into an experience of seamless, invisible convenience.
The N1 elevates foundational features to new heights of reliability, transforming your Personal Hotspot from a utility into a steadfast, robust hub of connectivity and making AirDrop so instantaneous and dependable that sharing vast files feels as natural as handing them to someone in the same room.
Further extending this philosophy of effortless power is the C1X, Apple’s groundbreaking cellular modem that redefines the balance between speed and efficiency. This isn’t merely an iterative update; it’s a monumental leap, delivering speeds up to twice as fast as its predecessor and, in a stroke of engineering brilliance, outperforming the modem found in the iPhone 16 Pro on equivalent cellular technologies. Yet, this incredible performance is achieved not through brute force, but through intelligent design.
The C1X accomplishes this feat while consuming a staggering 30 percent less energy, establishing it as the most power-efficient modem ever placed in an iPhone. This synergy of the N1’s local mastery and the C1X’s global reach creates a device where the user is no longer tethered by the limitations of conventional wireless, but is instead liberated by a connection that is as powerful as it is power-conscious, ensuring that your window to the digital world remains open longer and wider than ever before.
Outstanding All-Day Battery Life
Unleashed from the constraints of the daily charge, the iPhone Air ushers in an era of enduring power, woven into the very fabric of its design and intelligence. At its core, the revolutionary Apple silicon not only delivers exhilarating performance but also sips power with remarkable efficiency. This groundbreaking chip, coupled with a radical internal architecture, carves out unprecedented space for a larger battery, forming the physical foundation of its all-day stamina. The result is a device that is not only the thinnest iPhone ever but one that also boasts a reservoir of energy to carry you through your most demanding days.
But the true genius of the iPhone Air’s longevity lies in the deep synergy between hardware and software. With iOS 26, the device transcends mere hardware capabilities, introducing a new level of intelligent power management. The pioneering Adaptive Power Mode acts as a silent co-pilot for your battery, learning your unique usage patterns and proactively conserving energy.
It anticipates your needs, subtly dimming the display when you’re not looking, and optimizing background processes with uncanny foresight. This intelligent conservation, combined with a suite of new features in iOS 26 such as Live Translation and advanced customization, ensures that every milliampere is maximized, delivering a truly seamless and uninterrupted mobile experience from dawn until dusk, and often beyond.
eSIM: The Seamless Switch
By courageously moving beyond the physical SIM card, the iPhone Air redefines the very essence of mobile connectivity and design. This evolution to an exclusively eSIM architecture is the secret behind its astonishingly thin and light profile; by eliminating the internal space required for a traditional SIM tray, we’ve engineered a device that feels almost ethereal in your hand. But this innovation is more than just a design triumph. It represents a fundamental leap forward in user freedom and security.
Imagine a world where your connection is fluid and adaptable—with support from over 500 carriers globally, including industry leaders like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, your iPhone Air is a universal passport to seamless communication. For the world traveler, this means the end of fumbling with tiny plastic cards. Now, staying connected abroad is effortlessly elegant, whether you’re activating an affordable international roaming plan from your home carrier or instantly accessing a local prepaid data plan from one of more than 200 providers.
This digital-first approach also brings a profound peace of mind; because the eSIM cannot be physically removed, your device remains more secure if lost or stolen. And with the redesigned, intuitive setup in iOS 26, managing your travel eSIMs is simpler and more streamlined than ever before, transforming a once-tedious task into a seamless part of your journey.
iOS 26: Your World, Intelligently Remastered
iOS 26 represents a paradigm shift in the personal connection we have with our devices, transforming the iPhone into a more perceptive and proactive partner in our daily lives. This evolution begins with the revolutionary “Liquid Glass” design, which moves beyond mere aesthetics to create an interface of profound fluidity and focus; it’s an intuitive canvas where content doesn’t just appear, but flows, allowing system experiences and applications to feel more expressive and alive while retaining the instant familiarity users cherish.
Woven into this very fabric is the next generation of Apple Intelligence, a deeply integrated system that anticipates needs and dissolves barriers. Imagine effortlessly conversing across languages as Live Translation works its magic in real-time within your Messages, Phone calls, and FaceTime chats, making the world feel instantly smaller and more connected. This intelligence extends to your very vision, empowering you to grab a screenshot and immediately interact with the world it captures—be it searching for a landmark or acting on displayed information.
Critically, this power is delivered with an unwavering commitment to privacy through an on-device foundation model, which also unlocks a new frontier of offline-capable, intelligent apps for developers. To bring focus back to what truly matters, new screening tools for calls and messages act as a silent guardian for your attention, while the entire ecosystem is enriched with meaningful updates to CarPlay, Apple Music, Maps, Wallet, and the debut of Apple Games, a unified hub for every player’s digital adventures.
