The Sundarban
Image: Foundry
Hate to say I beneficial you so, but… . I beneficial you so. Yep, this is going to be one in all these articles.
Two and a half months earlier than it was announced, I predicted that the iPhone 17 Air may well be a flop. And now the first publish-launch research is in, and (with the usual caveats about lack of official sales numbers) it looks like I was fair: one document says Apple has “drastically” sever back on production orders and another says there’s “virtually no consumer demand.” The handiest part I got imperfect was thinking there may well be a 17 in the name.
No longer that I count on or deserve remarkable credit for this particular fraction of prophecy. (Or the one that, ahem, came two months earlier than that.) Anyone may contemplate this coming. An ultraslim smartphone was always going to be a complicated promote, as Samsung discovered in the summer season with the Galaxy S25 Edge. It merely requires too many compromises in areas that almost all customers care about for the sake of an growth in a single that they largely don’t.
Apple did its finest to mitigate the complications, going into plump damage-retain an eye on mode at some level of the keynote presentation. Instead of extolling the actual benefit of a 5.6mm cellular telephone (can be sharpened and ancient as a ninja star?), the company centered on telling us how it had solved a bunch of complications it excellent created.
Disturbed it will bend? Don’t! It’s made of space-grade titanium and is virtually unbendable. Disturbed it will have a crappy battery life? Don’t! We’ve made room for extra battery capacity by shunting parts into a swollen eyesore… sorry, we mean aesthetically pleasing Plateau. Disturbed about camera performance? Don’t! The single rear lens is actually an exciting contemporary “2-in-1 camera machine.”
By all accounts, the iPhone Air is a really spectacular feat of engineering, but you can’t engineer your way out of a bad strategy. And product obtain is a zero-sum game anyway: each of the stellar accomplishments that make up the Air’s CV represents a missed opportunity in totally different places. If the engineers didn’t have to make it so astonishingly violence-resistant, they may have made it cheaper. If there was room for a valid battery in the main body, then it wouldn’t have to stick out at the back like a pregnant halibut. And while battery life is fair for such a slim cellular telephone, it’s unexcited worse than all the other late-2025 iPhones and the Professional units from last year.
Ultimately, as my colleague Jason pointed out in his evaluate, the issue is that the iPhone Air asks Apple fans to pay extra for less. And that’s no longer what we’ve been resulted in count on over years and years of iterative upgrades, which don’t change remarkable but handiest change for the higher. (Even paying extra for the same is anathema. Be aware these gold Apple Watch Edition units from the early days, which mark thousands and thousands for no functional growth?) If Apple fans are going to pay over the odds, they count on to at least gather a bunch of extra features they’re probably no longer going to make spend of.
This may or may no longer be a critical setback for Apple, since the reportedly low sales of the Air are offset by the reportedly excessive sales of the iPhone 17 Professional and 17 Professional Max. My take may well be that it’s no longer a vast deal in the short time interval, certainly, it may even mean extra income overall, but it spells danger in the medium to very long time interval if Apple can’t learn its lesson. Traditional iPhones are likely to lose their lustre as AI turns into a extra important criterion for purchasers and other manufacturers discover their bear futuristic choices–such as foldables and zigzag smartphones. If the future isn’t the iPhone Air, Apple wants to figure out what is.
Foundry
Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which entails all the Apple information you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we contemplate it goes great with a Monday morning cup of espresso or tea, but it’s chilly in case you want to supply it a read at some level of lunch or dinner hours too.
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Podcast of the week
Apple has released a contemporary laptop, the M5 MacBook Professional. In the latest episode of the Macworld Podcast, we take a gape at it, talk about our impressions, and whether it’s worth purchasing or no longer. Tune in and fetch out extra!
You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our bear site.
Evaluations corner
- M5 MacBook Professional evaluate: A minor refresh hiding a massive graphics boost.
- Apple Watch Sequence 11 evaluate: The finest (but don’t purchase it).
- Razer Joro keyboard evaluate: A gamer’s alternative to Apple’s Magic Keyboard.
- Anker Nano 10K evaluate: Compact energy bank.
