For me to buy the iPhone Air 2, it needs 4 important upgrades

The iPhone Air may be one of Apple’s most controversial products in years, if not decades, which is saying something. It’s not a fundamentally new category for the company, like the 2015 Apple Watch, nor is there some serious design mistake. Remember the iPhone 4 issue that gave rise to Antennagate? Instead, the Air has some people riled because it costs more than the iPhone 17, yet makes some deep functional sacrifices to achieve one thing: the thinnest and lightest frame possible. It’s Apple’s long-running obsession with thinness taken to the nth degree. Steve Jobs and Jony Ive would be proud.

There are two obvious upgrades most will want for the iPhone Air 2, which is predicted to ship in September 2026 alongside the iPhone 18 series. But I’d argue that there’s more that the product needs to be hit, rather than just a continuation of the experiment that paved the way for the iPhone Fold. There’s even a non-zero chance that Apple will kill off the product, considering that there are no longer any Plus or Mini iPhones on the market. A lot is riding on the Air’s Q4 sales numbers.

A silicon-carbon battery

Back to a true all-day device

When it announced the iPhone Air on September 9, Apple was eager to stress the phone’s “all-day” battery life. By the tech giant’s own metrics, the device is capable of 27 hours of video playback. But that figure drops to 22 hours with streamed video, and of course, tasks like games, app updates, and Google Maps, can be an even bigger power drain. The result is that early reviewers have complained about the iPhone Air running on fumes if they don’t do a midday charge, or use Apple’s conveniently revived MagSafe Battery Pack.

All this could’ve been avoided if Apple had adopted a silicon-carbon (Si-C) battery. Despite the name, Si-C is actually an evolution of the lithium-ion format, just with greater energy density. The Air could’ve matched the iPhone 17’s runtime, if not surpassed it. It’s not even a bleeding-edge technology — a number of products have shipped with Si-C, most notably the OnePlus 13. Apple seems to have stuck with conventional batteries to keep its profit margins up.

One way or another, Apple has to improve battery life to get more people onboard with the iPhone Air 2. It’s just hard to imagine anything substantial coming out of tweaking its processors and modems a bit more, or adding yet more software optimizations to iOS 27.

An ultra-wide camera

Tough but necessary

One of the craziest things about the Air is that to achieve its thinness, Apple stuffed all the “guts” of the phone — meaning its processor, storage, and other chips — into the camera bump. The rest of the design is devoted only to the battery, microphones, USB-C port, and MagSafe charging. It’s not even a decent USB port– it’s stuck at USB 2.0 speeds, which are frankly lethargic in an age of file transfers measuring dozens or hundreds of gigabytes.

Apple’s approach didn’t leave much space for multiple cameras, as you might imagine. In fact the Air is equipped with a single wide-angle camera, which may be fine for some people, but quickly becomes limiting for everyone else. It’s harder to capture groups or scenic vistas, and you can’t even take macro (extreme close-up) shots. It’s a strange step backwards in an era when many people depend on their phone for photos and videos.

It’s hard to imagine Apple getting away with a single-camera design for two years in a row. And if it’s going to add anything, it’s an ultra-wide, which tends to be easier to fit, and enables macro work. I’d rather the company include a telephoto lens, but Apple has been pretty stubborn about limiting that to Pro iPhones.

Improved cooling technology

A boost to comfort and performance

The Air can run surprisingly hot when you put its A19 Pro chip to the test. This doesn’t appear to trigger premature shutdowns, but the warmth is reportedly very noticeable in your hand. Which makes sense — effectively, the phone crams the performance of an iPhone 17 Pro into an even smaller chassis. There’s one less GPU core, yet that’s not much help when there’s very little room for heat to dissipate.

Some sort of cooling solution is in order. This would do more than keep the iPhone Air 2 comfortable and safe — it would allow it to sustain higher performance for longer. That’s the reason there’s a vapor chamber on the iPhone 17 Pro, although Apple might find it tough or impossible to implement a similar chamber in the Air 2 without increasing thickness slightly. In Apple’s world, that’s often a cardinal sin.

Other options may be available, such as different materials or improved airflow. If I knew of a surefire solution, I’d probably be working for Apple’s engineering team.

More fashionable color options

Enough with the pastels, already

This one touches on the real reason some people will be buying an iPhone Air: fashion. Sure, the product is easier to hold or slip into your pocket than other iPhones, but relatively few people care about that. If they did, Apple wouldn’t have been so quick to abandon Mini models after the iPhone 13 mini. Given the practical features the Air sacrifices, one of the only remaining incentives to buy one is owning the newest, slickest form factor.

You wouldn’t know that from its color options, which are limited to black, white, gold, and a sky blue. All pretty conservative. There’s nothing as striking as the orange or navy blue colors for the iPhone 17 Pro. Heck, the standard iPhone 17’s palette offers more pizazz, although I wish Apple would get over its obsession with pastels.

If Apple wants the Air to be a fashion accessory, it needs to offer bolder colors, and preferably one or two more options. I know I’d give the Air 2 more serious consideration if I could find one in burnt orange, say, or a sunflower yellow. I might still turn away if other specs weren’t up to par, but catching my eye is a small victory for any company.