Here it is. The iPhone Air.
>> Wow. >> Okay. Very funny, guys. Where is it? >> Our friends at Dbrand sent it over.
>> Here you go.
>> According to the instructions, Dbrand wants me to get it myself.
>> Actually, don't don't >> Why do that? >> It is a real cut. You don't do that,
please. >> But that's Look at the blood on it. It's ringing.
>> I could get my arm out of it. >> Don't do that, Lionus.
>> No. My god, Lus. >> No. No.
>> Okay, there's an iPhone. >> Oh my god.
>> Okay. >> What a poorly crafted trap, Dbrand.
>> Oh, well that that was better than I expected.
Next time, if you don't want me to get the iPhone Air, you'll have to make a better trap. Also, I'm just going to
break the glass for fun. There you go.
Get Get this out of here.
Without further ado, let's open up the extremely generous accessory package for
the iPhone Air. Inside you will find a USBC to C USB 2 cable.
Wow, is that even a meter? Did you measure
it? and one piece of paper. That's it.
I mean, it's better than what they include with the AirPods Pro 3s. You
don't even get a cable with those anymore. But how else would Apple save
the envir Wow, it's really thin.
Oh, and it doesn't have the issue that I
have with some iPhones where the edges are really sharp. Like, they managed to
make it this thin without you feeling like it's going to slice your fingers
off at the first knuckle. Oh, I like it.
I don't even mind the plateau. See, Google, I blame Google for this. They
normalized this Apple's just taken Google's crappy design and
elevated it. Get it?
It's taller. In all seriousness, the plateau, which
Apple says was created to house some of the essential functions of their
thinnest phone ever, is far from the only controversial thing about this.
Let's start with a quick exterior tour. Over on the right, we will find our lock
button along with oo camera button. I
don't actually like it for using as a shutter. I actually just prefer the
on-creen button, but I do like it as a quick button for opening up the camera.
On the bottom, we find Oh, interesting.
An offcenter USB 2 type-C port. Oh, it's
not that offc center. People are complaining about such little things,
man. especially when you have big things to complain about down here, like the
lack of a speaker. The amplified earpiece speaker right here is the only
speaker you will find on the iPhone Air. Finally, over on the other side, we've
got our volume rocker as well as action button, which can be programmed to long
press and activate pretty much whatever you want as long as Apple authorizes you
to use it for that. There's really not much else to say about it other than
damn, I know it's $200 extra for a phone that
is missing a lot of features from the regular iPhone 17, especially notably a
second camera. That's right. You get just one 48 megapixel fusion camera with
2x optical zoom that is not optical zoom at all. It's just playing around with
which pixels it's using on the sensor and applying digital processing. full
support for MagSafe in spite of its thinness. Do we have any Mags safe
accessories that we can stick on it? I'm kidding. I wouldn't want them. What
would be the point of buying the world's thinnest iPhone only to put a giant
honking accessory on it? And yet, you know that's what you're going to do. If
you're going to put a skin on, it should be from our sponsor Dbrand.
Wow. Thank you. Oo, tank case. Oh my
god. Really? So Dbrand took the whole concept
of why would you put a big bulky case on
the thinnest phone and freaking ran with it with this thing. I mean, I'd hate for
my expensive iPhone air to get broken unless this thing started at $1,000.
It's like the very opposite of who I would imagine the target audience is for
the iPhone Air. Everything about the iPhone Air says I'm an Asian lady who
loves designer brands. And everything about this case that I've put on it says
that I'm a pubescent or young adult male
who's into guns. Apparently the buttons on it are interchangeable though. That
okay. Okay, that's pretty cool. I'm going to go with the green one because
whatever. I think camo is cool. Oh, I didn't see the pink ones. Why' I put the
stupid military green on? All right,
there it is. The tank. You can get yours at my boss is a shortnaristic
asshole.com. I assume they own that domain as well.
Nope. >> Nope. They have to buy it now.
And the best part is when a Dbrand employee buys it, well, I'm not their
boss. One area where you won't find any
controversy around the iPhone Air is the screen. It's absolutely gorgeous. At 6
1/2 in, it is just in between the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro and the 17 Pro Max. And
like them, it features Apple's ceramic Shield 2, which they claim is much more
scratch resistant. And it features a maximum brightness of up to 3,000 nits
outdoors, which we were able to validate, and 1,600 nits maximum in HDR.
Of course, for me, the bigger one is that they claim one nit of minimum
brightness in their brightness reduced mode, which can be accessed. Oh, shoot.
It isn't linked on this one. I will have to edit it. And it's worth it because it
is so awesome. Yeah, it's an excess. Ah,
it's Dude, this at night is a freaking
lifesaver. You crank your brightness all the way down, dude. Okay, it looks like
nothing right now. That's because it's almost nothing. But like at night when
I'm going to bed, forget like reduce blue light mode or whatever. This is
freaking awesome. Sitting there playing Wordscapes in bed with the wife. It's
great. I just have to figure out how to turn it back on. Or maybe I shouldn't.
This is a great opportunity to have a look at Apple's new anti-glare coating.
Oh, okay. I gotta say, I wouldn't quite put this
on par with the S24 Ultra, but damn,
that's not bad. Here, let's grab a crappy phone. Ah,
it's a little better. Yeah, you just you just want less. So, I'm scanning around
for the same. Like, here's the brightest spot. It's a little better. Like every
iPhone in the 2025 lineup, it features an up to 120 Hz prootion display. But
unlike the other iPhones that it came out alongside, the performance in gaming
is not necessarily peak. See, Apple
raised a lot of eyebrows when they announced that the Air would feature the
same A19 Processor that's in the iPhone
17 Pro and Pro Max, albeit with one
fever GPU core. So, we were thinking like, man, it's so thin. And they were
up there on stage saying, "Yeah, we needed an aluminum body in order to
freaking cool this thing in our Pro phono." But then the Air has a titanium
body, which in people's bent tests has apparently held up extraordinarily well.
What gives? Turns out what gives is some
thermal throttling. With that said, while the iPhone Air does fall behind
the 17 and the 17 Pro in most cases,
what it doesn't fall behind is its Android competition. I was shocked to
see it not only lead the Galaxy S25 Edge
in everything but Geekbench CPU multi-threaded where it ties and 3D Mark
Steel Nomad where I don't even know if I can count because in 3D Mark Wildlife
Extreme where we actually run the test multiple times once it reaches its
minimum score where realistically all of the phones are thermal throttling the
air comes out ahead and that ignores the absolute
buttwamping that the Pixel 10 Pro gets.
Like, man, for years, Apple's whole pitch was, well, our hardware is kind of
a generation or two behind, but you'll stay for the software and the ecosystem.
Nowadays, it's like, I got to be Apple sitting here going.
This is our thin one. Y'all can't even beat this.
If you guys want to check out the details, we're going to have the Labs website linked down below where they'll
have more extensive testing and graphs and all that good stuff for you folks who enjoy it. In the meantime, let's
talk about charging and battery life. Yes, my friends, we are returning to
controversy. The iPhone Air not only charges slower than its 17 and 17 Pro
compatriots, but manages less battery
life in usage thanks to, of course, being well, significantly thinner. With
that said, it's not that bad. It's worse than the Galaxy S25 Edge, but then it's
also thinner than the Galaxy S25 Edge.
And embarrassingly again for Google, it
manages to beat the Pixel 10 Pro in
battery life for crying out loud. Man, I
don't know who's making it harder to be an Android user these days, Apple or
Google. We were able to validate Apple's claim that you can reach up to 50%
battery life in 30 minutes with an appropriately spec charger. Not that
they include one in the box. And perhaps more impressively, from zero, you can
get to about 25% in just 12 minutes. Not
bad. But what will I be doing for all of that battery life? Why don't we fire up
YouTube and see just how usable these speakers are? Give me that crab rave.
Okay, it's the worst speaker I've heard on an iPhone in quite some time.
And it's not close.
Physics, right? Like Apple has done a lot to bend the laws of physics in terms
of making their very compact devices sound shockingly big, but there's only
so much they can do. It's just not a very big speaker. It's about as good as
I could have possibly imagined it sounding, though. Let's try out the
camera. Ooh, new camera design now
simpler than ever. Gotta say, man, as someone who uses the telephoto on my
phone a lot, like I don't really care about not having the ultra wide, but
missing the telephoto is kind of a downer. Wow, look at that, dude. I don't
even have noise in your shirt. Like, there's a little bit, but like wow. And
like, it knows that you and Reese aren't the same color. Dude, you see some of
these like racist phones we get? Like I can't believe what some phones are doing
to skin tones. Whereas like Apple, they just Yep. That's what they look like.
That's good. And that's especially hard cuz it's it's legitimately like really
dark over there. They're all sitting in the shadows. I'm I'm actually really I'm
Man, I'm really happy with that. Now, let's have a look at the fake telephoto.
Yeah, it's it's worse. It's just It's
just not better, though. That's the issue that I have. I swear to God, one
of these days I'm going to get through an Apple device video without talking
about the inconsistency in their UI design. I want to un what I'm doing. No,
I have to painstakingly do this because
you don't have a back button.
Oh. Oh, I should try the new simultaneous recording feature. How the
hell do I do that? Whoa, check this out. Like I'm on the ShortCircuit set. This
is what everything looks like on the ShortCircuit set. Look, look at there's Labs nerds.
>> You can move the window around, too. >> What's up? I can move the Oh, I can
move. Oh, yeah. Oh, I can put it dead center so I can just look at myself
instead of other people because that's honestly the most important part for me
cuz I just love the look of myself. I can't actually. Apple won't let you just
put it wherever you want. You have to put it in a corner. See? Oh man. Sorry.
Apple, man, you got no consistency when it comes to UI UX philosophy. See, you
do want to dictate where I put my stuff, right? You won't just let me put it
wherever I want, but you would let me put it in the way of like buttons and
what the why wouldn't it be here and
here? Like, that's stupid. They might as
well put like a big hole in the middle of where my display is supposed to.
Okay, before we finish up with the camera, can I get all of my friends in
here? And I need to have it automatically frame a shot for me. One
of the big features here is, of course, Apple Intelligence. uh more specifically
the Apple intelligence way that they're using their new 18 megapixel square
sensor here to automatically refframe
and crop your images so that you can fit all of your all of your paid friends
with you. So if you're taking a picture okay is it going to automatically go
landscape for me? >> Oh no, it just went wider. >> Yeah, but that's just already a thing.
>> Wait, we need more people. >> Yeah, we need more thing. More thing. We need more Yeah, we need more thing.
Look, >> it's been a long day. Okay. Okay. So, I'll take a picture of myself because
that's what I do. Okay. All right. Then a couple people come in.
Oh, dude. Oh, dude. That's so cool. I
love it. See, this is the kind of thing I want
Apple spending R&D money on. Fighting the war that I can't afford to fight
against people holding their phones like this and filming content that would be
way freaking better if they went like this. And a square sensor is such a
freaking smart solution to this. They could crop it this way. They could crop
it this way. They can do whatever they want. They got 18 megapixels and they
can be any shape you like. Freaking awesome. I love it. Oh, also it's
probably a decent selfie camera. Yep.
Solid. That's healthy. You love to see
it. Some other key features include the use of Apple's new C1X modem, which
they're claiming makes this the most efficient iPhone ever, as well as the
ability to send out SOS messages via satellite if you are out of reception
and you are lost. If I was buying a phone for a kid or a dependent, that
would be a major factor for me. Other key features, we've got Wi-Fi 7 again,
but this time with Bluetooth 6, which theoretically should give us, you know,
better security, better everything.
Cool. Which means the last major feature is of course iOS 26 which has some stuff
that I got to say is extremely tempting. You can check out our rundown from back
when they announced it. But for me the standout feature is to just
automatically screening unknown callers, having them state their purpose and then
only ringing my phone if they have a valid one.
That alone has got me going, well, I might as well just do another iPhone
30-day challenge because I might just be
ready to go iPhone right now. I have not had a great experience with my Pixel 9a.
You guys, if you watch ShortCircuit regularly, will have known that just
about every phone we unbox on here, I'm like, maybe this will be it. Maybe this
will be my daily driver. And like, I just haven't found anything that's been
exciting and and reliable. This has great battery life, but other downsides,
I just I think I'm ready. Apple, bring me into
the ecosystem. It's too bad the AirPods Pro 3 suck ass.