The iPhone Air is an incredible piece of engineering. At 5.6mm thick, it feels impossibly light compared to every other modern phone.
Apple clearly wanted to make a statement with this design. And it did. But the statement comes with a cost: the battery.
To get the Air this thin, Apple shrunk the internal cell. That’s the obvious trade-off. What’s less obvious until you start looking closer is how the company has decided to solve the problem it created.
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Instead of making a slightly thicker phone with a normal battery, Apple designed a $129 MagSafe Battery Pack that, according to iFixit’s teardown, appears to use the same battery that’s inside the phone itself.
On paper, this sounds clever. If you need more power, just snap on another cell. In reality, it doesn’t work nearly that well.
Because it charges wirelessly, the pack can only get an iPhone Air back up to about 65 percent before running out of juice. You’re losing over a third of the capacity to transfer inefficiency.
Since the pack itself is thicker than the phone, attaching it erases the very design advantage Apple is selling in the first place.
Carry both, and you’ve got something chunkier than an iPhone 17 Pro. Buy neither, and you’re left with a phone that struggles to keep up under heavy use.
To be fair, plenty of people will never notice. If your day is just texts, browsing, and a few apps, the iPhone Air will make it until bedtime.
But if you’re traveling, shooting video, or relying on maps, you’ll find yourself hitting the wall quickly. And when you do, Apple is right there with the answer, sitting on a shelf for $129.
This isn’t the first time Apple has chosen thinness over practicality, and it won’t be the last. But it might be the cleanest example yet of how the company sees design and business as the same thing.
