Apple has been doing this long enough that you can tell when something feels off. The iPhone Air feels off. Not because it’s a bad phone, but because it highlights a bigger problem inside Apple’s product strategy.
The company is building devices for customers it thinks it understands. The market keeps reminding them that those customers moved on a while ago.
You can see it in how Apple positioned the Air. It was pitched as the lighter premium option. That sounds fine until you remember that people who want light phones usually want cheap phones, and the people who want premium phones usually want all the features crammed in.
The Air sits awkwardly between both groups, and you can almost feel the hesitation baked into the product. This confusion isn’t limited to the Air alone; it reflects a broader disarray.
When you zoom out and look at the entire lineup, the iPhone catalog, which used to make sense, now reads like a record collection someone reorganizes every few months.
The mini arrived, disappeared, then became a cult object. The Plus returned long enough to confuse everyone. The Pro keeps drifting into non-Pro territory.
The SE is still around because carriers love an easy upsell. The Air drops into this mix and immediately feels like it arrived at the wrong party.
What really gives away the problem is resale value. When a phone loses this much value (almost 50%) this fast, it tells you the early adopters walked right past it.
Also: I get why Apple wants this, but I don’t trust ChatGPT enough to hand over my body’s secrets
These are the people who keep the entire iPhone ecosystem healthy by upgrading often, trading in their old devices, and repeating the cycle. If they aren’t buying in, then the product isn’t connecting.
The iPhone Air is a fine object. Apple still knows how to design hardware. What it missed is the buyer.
Not the mythical average buyer in the slide deck, but the real person deciding between a cheaper base model or spending a little more for a Pro. That decision is simple, and the Air complicates it without offering a clear reward.
Apple can keep making phones like this, but the market already delivered its verdict. The company is losing the plot on which customers matter and why they upgrade. The rest is just pricing.
Do you think Apple misjudged the iPhone Air, or is the market overreacting?
I think Apple has lost it for a long while already. Last time they got Steve Jobs back to fix it. Now they can’t do that.
Who wants a thin phone that has a huge camera bump, and compromises on battery and camera? It is lack of common sense. Somebody telling them that this is s**t, go back and fix it. Like Jobs used to do.