Apple and its often mindless pursuit of thinness doesn’t compute
A man holds up the new Apple iPhone Air during Apple's "Awe-Dropping" event at the Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, on September 9, 2025. Picture: by Nic Coury / AFP
Image: Nic Coury / AFP
With the arrival of the new batch of iPhones imminent, I firmly believe that they have once again missed the mark with the new iPhone Air.
Before I explain my thoughts on the new iPhone product, let me preface my experience with Apple.
I worked on the Apple G5 back in 2004 when I was studying video editing, and continued to work on one when I started my first job in the field in 2007. In 2010 I switched to sports journalism and swiftly landed myself in debt when I purchased my first 13” MacBook Pro (MBP).
Five years later when it broke, I got my next one, a 2015 13” MBP which was noticeably thinner and had a hard drive which had been decreased from 256GB to a ridiculously small 128GB SSD. When that broke in 2019, I ‘upgraded’ to my third 13” MBP.
The Pitfalls of Apple’s Ultra-Thin Design: A Cautionary Tale
This time I opted for a second-hand device, which was a 2017 MBP which was by far the thinnest of the lot. It had also lost the old USB A ports, in favour of four USB C ports and a Touchbar.
This device was the best example for me of prime Apple Idiocracy (you heard the term here first). They had made a laptop thinner for the sake of being thinner at the heavy cost of performance. The battery on this thing lasted barely four hours, overheated all the time and sounded like a jet engine with the fans taking off whenever I did more than open up a Word document.
This laptop had taken some pointers from the notorious failure that was the 12” fanless MacBook in 2015. Here was an incredibly thin and light device, with just one USB C port - one of the first laptops to make the switch to the new type of interface. However, this aesthetically pleasing machine was severely underpowered and much like my later MBP from 2017, was critically poor at heat management which would often render the laptop useless as it froze so often.
Apple’s New iPhone Air: A Step Back with MagSafe Battery Requirement
Now, what has Apple done 10 years after the release of that ill-fated MacBook? They’ve done the same with their new iPhone Air.
Sold alongside the new iPhone Air, Apple will also be offering a custom-made MagSafe (magnetic) external battery which magnetically clips onto the phone.
You heard that right, to get better battery performance on par with the other current iPhones, a user will have to essentially carry a power bank as well? For me, that’s just counter-intuitive and simply ludicrous.
And it’s not as if the company can’t produce thin and powerful devices; since 2020 with the launch of their own Apple Silicone chips in the MacBook Airs, it’s been like night and day. Since the M1 MacBook Air was launched five years ago, Apple has been able to make powerhouse laptops that beat the competition in both power and battery efficiency.
For example, the latest M4 MacBook Air - which now also features 16GB of unified memory - has also seen a launch price reduction over its predecessor, the M3 version.
It means on sale they can be found for under R20 000 - like the iStore had it retailing for recently. This is a laptop capable of intense tasks like video, photo, and sound editing. It also features the fastest web browsing experience of any laptop in the world at the moment.
iPhone Air: Sleek Design, High Price, Inferior Features
The new iPhone Air will definitely turn heads for its 5.64mm thick design. The standard iPhone 17 is 7.95mm thick. The Air also comes in at 165g, while the 17 is 12g heavier at 177g, which is an indistinguishable weight difference.
The price, though, is probably the craziest thing about the iPhone Air. It retails currently at R25,999 for the cheapest model, while the comparative iPhone 17 base version comes in at R20 799.
That’s a difference of R5200 for a phone that is much thinner, slightly lighter, and objectively worse in every other meaningful way (the camera system is also substantially inferior).
I’m sure when we get our hands on the new iPhone Air soon, it will look amazing. But I just can’t see anyone reason-based on anything that actually matters to choose that phone.
* The views expressed are not necessarily the views of IOL or Independent Media.
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