Apple advertises the iPhone Air as having an “all-day” battery life and says that it offers four more hours of video playback compared to the iPhone 15 Pro.
This heavy focus on the iPhone Air battery life in its promotional materials is undoubtedly designed to dispel any concerns about the endurance of Apple’s thinnest iPhone ever.
At just 0.22 inches (5.64 mm) slim, however, the iPhone Air still comes with a 3,149 mAh battery capacity, while previous compact iPhones haven’t been battery champs.
Apple says it designed the iPhone Air from scratch and managed to fit “multiple technologies” in the newly minted “plateau” design. This likely refers to the Apple A19 Pro chipset, the 48MP Fusion camera and new 18 MP Center Stage selfie snapper, as well as to connectivity paraphernalia like the eSIM and 5G modem.
iPhone Air battery life
- 27 hours of video playback
The centralized iPhone Air component placement, says Apple, freed up space for a “high-density battery,” likely referring to the silicon carbon electrode technology that Chinese phone makers started implementing in the last two years. In phones like the foldable Oppo Find N5, for instance, the technology increased the energy density of the cells by adding a record 6% silicon to fit a huge 5,600 mAh battery in one of the thinnest handsets out there.
Apple has seemingly gone the same route with the “high-density” battery in the iPhone Air and the concentration of all other components in the camera plateau. Tim Cook, however, just tipped another innovative approach that Apple used to achieve an all-day iPhone Air battery life.
First off, Apple freed up space for a larger iPhone Air battery by equipping it with its newest A19 Pro chipset instead of the A19 that went to the iPhone 17. Built on the third-gen 3nm process of TSMC, the A19 Pro offers higher transistor density, so the manufacturer can choose between increased performance in the same footprint, or the same performance in a smaller size. For the iPhone Air, Apple likely went with the latter, but it also freed up space inside by shipping its thinnest phone without a physical SIM card slot and tray.
According to Tim Cook, the move to an eSIM-only iPhone Air allowed Apple to fill every nook and cranny left below the components in the camera plateau with battery cells, down to the space where the SIM card slot would’ve otherwise been.
While Apple is very careful not to compare the iPhone Air battery life to the iPhone 17 Pro, the 27 hours of video playback that its iPhone Air battery life test returned are still above and beyond what its 0.22-inch titanium frame would suggest. They match the endurance of the iPhone 16 Pro, despite the much slimmer body and the larger ProMotion display.
One of the reasons that the iPhone Air battery life is as good as it gets on such an elegant handset seems to be precisely the fact that Apple managed to “extend the battery to areas that previously had the physical SIM,” tipped Tim Cook when extolling the virtues of its first iPhone without a SIM card slot.
Wooed by tech since the industrial espionage of Apple computers and the times of pixelized Nintendos, Daniel went and opened a gaming club when personal computers and consoles were still an expensive rarity. Nowadays, fascination is not with specs and speed but rather the lifestyle that computers in our pocket, house, and car have shoehorned us in, from the infinite scroll and the privacy hazards to authenticating every bit and move of our existence.
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