It’s finally new iPhone season – after months of rumors, Apple has revealed the new iPhone 17, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max.
While the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max iterate on the previous generation iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, the iPhone Air is a completely new addition to the iPhone family, replacing the iPhone 16 Plus with a 5.6mm thick design that houses just one rear camera.
The iPhone Air is also conceptually pretty different from the iPhone 16 Plus. The iPhone 16 Plus, and the iPhone 15 Plus and iPhone 14 Plus before it, were literally just scaled up versions of the base-model iPhone, with identical specs other than screen size and battery life.
On the other hand, the iPhone Air is closer to a slimmed-down version of the iPhone 17 Pro than anything else. Despite its single rear camera, the iPhone Air has the A19 Pro chipset and a titanium frame, which aligns it with Apple’s premium handsets more than the standard iPhone 17 (Apple has ditched titanium with the iPhone 17 Pro, but it was used for the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro).
It’s always exciting to see a new iPhone model join the lineup. As our hands-on iPhone Air review notes, it seems like Apple has made something truly beautiful, and I’m keen to spend some time using the new phone myself as soon as possible.
With that all said, the iPhone Air has already got me confused by Apple’s decision-making – and it's nothing to do with the lack of additional cameras or long-rumored smaller battery. I’m actually finding myself wondering about how Apple decided on the name for its latest handset, and what it could mean for future iPhone generations.
It doesn’t take a tech expert to notice that the iPhone Air isn’t numbered like the rest of the iPhone 17 lineup – it’s not the iPhone 17 Air, just the iPhone Air.
That’s pretty unusual on its own. Apple has followed pretty strict naming conventions with the iPhone since the release of the iPhone 11 in 2019, and hasn’t released an iPhone without some kind of numbered suffix since the very first iPhone came out in 2007 (sure, we had the iPhone X, but that was technically a Roman numeral).
This makes me think that the other iPhone models could follow suit in years to come. Perhaps we’ll see the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro lose their numerals too, as the iPad did back in 2017.
This might make it easier for Apple to issue smaller, more incremental upgrades, without the pressure of releasing a new numbered iPhone every year. Across iPad and Mac, chipset updates and minor internal improvements are generally well received, but Apple tends to catch some flak for doing the same with the iPhone (case in point: the iPhone 14).
The other possibility is that Apple really does see the iPhone Air as a distinct product, and plans to name its follow-up the iPhone Air 2. This would look even weirder next to, say, the iPhone 18 Pro, given that both the numbers and order of titles would be out of line.
All of this is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, as how a phone is named doesn’t affect how it runs – but Apple has made its name on design and detail, so stuff like this matters to the company's strategy moving forward.
I’d rather see Apple go one way or another on numbering its iPhones – but what do you think? Should the iPhone Air have been called the iPhone 17 Air? Does it even matter? Let us know in the comments below.
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