iOS 26.1 beta, iPhone Air thoughts, 17 Pro durability saga

So when we were talking about the iPhone 17 Pro design last week, Mayo, I said that it was not Apple's first unibody iPhone, but the first since the iPhone 6. You doubted my claim. We pulled up the press release of the iPhone 6. Apple described it as an aluminum unibody design. And as I kind of expected you to do, in between last week and this week, you did some more research and realized...

Something Apple said during the iPhone 17 Pro keynote. Yeah, because when you said that, I was confused. I was like, I'm sure they said it was their first unibody. And sure enough, I looked it up and in the design video where you have Molly Anderson narrate the introduction for the iPhone 17 Pro design, she calls it our first aluminium unibody for the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max.

That is false advertising. But indeed, as well as the iPhone 6 press release, if you go to the iPhone 6 event... back in 2014, you have Johnny Ive narrate a design video where he says the new iPhone 6 models feature a precision unibody enclosure. So I don't know whether the Apple marketing team have changed their definition of what an aluminium unibody is or if they just disagree on technicality or they just don't care.

I did think it was odd that when you... My memory was pinging at me. I was like, I'm sure they said it was their first Unibody. And here we go. They technically... depending on which person you talk about in terms of which year isn't either their first union body or not their first union body. I'm sure there might be some technical discrepancy. I think that's probably it, yeah. Changes their claim.

But it's very true that back in the iPhone 6 days, they introduced it as a unibody design. In the last week, I mean, the unibody of the 17 Pro is just such an understated design change. It's different than the iPhone 6. in that the iPhone 6 was a lot more curved from the front to the back. But the 17 Pro, that little curvature where it no longer feels like the sandwich shape that we've had since the 12, like that is such a subtle, nice design change that I've noticed.

Maybe not be the first unibody design, but it's still very nice. Yeah, I haven't held the Pro phones, but I think people have said that it feels nice in the hand, the curved edge of the 17 Pro. But what you have held is the iPhone Air.

You took delivery of your iPhone Air on Friday, an upgrade from the 14 Pro. And I'm very eager to hear your thoughts because as you said before we started recording, anytime you get a new iPhone, it's quite the event for you. Well, I try not to be a slavish consumer and buy... Consumerism, yeah. Yeah, and buy new iPhones every year. I was helped out last year by the fact that Apple gave me the iPhone 16 Plus review unit.

If the other Siri features had come out in the spring, I probably would have had to buy a phone if they hadn't given me that because... I think that stuff, you kind of need to use it to really be able to evaluate it, right? For the Apple intelligence stuff, you mean? Yeah, some of the existing Apple intelligence stuff, but especially the...

personal context stuff, right? Yeah. And even with the plus that they did gift me as a unit, I was kind of dreading the original March timeframe because I didn't want to switch the plus because it had a 60 hertz screen, right? The Plus was great and better than the 14 Pro in pretty much every other regard, but the screen refresh rate just really killed me. Well, and it's bigger than what you like from an iPhone. Yeah, yeah. And to be fair, the Air is also bigger.

That's probably the thing I'm still getting the most used to is just the size increase. So the 14 Pro is a 6.1 inch phone, right? The modern Pro phones in the small size 6.3 inches, but they thin the bezels down. So they're approximately the same size as the... iPhone 14 Pro, right? I mean, they're in the ballpark. It's close. But the Max's are obviously a lot larger. They're now 6.9-inch phones or 6.7-inch phones in the olden days. The Air is 6.5 inches, right?

So it kind of slots in between. And if I was being super picky, I'd still probably prefer a slightly smaller model, right? Like it's slightly too big for my hands and you kind of have to really do some aerobics with my thumb to... like hit the button in the top right corner well tell people how you hold the phone because i was surprised at how the way you described me how you hold the phone seemed very odd to me so on the 14 pro i would have like my thumb on the left edge

and then like three fingers on the right hand side and then my index finger would like cup it at the top so it'd be like the top middle almost like a deck of cards like I used to do magic and that's kind of how you're meant to hold cards and like if you look at casinos they kind of brace it with

a finger on the top and then thumb going like horizontally down the side how do you have the phone you just have like your four fingers on the right so i hold it in if i'm using are you talking about using it one-handed or two-handed yeah one-handed yeah I do the classic in my right hand, pinky holding it underneath the bottom, three fingers behind it and using it with my thumb. So you brace the pinky at the bottom, okay?

Which I think that's how most people hold their phones nowadays. I guess so. I don't know. I feel like my grip isn't that crazy. But it was definitely more amenable on the 14 Pro size than it is on the Air size. um the 14 pro is small enough that it almost is kind of like a deck of cards in your hand right it's that kind of shape the air is obviously a lot bigger and

Even though I can fit my fingers around like that, I then don't really have leverage with the thumb to actually click on anything. And the big reason why I'm having to change my grip is the index finger at the top middle constantly bumps into the plateau and the camera on the rear side. So it doesn't feel great because it's not that it's there. It's that the metal edge is quite sharp right on the plateau. So if my index finger is on the top edge of the phone, it's like...

digging into my finger at the bottom. So basically, it's not very comfortable holding like that. So I've now kind of changed to, I guess, either pinky grip with the pinky at the bottom, or I kind of like, I guess if I'm just like looking at something and scrolling and not like actively using it.

Then I have four fingers on the right hand side and the thumb goes on the left and the thumb like taps the screen and stuff. But if you've got buttons in the far top right corner, you do kind of have to like adjust your grip to actually hit it one handed.

With a phone of this size, it does become more of a two-handed usage pattern. It does help that iOS 26 moves a fair amount of stuff from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen. Not everything, right? Still a lot of like the confirm buttons or the blue buttons that are like the done action is still top right. But other stuff goes further down. So it's not terrible. And if I was being super picky, I'd probably want an air that was more closer to the...

pro size right maybe like 6.3 rather than 6.5 um because it's it's like if you take the case off it's the dimensions are just about right but then you have to put the case on and then it adds a couple of millimeters to every edge right and then it gets bigger again um So that's kind of my number one complaint with the air, having it now for a week and change. The rest of it, I'm pretty happy with. The airiness of it.

comes through in the lightness, right? This phone is lighter than like the 14 Pro and the 14 Pro screen is tiny compared to this, right? It's... So much lighter. It's lighter than the Plus. It's lighter than the other Pro phones. I mean, the 17 Pro series got way heavier this year. So it's lighter than all of them. It's lighter than all the stainless steel phones, the titanium phones. It's basically lighter than...

the small size pros of the last like four generations, including when they went to the Titanium and they advertised them as lighter. But the screen's bigger than that size, right? So you get the bigger canvas. which then spreads the weight out. It's only like six grams lighter than some of the low-end Pro phones, but that's the smaller screen Pro. So the combination of the slightly less weight and then the fact that it's just spread over a bigger size really makes it feel quite light.

in the hand the thinness is nice too but it's not as it's not what i it's that was the the the allure of the thinness has worn away a little bit um Just because you just, you know, once you put like a bumper case on it, some of the thinness elements become less impactful, right? Like when I've shown some other people this phone...

I'm like, oh, it's the thin one or whatever. And they're like, oh yeah, it looks thin. But then I have to like take the bumper off, which is a chore. That's a fun ordeal. So I have actually, I've kind of nailed the strategy now for the air removal, the air bumper case removal. But you take the bumper off and people are like, oh wow, that is a lot thinner.

But I'm not brave enough to run around with this phone without a case on. The air plus bumper is still thinner than any other phone you can buy, really, right? So it's still better, but it doesn't quite have the wow factor. And even in its bare naked form, the iPad Pro is still like the thinnest thing.

That makes me like every time I pick up, holy moly, that thing is sleek. This doesn't quite get there because obviously the top 15% of the phone has the protrusion that is quite thick. And it's like a double protrusion, right? Because you have the little bit and then the camera lens goes beyond that still.

But the weight is like really appreciable. Even a week on, like I haven't still fully adjusted and I have my like 14 Pros and that's becoming a test phone and a development phone. And now I'm like, this thing's so heavy. How did I ever... coped with this before and it slips in my pocket you know it's so the the overall form factor of the air i am really really happy with um if i was being super picky i'd like the screen to be slightly smaller um but

They don't offer that. So the air is what I'm taking. The compromises of this form factor, I guess the big things are battery, camera, right? Camera, I don't really care. Okay, so the speaker, I was bracing for it to be worse. Okay. I don't think it's terrible. Because it is one speaker and it is only the earpiece speaker, but it is an amplified earpiece speaker compared to where I was coming from on the 14 Pro.

And I believe the 17 Pro series as well get this bigger single speaker, but they also then get the second stereo speaker as well. If you look at the teardowns, the size of the top speaker has just got bigger this year across all the models. um and so yeah it is a mono speaker but if you listen to podcasts and it's fine right like the voices are still pretty clear you do have to turn it up to a higher percentage on the volume bar probably to match the volume that you would

So it doesn't have the greatest maximum volume. But I was coming in to unwrapping this phone and being like, the speaker's going to be horrible. And it's not, in my opinion, it's not horrible. Obviously, it's not as good as the other models. But I think it's acceptable and passable, right? If you listen to music, you're going to be using headphones. One of the problems, though, is if you're watching a video, especially in landscape.

Instead of the audio coming out of both sides of the phone, it's only coming out of that earpiece speaker. And I don't watch a lot of video on my phone, but I know for some people that's been kind of disorienting compared to the old stereo experience.

Yeah, I mean, it is worse because you've only got sound coming from one side. But it's passable, you think. It's passable. I don't watch a lot of movies and stuff on my phone, right? And if I do, I'm wearing headphones. Like if I'm traveling, I have my AirPods in.

If I'm at home, why would I watch like films on the phone when I've got, you know, the iPad or the TV, right? Like I'm not going to choose the phone to watch it on. YouTube videos, yeah, it comes out of one speaker. But your brain does adjust over time and like you just kind of forget that. the niceness of having stereo audio. So like if you're just watching like spoken word content or listening to podcasts, et cetera, I think you can get away with the one speaker. I would never say.

not to have like AirPods or other headphones with you though. Cause like, but I would use my headphones on my old phone as well. It wasn't like the stereo speaker was so overwhelmingly good that I'd be like, well, I don't need to put my headphones in for this stuff. Most of the time I put my headphones in. I'm at home.

If I'm playing, I can play podcasts through the phone speaker if I want to. If I want to enjoy it a bit more, I'll set the audio output to like one of the HomePods I got around. Or if I didn't have HomePods, I just put my AirPods in my ears, right? So I think the speaker is... waiting for that to be worse than it actually was in my opinion i'm sure other people are more sensitive to audio quality and they might reject it more but for me it was it was okay the camera is

It's hard, right? The one camera it has is great. But still technically not quite as good as the main camera on the 17 Pro, right? I'm sure it's slightly better than my 14 Pro, but not by much. It's like pretty close. So, you know, I've basically spent £1,000 on a new phone and the camera's the same, right? And I've got less zoom range. So it is obviously a downgrade for that.

I didn't really have opportunities to use the Zoom that often. And you know what's going to happen now. In three months' time, I'm going to do something. I wish I could Zoom in right now. I just can't do it. Which is why it makes this phone hard to recommend, right, for an average person. Because it's like...

You could spend less money and get a phone with two cameras, i.e. the iPhone 17, or you could spend marginally more money and get a Pro that's got three cameras and everything else and the better battery life situation. So that's why the Air is hard to... If you don't know someone's individual circumstances very precisely, it's hard to be just by the air because it's much more of a niche product. But if you fit into those niches, I do think it's quite nice. The camera is...

For me, fine. I don't really use the camera that much. I don't have a family. I don't have kids. It doesn't really come up. I don't have pets, so I don't have to take pictures of animals and stuff. on a regular basis. You do have a family, to clarify. You do have a family. I don't live with family. I don't have children. So if I had kids, there's no way I'd be buying a phone with just one camera. But as it is right now.

i've so far not been i haven't hit a situation but i wish i had another lens right um but maybe that will come up and the battery life was obviously the biggest question and i've been Knock on wood, satisfied? I mean, I think I colored a lot of people's expectations. I know I had you worried. I had our colleague Ryan really worried about the battery life. And most people seem to think it's fine or passable. Yeah, I mean...

I'm getting more battery life now than I was on my 14 Pro with 75% battery health. I would hope so, yeah. And I'm pretty sure I'm getting more battery life than I did when the 14 Pro was brand new. It's hard to remember, right? That was like three years ago now. But if you look at some of the battery tests and stuff, the Air is not so far away from the other phones that I thought it was going to be like a massive chasm.

And it is less, but it's close. It's in the ballpark. I get about six hours screen on time, it seems like, if I'm on Wi-Fi. So if I'm at home, basically, which I work from home, so there you go. If I go out and about, the cellular modem is obviously more efficient, as Apple says, but it's still less efficient than being on Wi-Fi. So I think, at least in my experience, you get about...

you know, six hours screen on time doing, you know, normal internet stuff like email, Twitter, threads, messenger, that kind of stuff, camera usage. And then probably if you're on cellular... I'm expecting more like the four to five hour range in terms of screen on time. I've been consistently in the four to five hour range, even on days where I don't leave the house. I don't think I've gotten all the way to six on a single charge yet.

I, again, that's passable for the most part. Like obviously the difference between getting four and a half, five and a half, six hours of screen on time on a phone is negligible because when you go. out for a day where you're not going to have the opportunity to charge your phone you still have to plan around it right it's not all day battery life in a lot of situations you need to plan to have the magsafe battery pack you need to plan to have a portable charger of some sort

whether you're getting four and a half or six hours of screen on time. Yeah, if you get six hours screen on, that's probably equivalent. If you go back a couple of generations of iPhone, it's probably comparable. to like the 14 Pro series at new, you know? So if you're upgrading from a phone that old, you might not even feel like the battery's that bad. It's just kind of average. The battery's life of the iPhone series just got a lot better in the last, you know, 15, 16, 17.

um that kind of range the battery life increased a lot especially if you're coming and obviously if you're coming from a max phone it's going to be a downgrade regardless but if you're coming from like the base iphone or the iphone base pro um

You might find it not like even a thing to bring up. But yes, if you're going out all day long, you're probably going to want to take... a battery pack of some description or you just can't use your phone very much is the other one is the other situation right and to be fair that's what i was living um with my 75 battery health 14 pro i would charge it before i leave if i was going out to like london or something

and then just use it not so much and put it in low power mode and I'd be okay. So people get by, right? I think the point is there are hundreds of millions of people out there right now with iPhones that have worse battery life than the Air. It's not like the air is coming into the market and suddenly hitting a new floor. Just because of battery degradation or the fact that older models perform less well, there are just hundreds of millions of people out there right now.

who live with a battery life that's probably the same as the air, if not worse. So you too can live with an air and be okay. Now, if you're one of the people out there who is in that situation, you're like just frustrated, the battery life's bad. You probably don't want to spend £1,000 on the phone that gives you the same battery life, right? And again, in those cases, the Pro models are probably more appealing. But for me, it's fine because I mostly work from home.

I probably only use about five hours screen on time in an average day anyway, because if I'm at home, I'm also using my laptop a lot of the time, my desk, right? So I can go the whole day without having to plug it in again.

Oh, that's good. Yeah, because I just don't use the phone as much. And the first, like the second day, I did like the full battery test thing. I took off the charger at nine. I was using the phone as I... would right on a regular saturday you know i wouldn't say i'm the most intensive user of a smartphone right i i use it a lot um but i got through the whole day and i got through like

it went the whole night with always on display on uh and then it lasted for like another hour or so in the morning so it got through the whole day basically without having to hit a charger again and i didn't i purposely didn't turn on low power mode

which probably would have extended it a little bit longer. And that was probably six to seven hours screen on time total across that day and a half span. Obviously, if you're a person who's going to... be on tiktok for seven hours then you're gonna need to plug it in and if you're playing games it you can feel the phone heat up a lot more the efficiency drops the battery life gets consumed face time seems particularly intensive um you can do a half an hour face time call and lose

15% battery. So you've got to be aware of that kind of stuff. But for average, like normal daily tasks, web browsing, social media, I feel like six hours screen on time is acceptable. And so for me, that hasn't really been a problem. It's definitely nowhere near close enough for me to need to return it, right? Like when you were having your review unit period and you were getting two and a half hours in that first time around, there's just no way I could survive on that.

um and it was insane and obviously you reset the phone you'd say i was new and now you're getting like in that four to six hour range right and it feels more more amenable and but if i was commuting to london every day to work uh and that's you know

an hour or plus on the train on the way there, an hour or plus on the train on the way back on weak cellular connection, the battery life of the air is going to sting a lot more. And for that kind of lifestyle, you probably want to go to a pro phone or...

you know, like a last year's plus or something, which also got good battery life. The other random thing that I noticed in terms of random compromises on the air was the torch. Do you know about this? You can't do the, you know, they added that feature with the dynamic island where you can like change the spray of the torch lens and it like makes it wider or deeper. That just doesn't exist on the air. The air just has a normal flash. So you can make it bright or...

You can make it brighter or dimmer, but you can't change the shape of it. And the peak brightness is less than the 16 phones, at least, that I've noticed. Yeah, I think so. Now, have I ever changed the shape of the...

torch more than when they released that thing and it was cool to mess around with no so but i did i did change the torch i was like wait you can't actually make it thinner um and then the other thing i spotted which was just kind of random i don't think many people mentioned was the

Camera control button looks quite different to the camera control button on the other Pro phones just because of the size. Like the camera control button on other models has like a, what would you call it? Like a bevel around it. Like there's more of a border.

On the Air, just because of the thinness of the phone, it doesn't have a border. It's just more like a straight volume button. You'd be hard-pressed to notice that it wasn't a normal button. Whereas you look on the Pro phones, there's a ridge around it. It has more of an indentation. But on the air, it almost just looks like a button. It has all the same capabilities as the other phones, but physically you could just forget about it and it just kind of just looks like a normal button.

They've done a good job of making it like smoother to match the chrome edges compared to the other phones too. Like it blends in. It's less of an outlier, right? Although... You saw, like everybody else did, that when you set up a phone now, the camera control functionality, the swipey swipe functionality is off by default and it has that little toggle as part of the signup screen and you have to turn it actively on to use it.

I turned it on just to try it very briefly. Obviously, I've tried it on the Plus before. But now what I currently have it set on is I turned off all the other swipey swipey options but Zoom. So I can't accidentally change modes or anything.

But if I'm holding it like that, I can zoom in without having to go to the screen. And obviously you can click to take the photo. So I'm trying it in that configuration at the moment. It's still quite gimmicky in the scheme of things. And the fact that it's now off by default. speaks a lot of volumes especially when the second screen after you continue on is

you can use the camera control button for visual intelligence by holding the button down and that has no option to turn it off as part of the onboarding. It's just on there. If you're going to dig into the settings of the camera control, you can turn the long press gesture off. But just in the onboarding screens, it's just there. which is kind of hilarious. And then general phone speed performance.

Obviously, I'm going a three-year event-style upgrade, so it just feels snappier. The bigger screen helps the iOS 26 app icons kind of look better, I think. Just because the fact they're a bit bigger physically, you get to see the details more of the corners and the shapes and the edges. And it just looks a bit crisper.

So maybe some people that were talking about the blurry icons just have smaller phones where the icons are rendered worse. I think on the air, the icons are really nice. Even the third-party icons are not updated with new assets and the system does the automatic translation. The blurriness effect is vastly reduced. You just see the crisper edges of the shapes more, which was something I wasn't really anticipating. And then some random stuff, the bumper case.

I think last week I said I was getting a bumper for launch, but I wasn't sure if I was going to keep it. Now I've had the phone. I'm kind of inclined to keep the bumper case. It just fits better with the philosophy of the air, right? Keeping it lighter, keeping it... The only thing I don't really like about the bumper is the fact that...

It obviously doesn't cover the protrusion fully because it's only slightly thicker than the phone body, but not the plateau part, which means when you put it down a table, the thing that's hitting the surface first is the plateau and the camera.

And that means it also wobbles, right? Now, the wobbling doesn't bother me too much because normally when I'm using my phone, I pick it up anyway because, you know, you have to make face ID unlock and stuff. So you've got to tilt it towards you. You might as well pick the phone up. It's just the... I'm a little bit disconcerted every time I put it down on the surface and I just know the thing that's touching.

that's having the first impact is the camera lens. I'm like, I'm in the bathroom. I put it down on the tiles. It's like, click. I'm like, oh, I know the camera lens is hitting first. And it doesn't feel like an even spread of force, right? Because I just know that it's hitting that bit first.

So if I got like a full leather case or something, that would eliminate that feeling or sensation. But it's just not worth it. The lightness alone is just so nice to have the bumper. And to be clear, you weren't debating between... going caseless or using the bumper you're debating between using the bumper or using a different case right yeah there's no world in which you're going caseless with this phone no even though that is the best way to use this phone and that's how i'm using this phone

You are a bit more particular about that. I'm more particular and I don't buy AppleCare either. Yeah. So that's my trade-off in life. I don't buy the AppleCare, but I make sure it stays in the case. The phone is nice to hold caseless, but like all the titanium edge phones or the stainless steel bands, it's just a bit slippery, you know? I have never dropped...

I can't remember dropping my 14 Pro. Knock on wood. Knock on wood ever in the case. I think there might have been one time where it dropped off a table, right? But physically when it's in my hand, it hasn't like slipped out of my hand like a bar of soap.

I feel like the air would slip out my hand like a bar of soap if I didn't have it in this case because it's light, because it's quite easy to slip out and the titanium side just make it a bit slippy. The bumper just gives it a bit of that friction on the sides. Oh, and the only other thing I should probably mention, the eSIM saga that I spoke about last week. Oh, yeah. I don't know if the Apple support chat did anything at all. They never got back to me.

About 22 hours after I changed over to an eSIM, the iMessage immediately started working. I toggled it, and that time the iMessage activation just happened. It didn't come up with the unsuccessful message. So I have no clue if anything I did made any difference whatsoever other than... Time heals all wounds. But I waited. It kind of sucked for a day because my parents were actually abroad, so they couldn't actually reach me on iMessage through a normal method. So it's kind of awkward. But...

Luckily I didn't have to do anything more drastic than just wait until the next day. It started working before the Air even arrived at the front door because my plan was, oh, I'll set up the eSIM on the Air and that will make it start working. But it didn't even get to that point. It started working on the 14 Pro like a couple of hours before the Air got delivered.

that saga was finished. I'm trying to think of other things that are new to you coming from a 14 Pro. I mean, that's why you do a three-year cycle because there isn't that much in this game of things, right? The action button? Yes, the action button is new. I set it to the flashlight at the moment. Okay. In lieu of struggling to think of something else to use it for, I have mine linked to open chat GPT.

That's not bad. That's not bad. I don't know. I use the flashlight quite often. So I was like, let's put it on the flashlight. I will say, just because of my grip on the phone... When I'm taking screenshots, which I'm doing a lot at the moment, because obviously iOS 26 is new, the phone's new, I'm like, you know, analyzing stuff. I end up taking screenshots by pressing, holding down the action button and the power button rather than the volume button.

And I'm like, why is the screenshot not happening? And it's like, oh, I'm just clicking the wrong thing. If you could set, maybe you can actually, if you can set the action button to take a screenshot, I might change it to that because I take screenshots all the time. So it's kind of nice to be able to do that with having to grip both sides of the phone at once.

USB-C? Yes. I forgot about that, actually. That is new. The biggest issue with that was is that my car doesn't support wireless CarPlay because it's an older car. It does wired CarPlay. So, obviously...

I got in the car on Saturday and went to plug in my phone and then I was like, wait, no, I've got a lightning cable in it. So we went back in the house, we got a wired CarPlay cable, come back out to the car. Oh, it doesn't actually fit in the bumper case because the USB-C cable is too thick. Oh, yeah.

And if you look at the bumper case, they actually make quite a big cutout like Apple does, I guess, to support more varieties of USB-C cable. But USB-C cables exist that are even thicker than the... the out than the cutout that they make and the first one i picked up it wouldn't fit in the case so on that particular journey

I had to take the phone out of the bumper case just to plug the phone in raw to be able to use CarPlay on that situation. Later, I then got another wire, which does fit in the hole. Taking the bumper case off the air is something you don't want to do on a regular basis because it's pretty difficult. However, I've kind of nailed the strategy. So the way I figured out how to do it is I turn the phone face down with the plateau at the bottom and then I peel off the top right corner.

which I guess is the bottom right corner if you're holding it front forward, right? So like where the port is. For some reason, I've been able to get the sides of that to like flex open and then you can use that to peel it away. So... I've kind of nailed the bumper removal thing, but I wouldn't recommend doing that on a regular basis. I mean, when I was at Apple Park playing with the phones in the hands-on area, I was trying to take the bumper off and I was...

so nervous i was about to snap the bumper in half i just handed it to the apple employee who was right there and i was like here take this off and i was not they indicated that i was not the only one that was having trouble taking it on and off putting it on and off so that's the downside of it fitting so

But yeah, I'd recommend the bumper to a lot of people. Do I recommend the Air in general? I think I'd have to say no. It's just a niche option. The compromises, you have to be aware of the compromises of the phone.

The phone is not without compromise. And the camera is probably the number one issue. Like I think battery, at first I thought it was going to be the battery is going to be the biggest problem. But now I think the camera is the biggest problem. The battery is like a secondary thing. People just value the cameras too much.

And I completely get it. And why would you spend more money to get one camera when you get two on the base iPhone 17, which is a great model this year, or you could spend a hundred dollars more and get three cameras and a better main cameras as well. and everything else that the Pro series gives you. So if my friends come up to me and are like, oh, I want a new iPhone, which one I get, I'm probably not recommending in the Air, but I like the Air. So I have no...

No illusions that I'm going to be changing it anytime soon. They sell right out until... My next upgrade is probably going to be the glass wing one, the rumored old glass iPhone, which is sooner than my three-year normal cycle. 27, yeah. Yeah, 2027.

But we'll deal with that when it comes. But that phone sounds so cool. So that's kind of what I'm looking at next. But for now, I'm happy with the air. Happy Hour This Week is sponsored by HelloFresh. Check them out at hellofresh.com. slash happyhour10fm

Wow, this year feels like it's flying by. Fall is officially here, which means it's cooler nights and a craving for warm and heartier meals. And that's where HelloFresh comes in. They deliver chef-crafted recipes and fresh ingredients direct to your home. And while you may have heard about HelloFresh before, they've made some big changes. So here's what's new.

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We touched on the battery life of the Air, but over the last week, 10 days or so, we've seen more intense battery testing from other sources on the whole iPhone 17 lineup. And the results from test to test vary a little bit. But I think the takeaway is that, yes, the Air is worse. But as we said earlier, not as bad as maybe we expected. Then we have the base phone.

The Pro and the Pro Max. The difference that I was looking for most was the difference between the 16 Pro Max and the 17 Pro Max. And in most of the testing, it seems like you're looking at what about a... 30 minute difference between those phones i don't know if anything else stood out more to you mayo but all in all i think everything is in line with what i expected it depends right so

I think the test, the 30-minute thing was done by Mr. Who's the Boss, but he was testing the UK. That was Tech Chap. Okay, yeah. So I think his phones were UK models. So... you're not actually getting the longest possible battery life because they're the physical SIM models. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're going from a 16 Pro to a 17 Pro internationally... like in the UK, where you don't get ESIM only, it does seem to be about half an hour to one hour extra longevity.

But if you get the eSIM model, you're getting another 7% on top of that. So that's basically closer to another hour. So it seems to be like you can probably get a two-hour improvement in screen on time.

on the 17 pro max compared to the 16 pro max and if you're getting two hours extra screen on that's like another six hours or eight hours standby right so that's a pretty big jump and depending on the test the 17 print max even lasted even longer like um the chinese website who does geekawan they do a really good analysis of like You know Anantek? Remember the old Anantek? Geeker Wan's like the new Anantek. Unfortunately, all their content's in Chinese, so you have to read it through.

captions translated captions but they go really in depth on like power curves on the i19 pro breakdowns and all sorts of stuff and their battery test had the six they do like you know we chat video instagram on loop Their test, which again is the Chinese models, which is not eSIM, they got eight hours or close to eight hours on the 16 Pro Max and the 17 Pro Max got nine and a half hours. And that's the non-eSIM model.

That's a pretty decent jump year to year. The base 17 also gets a nice bump. It's going up from about five and a half hours to about seven and a half hours. So that's the base 17. So across the board, all the phones get a decent batch life improvement year over year. But if you're international, especially like the base pro phone, the base pro phone is not that much better than the 17.

if you haven't got the eSIM only with the extra battery capacity. It is more, but it's like less than an hour. If you get the eSIM only model, you get at least another hour on top of that, which makes it more stark. So I kind of wish they would sell the eSIM-only models internationally. I know it'd be more SKUs and more nonsense for them to worry about in the supply chain, but you're literally giving a pretty noticeable battery improvement to...

the US market and a very slight number of other countries. You know, I've just gone through the pain of doing the eSIM transition for the Air. What if I did want to switch to a pro phone? I would now be like, oh, I'll go for the eSIM model, but I just can't buy it. I have to buy a model with a physical SIM tray.

and i know in previous years when you didn't have a physical sim tray they would just put a plastic spacer in there which was pretty pointless but this year it's like well now you can buy a physical sim tray model and not use it it's like well that's just as pointless so It's a bit of a shame they don't sell the E-SIM model in a more worldwide basis. Then there was a teardown by iFixit of the MagSafe battery for the iPhone 17 Air and they found that. It's...

Basically exactly the same battery as what's in the iPhone Air itself. So it's like a what? About a 3,100 milliamp hour capacity battery. Yeah, it's the exact same battery. Yes. So they... You can take the battery out of the MagSafe battery pack and replace it with the battery in the actual phone and it still works. The question that they have is why, even though it's the same...

Why does the MagSafe battery only get you 65% additional charge for the iPhone Air? So it can't take you from zero to 100. It could take you from zero to 65. And ultimately, that just comes down to... the loss, the lack of efficiency in wireless charging. You have basically 35% of wasted energy because you're charging wirelessly compared to wired. Yeah, I mean, there's always a drop-off, but...

Like, when you, you know, any battery pack that, any wireless battery pack that quotes like, you know, 5,000 milliamp hours, you're not going to get 5,000. You might get 3,000. Yeah. There's actually a, I wish someone, YouTuber, would do a comparison of the... MagSafe battery for iPhone Air and the other wireless battery pack, MagSafe battery pack that Apple sells in the Apple Store, the Anker one. It's called Anker MagGo. I have one of those. I should do that. It's thicker and a bit fatter.

But it quotes a 5,000 million power capacity. And so in technical specs, you think it would be able to charge the air more. But I wouldn't be surprised if the end result is actually pretty similar. Because you wirelessly charge the air, it gets hot.

I'm sure there's wireless charging inefficiency there and I would not be shocked to find that like the firmware of the MagSafe battery pack is just a bit more optimized so that the end result is about the same. But I'd love to see someone do an actual comparison of that and like charge it from zero or whatever and see how much more.

you can get or not from the Anker one, which technically is rated for a bigger capacity than the Apple one. Then we've also had some durability tests for the entire iPhone lineup, the iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 Pro.

The jerry-rig everything test is, I think, what most people were looking forward to, particularly him trying to bend the iPhone Air. And ultimately... doesn't bend i think that's the takeaway from his testing is he did it by hand he tried to bend it just using his hands bend it in half like you could bend the iphone 6 and especially the iphone 6 plus couldn't do it that way so he took it into his garage

put it in this contraption thing, put 215 pounds of force. Then it snapped. But even in that state where the front glass had shattered, the back glass was still intact. And the touchscreen still worked. We've come a long way from the bend gate saga of the iPhone six era. Like this is really impressive. Yeah. And the, um,

like the point force where it's like 90 kilos or whatever. I saw someone say, well, you know, humans are heavier than 90 kilos and you could sit on your phone and still bend it. It's like, no, no, it's 90 kilos of point force on one specific area of the phone. If you're a...

If you're just a person sitting on a sofa and you accidentally sit on your phone, your weight is spread out so much that any point force is way less than 90 kilos. So basically, you shouldn't be able to... bend the air unless you actually are trying to bend it with a machine right by your hands it'll just like snap back so the air durability is definitely affirming apple's claim of being the most durable iphone ever

And also the other durability test I was interested in was the screen, because obviously now this year we've got Ceramic Shield 2, you know, the next generation of Ceramic Shield. And Jerry O'Gate thing has like his classic thing where he gets his little pick out and he scratches the screens with the different harnesses.

And he's done this. This is like the meme at this point. It's like, you know, light scratches at level six with deeper grooves at level seven. That just happens every single year because that's what the glass was. But this year with Ceramic Shield 2, there were no...

scratches at level six and barely anything at level seven so the scratch resistance to ceramic shield two also seems to be verified in practice with these you know somewhat synthetic tests but that's what we have to go on um so yeah ceramic shield two and the general hardness of the iPhone Air is definitely like there hasn't been a gate out of it, right? No one's been like, haha, this thing cracks or smashes or bends. It's like, no, it actually lives up to what it says.

For Ceramic Shield 2, that should mean you have the same crack resistance as the last few years of Ceramic Shield, but also now it should be way harder to get those fine hairline scratches. So that's fantastic. And remember Ceramic Shield 2 is on the front glass of all of the iPhones. And then on the back glass this year, you've got Ceramic Shield, whereas before it was just normal glass. So at least in theory, it should be more durable on the back and the front.

But that brings us to the one quote-unquote gate that we do have this year, and that's scratch problems on the iPhone 17 Pro. So the iPhone 17 Pro, of course, went from titanium on the 16 Pro to aluminum on the 17 Pro. And the Scratchgate narrative first materialized on iPhone 17 launch day in a story from Bloomberg. And that article highlighted...

Examples of wear and tear on iPhone 17 Pro demo units in Apple stores, those marks were mostly contained to the back of the iPhone 17 Pro. At the time... We read the story and I was a little bit skeptical of it or skeptical of how useful it is to look at demo units in an Apple store and gauge durability of a new iPhone. So that was kind of a red flag to me.

And then the second quote-unquote scratch gate issue came from JerryRigEverything, who found that the raised edges around the camera plateau on the back of the 17 Pro were particularly susceptible to scratches. So not the back of the phone and not the camera plateau itself, kind of that hard edged transition from the back of the phone to the plateau. And he had some technical explanations for why.

That area is scratching easier than the rest of the phone. And he basically said it had something to do with the fact that Apple didn't add a chamfer, a fillet, or a radius around the camera plateau. Something that he said was generally considered an industry standard of something you should do. For aluminum that is at that angle. Then there's been a handful of pictures on social media of 17 Pros that have scratches around just the general aluminum body.

And that actually contradicts something that Jerry Rick Everything found in his testing, where he found that the actual body, the actual unibody aluminum of the phones is surprisingly scratch resistant just outside of those camera plateau edges. He seemed to think that even under normal usage, with brushing against keys and other things in your pocket, you shouldn't expect any damage to your phone. Then yesterday, Apple got involved and they...

said some things to me and a couple other outlets about what they think of this whole scratch gate narrative. And they said that... The issues that people were seeing in Apple stores, those marks on iPhone 17 Pro demo units, are actually caused by worn down MagSafe stands. So the stands that these phones are placed on were old and had some wear and tear on them.

which caused not scratches on the 17 Pros, but material transfer from those stands to the Pros. They say that you can wipe this off and it looks good as new, and that other iPhones on display, like the iPhone 16, are also affected by this problem. Totally valid or potentially valid explanation, but it's like, who put those stands in the stores? Who was responsible for keeping those new and clean? It's Apple.

Yeah, so there's a couple of parts to this, right? Because the statement also mentioned that, like, it didn't, it didn't, it, like, implied that what Jerry Rigg everything was saying about the chamfered edges on the... plateau was also incorrect because it was like it's done to industry standard in every way shape or regard like this is the highest quality of you know anodized aluminum like any other product we make blah blah blah which i'm sure is true

But it's also true that the aluminium casing is more susceptible to scuffs, nicks, dents than the previous generations with stainless steel and titanium edges. That is just a complete fact. Because you'd have glass back and you'd have titanium sides, right? And you'd see on all the YouTube job tests...

The sides, you know, they might get a little scratched up, but it's almost imperceptible to the eye. The back glass is pretty good until it eventually cracks, right? With the aluminium phones of the 17 Pro series, you drop them. you know, most normal circumstances, it's going to be fine. But if you're doing it from the bigger heights, if you're dropping on the concrete, the paint is going to wear away. You're going to get little dents on the corners.

Like aluminium is a softer material than glass and steel was and titanium. So you drop it, there's going to be a little nick. The glass will be fine, right? But the actual like body of the phone, you know, where you've got the perfect orange back. It's just going to look more like silver. The paint's going to go away a little bit. You might have a little indent, right? That is just also true. So the Apple statement, I'm sure, is completely correct, where it's like...

You know, all those demo units did not get that scratched up that quickly through normal use. And it wasn't really scratched. It'd be worn away completely by that. But over the lifetime of owning the phone... i have no doubts in my mind that just in terms of the visual appearance in terms of like what can it scuff up can it get a little nick in it 100 the aluminium body phones of this generation will be more susceptible to that than the previous generation

Pros or the current iPhone Air, which is also titanium sides and glass backs. um so yeah if you have a pro phone and you care about those little imperfections in terms of you know little getting scarfed or you see a bit of the raw aluminium underneath the the orange color and stuff if you drop it on a hard surface

You're going to want to put a case on it. I would put a case on it if I was buying it. But I think the point at which the phones become unusable in terms of the screens completely destroying themselves, that should be even further. than previous models because of ceramic shield 2 um so yeah if you do drop them from medium height distances onto not great you know hard surfaces i think you're going to get more visible marks than the previous phones just

the fact of the materials but i don't think apple's like cheapened out on the way they're energizing these phones i think it's up to the normal standards uh and the only difference is the variation in the material usage and in terms of the screen the back glass or the front glass actually cracking

and shattering, that should be even harder to do than the previous generation phones. I mean, I have a space black MacBook Pro that I've had for, what, like 10 months at this point?

And the space black finish is rubbing off like around the palm rest and around the general bottom half of the design. Like it's just a factor of the material. What's interesting about the pro phones is that Apple seemingly did the market research, did the... had the conversations and determined that the durability trade-offs of aluminum were worth it to capitalize on the other benefits of aluminum, like the better thermal properties.

I generally think that that was probably the correct decision for the quote-unquote pro phones. I've seen some people argue otherwise, but I think having the better thermal properties, being able to make the phones lighter to fit a bigger battery inside. All of that seems like worthy trade-off and an example of Apple prioritizing function over form with these particular phones. Yeah, there's a conspiracy theory out there that they switched to aluminium to improve their profit margins.

I don't really think there's much difference. The scale that Apple buys, the amount of actual titanium on the titanium phone is so slender that it's like a rounding error.

The components of the phones that are most expensive are the displays and the chips and the batteries, right? Yep. And they all got better this year. I don't think whether they moved from glass and... titanium to glass and aluminium is that's not changing the balance sheet very much it's just it's just and that's not why they did it i mean the iphone air

is a different choice of material because it was thinnest. They needed a more rigid band around it. That's why it's still titanium. But for these pro phones, like you said, they're optimizing battery life, they're optimizing thermal performance, they're optimizing efficiency. And so...

They've chosen a different material. They would be holding themselves back if they stuck to a titanium thing. Even though, as we spoke about in the previous week's episodes, I think the previous designs aesthetically look nicer. Yeah. And still. The two-tone back thing of the iPhone 17 Pro is not as nice-looking to look at because you've just got different materials. You've got clashes of glass and aluminium. The iPhone Air, ignoring all of its downsides...

is the best looking phone and it's not just because it's thin, right? It could be thicker and it would still look the nicest, in my opinion, compared to the aluminium phones. But I don't think the aluminium phones are... a quote unquote downgrade of any description. It's just a different set of trade-offs that they've made to fulfill the pro moniker that they're going for this year. It's why the pro phones are like stylized in that big bold font, right? They're like, it's a different direction.

It's the Apple Watch Ultra of phones, basically. Yeah, and if you wanted to make a critique, maybe Apple's alienated some people in between that liked the higher kind of jewelry luxury design of the iPhone. but they don't want to accept the compromises of the iPhone Air. Like if there was a phone that was still thicker, but still had the titanium bands and the sides and everything and could have a bit more batch life and the extra camera lenses.

You know, I'd probably buy that phone if it existed, for instance. But I'm not sitting here trying to advocate that Apple needs to make a phone that appeases to every single... individual preferences down to the nanometer, you know? They have to make choices and they have to make groupings of products. And I think the alignment they've got for this year is pretty solid. If you really, really don't like how the pro phones look...

seriously consider buying the base hyphen 17 because you'll get almost the same battery life as the base hyphen 17 pro and you have a full glass back with no two-tone design right and you don't even have the full width camera camera plateau so and you have two cameras unlike the air

Yep, yep. And if you really, really don't like it, you can buy a 16 series phone, also still great. Or just wait another year and don't upgrade yet. Although arguably next year, they probably won't change the pro phone designs now for a while. But maybe...

in the next couple of generations the air will have less compromises like you have to imagine they're going to put a second camera on at some point the battery is going to keep getting better um but yeah the overall lineup i think is in a good shape

But yes, they have made different choices for different parts of the lineup. And that does affect customers. Happy Hour This Week is also sponsored by Shopify. Check them out at shopify.com slash happy hour. The idea of starting your own business can be daunting. There's so much suddenly on your plate that you have to deal with beyond just having that one great product.

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shopify.com slash happy hour thanks to shopify for sponsoring the show ios 26.1 beta one was released this week and not a whole lot to talk about here The couple of changes that are worth highlighting is that in the music app, we have a new gesture that lets you swipe left and right on the mini player along the bottom of the interface to switch between songs. And this actually...

is a direct response to one of the complaints I've had about the music app the entire iOS 26 cycle, which is that skip track buttons are hidden as you scroll down. Like when it collapses from the two-tier to the one-tier navigation layer. The skip track buttons get hidden, which is very annoying. So now you have this gesture to skip tracks, which is fantastic. And you can even go back, which you couldn't even do when it was expanded because you'd swipe it the other way.

And the swiping works in the mini player or when it's fully full screen. You can swipe on the artist name there as well. And it gets a nice little animation and it just gives you a little bit of functionality. Do I... Like, would I just prefer it if the mini player didn't shrink? Probably still would. But this is a decent way to get the most essential functionality back while retaining the visual design that obviously Apple prefers. Slight problem is how many people will realize...

Unless they put a pop-up that they've added the ability to swipe. It's a hidden UI element that hopefully people discover because it's great, but it's hidden. Yeah, it's like Safari, isn't it? Yeah. Your enjoyment of the compact mode improves a lot if you get used to the fact you can swipe on the bar. Small change to the video player interface in the Photos app. So now there's a new sort of, I don't know, not...

How would you describe this? It's like a background platter around it. Yeah. A background, yeah. Over the scrubber so it doesn't overlap with the content really or the white background. Just more of a clear. section of the interface for the video scrubber. It looks so much better than what they tried with 26.0. I still think that my favorite personal implementation of the video scrubber, you have to go back a few years, is when they had it like in line with the thumbnails. Do you remember this?

So you'd have like the thumbnails at the bottom and then if you went to a video, it would then expand the video down there and you'd get like a timeline view with little frames of the video and you could like scrub. That was really nice.

I think a lot of normal people were confused by it and they would accidentally click over or click on the photo. They didn't quite understand how to use that control because it was pretty custom. And this one's definitely more obvious than what you have to do because it just looks like the scrubber in a video player.

But you do lose like the frame by frame stuff. So I really like that couple years old generation of Photo Scrubber. But this generation is definitely better than what they shipped in 26.0. Just because you've got more separation between the elements. I mean, so many other places for iOS 26.

they were adding back in background platters and stuff. You know, like all the link buttons now are completely gone. They've got shapes around them all. But this was like, no, let's just flow it over the top. It was like, okay, but now we actually have a nice background for it. So yeah, definitely an improvement. Then we found some code references to Apple working on MCP support. So this would enable agentic AI. And I had a very basic understanding of what MCP was before.

researching it for this story. And it's basically the industry standard interface between AI systems and traditional platforms. And it's been adopted by OpenAI, Google, Figma. It was proposed originally by Anthropic. For Apple specifically, it looks like it's going to integrate with the App Intents framework, which is what allows apps to expose functionalities and content to the system. So theoretically, if Apple were to let developers use system-level MCP,

integration. Apps like ChatGPT, Claude, and other apps could integrate natively with apps on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad and take actions within those apps without the developers having to do The work of fully implementing MCP support on their own. Yeah, or making like their own proprietary version of like App Intents. Because this basically seems like a translation layer where you still make App Intents as a developer, but then the OS will...

expose them through the model context protocol for third-party AI services that want to use it. So is this basically Apple doing what they plan on doing for the next generation version of Siri built on AppIntense? then opening up that same system or a very similar version of that system to third-party apps too? So the code obviously doesn't describe the intent fully, right? It could just be that this is their integration for like...

the next version of the chat gpt integration for instance like that was maybe my first inkling was that they aren't going to make this like a system platform thing but it's just like for the internal support for chat gpt they're going to you know when you do the series with chat gpt stuff um

They're going to make that better by letting it access in-app actions and stuff as well. So maybe it's just for that. Maybe they are going to open it up and let any app on your Mac natively contact with other apps on your Mac. That would be cool. It may also be...

required for like EU digital markets out of compliance, right? Like it's like, if we're going to do Syrian personal context in-depth actions with our own thing in iOS 26.4, maybe to bring it to the EU, we also have to offer an API for it. And this is what their plan is. They're going to use like a...

you know, industry standard almost. Because my first inkling with anything like this is like Apple is not going to open the floodgates to anyone to do it because it would kind of, it would basically give a lot of the advantage that they were promoting.

you know, for Siri in terms of having personal access to your device and the ecosystem benefits of AppIntense to any third-party voice assistant, right? Which isn't Apple's normal play. Like, they're not normally that generous. But in a world of... competition and monopoly and all that stuff, maybe they're just going to be like, well, we're going to need an API for it, so this is what we're going to support. Then also some code evidence of some changes to Apple's security update system.

There's code that suggests Apple is switching from rapid security responses to a new system called background security improvements. The rapid security response system was introduced in iOS 16, I think. I was doing some research before we started recording, and I think it's been used two or three times. And one of the times it was used.

was a disaster because it broke Safari for a lot of people. I think it fixed some WebKit bug. And in the process, they broke Safari. So they had to release a B build of the rapid security response. Oh, great. They had a rapid response to the rapid security response. This system, in addition to being apparently renamed to background security improvements, we found some evidence in the code that suggests...

critical components could be updated to fix security issues without the user having to reboot the phone. That'd be cool. That would be nice. Because the rapid security ones, it still showed up in like software update, didn't it? You set to like press install when it would go verifying and it would do the whole boot loop dance. This kind of sounds like they might be able to...

take some of the system components as independent plugins and be able to update them without having to restart the whole phone. So yeah, just a little step forward. Background security improvements is a far less scary name than rapid security responses. Yeah. So I imagine that that's actually a factor that Apple is considering. The other thing with the rapid security response idea was like, they just released point.

versions for iOS on such a regular basis anyway. Are you really saving that much more time by doing this special thing? Didn't seem like it to me. Oh, the only other thing in 26.1 is they added those other Apple Intelligence languages, right? Oh, yes, they did. They promised for Apple Intelligence in general and also for live translation.

So that's coming as part 2016.1. I did actually get to try Line Translation over the weekend. Oh, with your AirPods? Yeah, with the AirPods. And now my Apple Intelligent-enabled phone, right, with the iPhone Air. And my dad speaks like decent Spanish. He's completely English, but he lived out in Spain for a while. It's a bit slow, I think, on some, like he would say something and then I'd be waiting.

beat or two longer than I really thought I should for it to say it back in my years but the translation seemed pretty on point And I literally don't understand a word of Spanish. And if he was only to be able to speak Spanish to me, this would actually let me out to have a conversation with him. So I would come away pretty impressed, but I do think the...

There's obviously still more what to go. The performance of the speed of answering could improve. And just the voice quality, you know, we said this last week, it's just the system Siri voice, right, that always speaks back to you. It would be nice if they could inflect the personality into it.

Make it more like the ChatGPT voice mode voices, which are surprisingly human-like. But all these things are kind of orthogonal. As a bass release, I was pretty impressed with live translation, to be honest. All right, I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. Find an ad-free version of the show with bonus content each and every week at 9to5mac.com slash join. $5 a month or $50 a year.

Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I am on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? At BZA Mayo. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.