A 2nd-gen version of last year’s iPhone Air will address two of the biggest complaints about the original model, according to a new report. Sources also claim that the new Air is being prepared for a launch next spring.
Writing for Bloomberg, leaker-analyst Mark Gurman says Apple is “aiming to boost the appeal of the slimmed-down device” in two ways. If the project goes as planned, it will feature both a second rear camera lens and improved battery life.
When Apple unveiled the startlingly slim original Air last fall, it had to address three obvious customer fears: that the device would bend, that it would have disastrously poor battery life, and that it wouldn’t have room for the camera setup of a larger phone. These attempts at reassurance met with mixed success.
On the design front, the Air is clearly a marvel of consumer tech engineering, and you’ll struggle to find a single report of the device bending or breaking in normal use. But battery and (particularly) camera performance remain areas of dissatisfaction. Improvements to these aspects could do a lot to convince customers that this is the phone for them.
Citing “people with knowledge of the matter,” Gurman claims prototypes of the 2nd-gen Air, codenamed V62 and currently in “advanced testing,” feature a second rear camera for ultrawide-angle photography. The original Air only has a single rear 48MP main camera. Adding an ultrawide lens would bring it to parity with the iPhone 17, although it would still be missing the third telephoto lens from the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max.
In our iPhone Air review, my colleague Jason Cross reports that he was painfully conscious of the device’s limited camera setup.
“Not a day went by that I didn’t miss having a second (or third) camera,” he writes. “The lack of an ultrawide didn’t bother me for landscape shots, but the inability of the standard wide camera to focus less than about 6 inches is a killer. I missed my macro photography! And I was surprised at just how often I regularly use a telephoto of around 4x or 5x. I can always use digital zoom and get the shot, it just doesn’t look as good as it should. Not for a thousand-dollar iPhone.”
It’s less clear how Apple will address the battery issue. Gurman simply says Apple is trying to improve performance. “It’s unclear if that will come from a larger battery, which may be impractical in the Air’s compact chassis, or efficiency gains,” he admits.
Apple
The original iPhone Air has an estimated battery life of up to 27 hours of (non-streamed) video playback, compared to 30 hours for the iPhone 17 and 33 for the iPhone 17 Pro. That isn’t disastrous, but it’s also not ideal when you bear in mind that the iPhone 17 is $200 cheaper. It also seems noteworthy that Apple feels it necessary to include the battery life for the Air when using the MagSafe battery accessory in the comparison table, as if the company knows 30 hours isn’t really acceptable and that customers will be looking for more. (The augmented total is 40 hours, by the way.)
Perhaps most intriguingly, Gurman’s sources claim to know the planned launch timing for the 2nd-gen Air: spring 2027, 18 months after the first model came out. Whether that would put it on an 18-month update cycle or whether it would be updated each spring—as appears to be the plan for the baseline and e model of each iPhone generation—is, like much else, unclear at this point.
Indeed, up to now, it hasn’t been clear if the iPhone Air would get a second model at all. Back in January, a report on Chinese social media claimed it would launch in fall 2026, but the muted critical response to the device and its seemingly pedestrian sales have led some pundits to speculate that the Air might be entirely replaced by the iPhone Ultra later this year rather than sitting alongside it.
