Hands-on with Apple’s new iPhones: Beauty and the beast and the regular-looking one

CUPERTINO, Calif.—We're a long way from the days when a new iPhone launch just meant one new phone. It shifted to "basically the same phone in two sizes" a decade or so ago, and then to a version of "one lineup of regular phones and one lineup of Pro phones" in 2017 when the iPhone 8 was introduced next to the iPhone X.

But thanks to Apple's newly introduced iPhone Air, the iPhone 17 lineup gives new phone buyers more choices and trade-offs than they've ever had before. Apple's phones are now available in a spectrum of sizes, weights, speeds, costs, and camera configurations. And while options are great to have, it also means you need to know more about which one to pick.

We've gone hands-on with all four of Apple's new phones, and while more extensive tire-kicking will be required, we can at least try to nail down exactly what kind of person each of these phones is for.

The iPhone Air: Designed for first impressions

There's no more iPhone mini, and there's no more iPhone Plus. Now we have an iPhone Air, and it is very much its own thing.

The phone is just over two-thirds the thickness of the iPhone 17, not counting what Apple now calls a "camera plateau" that stretches across the top of the device. It's 0.22 inches thick and weighs 5.82 ounces, compared to 0.31 inches thick and 6.24 ounces for the iPhone 17. You have to go back to the iPhone 12 (5.78 ounces) to find a full-size iPhone that's equally light, and that one had a 6.1-inch screen instead of the Air's more expansive 6.5 inches.

Those don't look like huge numbers on paper, but when you're holding the iPhone Air, it does make a substantial difference. While the camera plateau makes it look top-heavy in photos, in reality, it's light, and that weight is distributed evenly enough that it feels as well-balanced as any of the other iPhones.