iPhone 17 Air is real—here’s what’s new in Apple’s extra-thin handset

An incoming new iPhone model called the iPhone Air has been one of the worst-kept secrets in tech lately, and now Apple has confirmed it at its annual iPhone reveal event.

The 6.5-inch iPhone 17 Air combines the CPU and GPU of an iPhone Pro with the camera system of a regular iPhone, all in an extra-thin design (5.6 mm), with a treated titanium frame that is likely to appeal to style-conscious users and some business consumers.

Like the iPhone 17, the iPhone 17 Air has a ProMotion display with a variable refresh rate up to 120 Hz—something that was reserved for only the Pro iPhones up until this year. The Air's display also has always-on functionality and claims 3,000 nits of peak brightness. It has Apple's new Ceramic Shield 2 protective coating on both the front and the back, which the company claims will make it more durable and anti-reflective.

On the inside, it has the new A19 Pro chip. That includes a 6-core CPU with two performance and four efficiency cores. During its presentation, Apple dedicated much of its time talking about the A19 Pro chip for the Air, hyping up efficiency improvements. Overall, it claims to offer 20 percent better performance than last year's iPhone 16 Pro.

Notably, Apple has added "neural accelerators to each GPU core," offering 3x peak compute compared to the A18 Pro.

The main system-on-a-chip is not the only place where Apple has put the focus on new silicon. There's a new Apple-made chip, dubbed the N1, that handles Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread. And there's also the C1X, a cellular modem that succeeds the C1 from just a few months ago; it purports to be twice as fast as before and to use 30 percent less energy than the iPhone 16 Pro.