The Air actually looks more premium than this year’s soap-bar Pro design, which disrupts the visual hierarchy Apple buyers expect. Many Pro and Pro Max owners pay specifically for differentiation, to signal that they own the top model, and if a cheaper phone looks more premium, that signal value is weakened. People dislike paying extra and not visibly standing apart.
A lot of Pro users also assume that everyone should care primarily about maximum specs, and it simply does not occur to them that someone else might prioritize comfort, elegance, or minimalism instead. Many tech-spec-obsessed people genuinely struggle to accept that different individuals optimize for different things. Their internal logic is essentially that the Pro is objectively the best, and therefore anything below it must be coping, poor, or clueless.
They evaluate phones as if everyone must care about 120 Hz displays, 5× zoom lenses, benchmark scores, future proofing, and raw camera flexibility. But a large number of normal users actually prioritize entirely different qualities, such as how comfortable the phone feels in the hand rather than how well it handles all-day camera rigs, or how light it is because of small hands, joint issues, or wrist strain. Many value thinness because it feels nicer and fits in pockets more easily, or prefer a cute and elegant object rather than a heavy max-tech brick, or simply want price sanity instead of feeling like a hostage to specs.
That core difference, that some people optimize for feel rather than specs, breaks the Pro mindset completely, because they view phones as performance machines rather than personal objects.
