i went to my local store and played with the Air and the base models for about an hour. Most of the time was spent trying hard…very very hard… to like the Air. I wanted to like it. I wanted a dang good reason to be finally convinced and move on from my 2016 SE.
I couldn’t get there.
The width is too much. I can’t reach the opposite side in a one handed hold. I’m 5’ 10” and have reasonably-sized hands; “cursed with average height”.
I dropped the phone 4 times while handling it, but the security lanyard caught it. It’s literally “too thin” now. It returns to many of the flaws of the iPhone 6 design.
The frame is now absurdly thin that it harkens back to the rounded frame of the iPhone 6 through 11, while pretending to be squared. It doesn’t even qualify as form over function. It’s a marvel of engineering, but it never should have passed DVT, or maybe a few prototypes of EVT but no further. It can’t be picked up safely.
The side button vs. volume-as-shutter is indeed mitigated (the #1 gripe of mine which is why I got the SE). The camera control button is… something. It’s also forcing an alternate grip that I don’t think is natural.
The camera control options and function were just weird. I may have found a bug because the options got stuck at one point. I compared to the base model’s camera control and this worked as expected. I was a little surprised to see the base model had more camera control options. Although, I didn’t have the spec sheet memorized between the two, so this was just a knowledge gap on my part. It was still an odd feature parity gap.
The top-to-bottom vertical weight distribution of the Air is also odd. It felt obviously top heavy. I tried to remove the restriction of the security lanyard by wrapping it around my right fingers as I held it in my left hand (my normal grip mode ever since the iPhone 3G, which was my first). I think I gave it a fair test.
The liquid glass UI is .. meh. It’s clearly just eye candy with layers of effects “because they could”. It serves no purpose; it’s a solution in search of a problem that never existed. They’re clearly just showing off. It was an odd effect in lots of little places. Maybe they’ll continue refining this in later updates until they give up and revert it in iOS 27. As it stands, the UI is more distracting than anything.
The useless UI is much too fluid and because of the nearly edge to edge display, it’s incredibly easy to hit corner icons on the display when in the camera app. No, I don’t have “fatty palms”l either. I weigh 178 lbs (80.75 kg). Some of this may have been because I was holding back the security lanyard to give me the best “free hold” test I could. I kept hitting the camera switch icon when trying out various options. That was a time when I dropped it.
The camera wart is just stupid. If they’re gonna insist on this, they need to put an opposite side offset to balance it. This is screamingly obvious and I can’t understand why these people don’t see it. It’s just plain symmetry; nothing more fancy than that. Then the device can be used face up like natural law intended. It’d be a little gooofy in landscape mode, but not bad. As it is, the thing is useless in both orientations face up. Just stupid. Plain ignorantly stupid. Clearly they didn’t ask me, so…they lose another sale.
I spent some time with the base model, too. It’s thicker so it passes the grip test for laying on a surface. Fine. It was supposed to; that was the shell design. Side button vs. volume-as-shutter was mitigated, too.
It wasn’t much better with the one handed mode. Camera wart gripe is the same. The UI issues and accidental presses weren’t as bad since the frame had more grip room. It was noticeably heavier too.
For those who are wondering, yes, I did go through the Accessibility settings to adjust the various items. I laughed and rolled my eyes at the mere presence of the “one handed keyboard” option. The mere existence of this should be a huge clue to the designers that they have failed. Oh, and for the software team, this was very buggy and inconsistent between apps. I switched between Safari and Messages and he keyboard reset to full width mode. I had to go back to Settings and reset to one hand mode. It’s not reliable enough to use.
Just for something different, played with an Apple Watch SE, too, and found a bug in under 3 minutes with the App View in List mode, opened calendar app, fiddled with the default events, went back to the main face. Then it got stuck. Pressing the crown wouldn’t return to the list view of apps. Sigh. I didn’t even try to trick it.. I just used it like a normal human would. No fancy hackery. The Apple Watch 11 section was full of other people so I couldn’t get to that.
My little test results and pennies mean nothing to Apple; I understand that. I don’t even register as a 1-atomic weight of hydrogen in their multi zillion compounds of water bucket. I get that. They don’t care what I think. But I’m not alone. MacRumors, although a minority of a minority, has comments from posters echoing many of these points and they’re growing. I’m not alone.
I had my SE on the table when playing with the Air. A guy came up and asked “wow, is that an original iPhone? That looks great.”. I let him hold it and showed how it was lighter weight than the Air. He was quite pleased and lamented the size and weight of his current Pro model. I showed that my SE lay flat face up and I can use it when face up on the table without the wart rocking it. He appreciated that. He must have forgotten iPhones were once designed intelligently (I don’t blame him; 9 years is a long time).
Apple would do well to remember their history of the best usability years when guiding toward the future. The Air in its current form is not it. Engineering marvel, yes. Practical, no.
Edit: I did realize I missed one thing. I went back to the store and picked up the Air again. I went through Accessibility settings a turned off the animations and most of the UI eye candy, increased contrast, and reduced transparency. I did this with my iPhone 6 and iOS 7 garbage. This effectively turned off all the Liquid Glass elements. This did improve the display elements. Although there was some odd skipping when scrolling text here on MR and at apple.com.
Like I said, I tried. Valiantly.
