It has too many shortcomings sacrificed in the name of thinness. If this were 2011, Air might make sense, but as it stands, a single camera phone at that price point was never going to fly. Honestly, even the base iPhone 17 does more than enough for most people.
As for AI, outside the tech-savvy crowd most people still have no idea what benefits it actually offers (well sometimes tech savvy people overthinks it and reject AI altogether). People don’t know what they don’t know, so it never factors into their buying decisions. Personally, even the basic writing tools are a step forward, but using Apple Intelligence to generate a simple email draft feels absurdly over-engineered. It’s far easier to write a draft in the ChatGPT app, proof-read it, copy the result, and paste it into Mail. I can’t imagine my partner doing that, let alone my parents. So people just give up. On Gmail, composing from a draft is much simpler. Even if Apple somehow magically nails the AI, I doubt the user experience will ever be simple enough for ordinary users.
