The iPhone Air is a stepping stone to something even better

If you’re waiting for the first folding iPhone and feel like it will never arrive, don’t worry. Half of it just did, in the form of the iPhone Air. Now we just need to wait for the other half to turn up in 2026.

The so-called iPhone Fold has been rumored for considerably longer than the Air, and the wait has at times been excruciating. The foldables market as a whole is now mature: Samsung kicked things off with the Galaxy Fold more than six years ago, and these days every self-respecting Android manufacturer has a folding phone to offer. But Apple refuses to release a foldable until it can get it right.

That’s a questionable decision, because in many ways the best way to learn how to make good foldable phones is to launch a bad one. (Just look at Samsung’s journey from day-one breakages to the top of the class.) Customers may complain, reviewers may hand out devastating reviews, but mass negative feedback is a powerful catalyst for growth. As long as a project is confined to the “one day, possibly” moonshot department, it moves at a snail’s pace. Tell the team they need to ship this year, no matter what, and you’ll get three things: complaints, mistakes, and progress.

Apple needs progress. But it’s seemingly unwilling to accept either of the obvious options: to launch a flawed folding phone and iterate from that, or to never launch a folding phone at all. Instead, the company appears to have come up with a third way. Which is to quietly launch half the components of the iPhone Fold under the guise of something else.

After all, what else could it have in mind with the iPhone Air? By Apple’s rigorous standards, it feels like a major strategic misstep. It’s extremely good at one thing (being incredibly thin) that most customers wouldn’t regard as a top priority, while compromising in other areas that they would (battery life, extra cameras). Nobody needs their phone to be 5.6mm thick, and it seems unlikely that many people will be prepared to pay for that with lower battery life, weaker camera performance, and a high price tag.

But the device makes a lot more sense when you view it as part of a continuously evolving product ecosystem rather than in isolation. Unlike conventional smartphones, foldables need to fit a working screen within a super-slim body, because half the time they’re closed and effectively double the thickness. (When I made a list of objects that the iPhone Air is thinner than, I discounted folding phones because it felt like an unfair comparison: like opening a book and counting only half the pages. But their unfolded thickness can be as low as 4.2mm.) The developments and sacrifices made to create the iPhone Air will prove their worth when they enable Apple to build a folding iPhone that retains the ability to fit in a pocket.

Indeed, the funny thing about the iPhone Air design is that in many ways it is a phone split into two joining sections. Look at the “Plateau” on the rear, one of the most audacious pieces of marketing I’ve seen from a company legendary for its marketing skills. It’s a grotesquely swollen camera module that distorts the phone’s proportions and looks, on first impressions at least, straightforwardly ugly. And its main purpose is to enable Apple to cheat on the dimensions by cramming half the components into a section of chassis we’re not allowed to measure. It’s the design equivalent of sweeping rubbish under the carpet and then inviting guests to marvel at your all-new “Indoor Hill.”

But I digress. The Plateau, as ugly as I find it, is evidence that Apple’s engineers have worked out how to subdivide the iPhone’s essential componentry and shift elements of it at will around the case. The 5.6mm part of the Air is ready and waiting to serve as the iPhone Fold’s main display; all Apple needs to do now is expand the Plateau and give it a second display… and then work out the hinge, which is the hardest part of the equation but is believed to be well underway. Once that’s sorted, you have yourself a foldable iPhone that combines the hype and lack of preconceptions of a brand-new product with the learning benefits of the second generation. It’s the best of both worlds.

And the iPhone Air? Maybe I’m wrong, and it’ll sell well enough for Apple to keep it around. But my suspicion is that it’s just a stepping stone. One theory explaining why Apple went for that branding rather than the expected iPhone 17 Air is that the company intends it to be a one-off. It exists outside the normal version cycle. And when its purpose has been fulfilled, the Air will be quietly phased out in favour of the foldable Apple wasn’t quite ready to launch this time around.