Apple iPhone Air is official: 5.6mm thick, A19 Pro chip, in-house C1X 5G modem, starts at $999

Apple has made its new ultra-thin iPhone Air official, unveiled during its recent iPhone 17 unveiling. The new iPhone Air features the company's new in-house A19 Pro processor, but also its new in-house C1X 5G modem, new N1 wireless chip, and more. Check it out:

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First off, Apple's new iPhone Air is using Grade 5 titanium for the chassis, with Apple stating that the iPhone Air sports the most durable design even though it's just 5.6mm thick. The iPhone Air features a 6.5-inch display with ProMotion technology that drives 120Hz on the screen.

There's also the new "Always On" display, up to 3000 nits of peak outdoor brightness, and Ceramic Shield 2 technology on the front. This is the first time that Apple has used Ceramic Shield 2 on the back, which makes it up to 4x more scratch-resistant.

• Read more: Apple's in-house C1X 5G modem in iPhone Air, not as good as Qualcomm 5G inside 17 Pro, Pro Max

Inside, the new iPhone Air sports Apple's new in-house A19 Pro chipset which is fabbed on TSMC's new 3nm process node. The A19 Pro packs a 6-core CPU with 2 x Performance cores and 4 x Efficient cores, with the low-power cores featuring 50% more cache, making them more efficient than the A19. The GPU has Apple's second-generation Dynamic Cache and unified image compression, too.

Apple's new A19 Pro inside of the iPhone Air also features dedicated Neural Accelerators with 3 x the GPU compute over the previous-gen A18 Pro, with Apple saying that customers will enjoy MacBook Pro-levels of compute power inside of the iPhone, making it perfect for AI-based workloads.

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Two of the more interesting things in my eyes are the use of two new in-house chips: the new C1X 5G modem and N1 wireless chips. Apple's new iPhone Air smartphone features its new second-generation C1X 5G modem, with Apple saying that the baseband chip inside of the iPhone Air sports up to twice as much speeds as the C1 chip that was inside of the iPhone 16e smartphone.

Apple says that efficiency is one of the key parts of the new C1X 5G modem, which uses up to 30% less power than Qualcomm's Snapdragon X75 5G modem which is inside of the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max smartphones. We've also got Apple's new in-house N1 wireless chip inside of the iPhone Air, which manages the Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, and Thread radios.

Apple says that the N1 wireless chip is designed to provide better performance and efficiency in features like Hotspot and AirDrop. Now that the N1 wireless chip is in the wild and powering the iPhone Air, we should expect Apple's reliance on Broadcom to die down over the years to come.

The camera on any iPhone is always an important part, with the new iPhone Air featuring a single 48MP rear camera that has 1x and 2x zoom capabilities, with Apple adding an 18MP front-facing camera that features Center Stage technology, which uses AI to automatically expand the FOV (field of view) and rotate the camera for you depending on how many people it detects in the viewfinder.

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The battery is another important part of the iPhone, with Apple not mentioning its exact battery capacity for the iPhone Air, but claim the ultra-thin new iPhone has "all-day battery life" with 27 hours of video playback. Apple also has its new MagSafe Battery accessory, which when used will give the new iPhone Air up to 40 hours of video playback.

Apple's new iPhone Air is available in four colors with the base model packing 256GB of storage for $999, with pre-orders for the new iPhone Air beginning September 12, and an official release a week later on September 19.