- We have put iPhone Air’s battery life on trial
- It works surprisingly well in some tasks considering its super-slim chassis
- However, it hangs behind Apple’s other iPhones
IPhone Air is here and there is one thing that everyone wants to know about Apple’s super-slim phone: Is the battery life something good? Because when you see a device such a slimline as this, you have to wonder if it can last all day.
Well, we’ve put Apple’s Svelte phone on trial to see how well its battery holds up in different situations and we’ve been pleasantly surprised at how it went. Apple has claimed that you get the “all day” battery life from iPhone air, and in some cases it definitely keeps it really depends on what you’re doing.
For example, take our web browsing test. For this we use a proprietary app that cycles through a series of 22 sites until the battery is completely drained. We set the display to 150 nits of brightness and deactivate dynamic brightness, adaptive battery settings, attention awareness features, location services and bluetooth and also sign iCloud.
In this test, iPhone air lasted for 12 hours and 2 minutes. It’s only 45 minutes behind the iPhone 17, but you might be struggling to call it “all-day battery life” in this scenario. It is also slightly upper -class of the iPhone 17 Pro Max, but it still surpasses the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, which you can see in our chart below.
IPhone Air did much better in our video streaming test. Here we streamed a nature video for five hours and noticed the device’s battery life rate at the end:
As you can see, iPhone Air came out with 81%battery life just behind the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 88%, but far ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge’s 67%.
Extrapolation From these results, we can estimate that you get 26 hours and 19 minutes of juice while streaming video on iPhone Air, exceeding Apple’s own estimation of 22 hours. It’s pretty impressive.
How it compares
The amount of life you come out of a single charge varies based on what you use iPhone Air for, but it is clear that some tasks (like video streaming) justify Apple’s “all day battery life” claim. It won’t be that long if you mainly spend your day browsing the Internet, so be sure to manage your expectations there.
Still, it’s a remarkable achievement for Apple. If you are after a slim and lightweight smartphone that still offers respectable battery life, iPhone Air may be a better option than Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge, at least according to our test.
