In my post earlier today on the then-breaking news that Alan Dye has left Apple to join Meta as chief design officer (a new title at the company¹), I wrote:

It sounds like Dye chose to jump ship, and wasn’t squeezed out (as it seems with former AI chief John Giannandrea earlier this week). Gurman/Bloomberg are spinning this like a coup for Meta (headline: “Apple Design Executive Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup”), but I think this is the best personnel news at Apple in decades. Dye’s decade-long stint running Apple’s software design team has been, on the whole, terrible — and rather than getting better, the problems have been getting worse.

Dye’s replacement at Apple is longtime Apple designer Stephen Lemay. I’ve never met Lemay (or at least can’t recall meeting him), and prior to today never heard much about him. But that’s typical for Apple employees. Part of the job working for Apple is remaining under the radar and out of the public eye. What I’ve learned today is that Lemay, very much unlike Dye, is a career interface/interaction designer. Sources I’ve spoken to who’ve worked with Lemay at Apple speak highly of him, particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship. Those things have been sorely lacking in the Dye era. Not everyone loves everything Lemay has worked on, but nobody bats 1.000 and designers love to critique each other’s work. I’ve chatted with people with criticisms of specific things Lemay has worked on or led at Apple (e.g. aspects of iPadOS multitasking that struck many of us as deliberately limiting, rather than empowering), but everyone I’ve spoken to is happy — if not downright giddy — at the news that Lemay is replacing Dye. Lemay is well-liked personally and deeply respected talent-wise. Said one source, in a position to know the choices, “I don’t think there was a better choice than Lemay.”

The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)

What I struggled with in the wake of today’s news is how to square the following contradiction:

• Dye apparently left for Meta on his own; he wasn’t squeezed out.

• Apple replacing Dye with Lemay seemingly signals a significant shift in direction, replacing a guy whose approach was almost entirely superficial/visual with a guy who’s spent his entire career sweating actual interaction details.

If Apple’s senior leadership would have been happy to have Dye remain as leader of Apple’s software design teams, why didn’t they replace him with a Dye acolyte? Conversely, if the decision makers at Apple saw the need for a directional change, why wasn’t Dye pushed out?²

The answer, I think, is that the decision to elevate Lemay wasn’t about direction, but loyalty. Why risk putting in a Dye-aligned replacement when that person might immediately get poached too? We know, from this year’s AI recruitment battles, that Zuckerberg is willing to throw almost unfathomable sums of money to poach talent he wants to hire from competitors. Gurman reported that Billy Sorrentino, a Dye deputy who has served as a senior director of design at Apple since 2016, is leaving for Meta with Dye.³ I don’t have any other names, but word on the street is that other members of Dye’s inner circle are leaving Apple for Meta with him. But those who remain — or who might remain, if they’d have been offered the promotion to replace Dye — simply can’t be trusted from the perspective of senior leadership, who were apparently blindsided by Dye’s departure for Meta. They wouldn’t have given Dye a prime spot in the WWDC keynote if they thought he might be leaving within months.

So the change in direction we may see — that many of us desperately hope to see — under Lemay’s leadership might be happenstance. More a factor of Lemay being politically safe, as someone predating Dye and outside Dye’s inner circle at Apple, than from Tim Cook or anyone else in senior leadership seeing a need for a directional change in UI design. But happenstance or not, it could be the best thing to happen to Apple’s HI design in the entire stretch since Steve Jobs’s passing and Scott Forstall’s ouster.

Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer.⁴ Dye had no background in user interface design — he came from a brand and print advertising background. Before joining Apple, he was design director for the fashion brand Kate Spade, and before that worked on branding for the ad agency Ogilvy. His promotion to lead Apple’s software interface design team under Ive happened in 2015, when Apple was launching Apple Watch, their closest foray into the world of fashion. It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.

The most galling moment in Dye’s entire tenure was the opening of this year’s iPhone event keynote in September, which began with a title card showing the oft-cited Jobs quote “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” The whole problem with the Dye era of HI design at Apple is that it has so largely — not entirely, but largely — been driven purely by how things look. There are a lot of things in Apple’s software — like app icons — that don’t even look good any more. But it’s the “how it works” part that has gone so horribly off the rails. Alan Dye seems like exactly the sort of person Jobs was describing in the first part of that quote: “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’”

I am not a Liquid Glass hater. I actually think, on the whole, iOS 26 is a better and more usable UI than iOS 18. But MacOS 26 Tahoe is a mess, visually, and I’m not sure there’s a single thing about its UI that is better than MacOS 15 Sequoia. There are new software features in Tahoe that are excellent and serve as legitimate enticements to upgrade. But I’m talking about the user interface — the work from Alan Dye’s HI team, not Craig Federighi’s teams. I think the fact that Liquid Glass is worse on MacOS than it is on iOS is not just a factor of iOS being Apple’s most popular, most profitable, most important platform — and thus garnering more of Apple’s internal attention. I think it’s also about the fact that the Mac interface, with multiple windows, bigger displays, and more complexity, demands more nuanced, more expert, interaction design skills. Things like depth, layering, and unambiguous indications of input focus are important aspects of any platform. But they’re more important on the platform which, by design, shoulders more complexity. Back in 2010, predicting a bright future for the Mac at a time when many pundits were thinking Apple would soon put the entire platform out to pasture, I wrote, “It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.” That remains as true today as it was 15 years ago. But Liquid Glass, especially as expressed on MacOS, is a lightweight poorly considered design system as a whole, and its conceptual thinness is not sufficient to properly allow the Mac to carry the weight it needs to bear.

Perhaps more tellingly, there should have been no need for the “clear/tinted” Liquid Glass preference setting that Apple added in the 26.1 OS releases. Alan Dye wasn’t fired, by all accounts, but that preference setting was as good a sign as any that he should have been. And it’s very much a sign that inside Apple, there’s a strong enough contingent of people who prioritize how things work — like, you know, whether you can read text against the background of an alert — to get a setting like this shipped, outside the Accessibility section of Settings.

It remains worrisome that Apple needed to luck into Dye leaving the company. But fortune favors the prepared, and Apple remains prepared by having an inordinate number of longtime talented HI designers at the company. The oddest thing about Alan Dye’s stint leading software design is that there are, effectively, zero design critics who’ve been on his side. The debate regarding Apple’s software design over the last decade isn’t between those on Dye’s side and those against. It’s only a matter of debating how bad it’s been, and how far it’s fallen from its previous remarkable heights. It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. If reaching the most users is your goal, go work on design at Google, or Microsoft, or Meta. (Design, of course, isn’t even a thing at Amazon.) Designers choose to work at Apple to do the best work in the industry. That has stopped being true under Alan Dye. The most talented designers I know are the harshest critics of Dye’s body of work, and the direction in which it’s been heading.

Back in June, after WWDC, I quoted from Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass during the keynote, and then quoted from Steve Jobs’s introduction of Aqua when he unveiled the Mac OS X Public Beta in January 2000. I wrote:

Re-watching Jobs’s introduction of Aqua for the umpteenth time, I still find it enthralling. I found Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass to be soporific, if not downright horseshitty.

One of the bits from Jobs’s Aqua introduction I quoted was this:

This is what the top of windows look like. These three buttons look like a traffic signal, don’t they? Red means close the window. Yellow means minimize the window. And green means maximize the window. Pretty simple. And tremendous fit and finish in this operating system. When you roll over these things, you get those. You see them? And when you are no longer the key window, they go transparent. So a lot of fit and finish in this.

After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, “I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ‘radio buttons’ and ‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like “programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership. It’s like the head of cinematography for a movie telling the camera team to stop talking about nerdy shit like “f-stops”. The head of cinematography shouldn’t just abide talking about f-stops and focal lengths, but love it. Said my friend to me, regarding his interactions with Dye and his team at Apple, “I swear I had conversations in which I mentioned ‘key window’ and no one knew what I meant.”

That won’t be a problem with Stephen Lemay. Understanding of fundamental principles will no longer be lacking. Lemay has been at Apple spanning the gamut between the Greg Christie/Bas Ording glory days and the current era. At the very least, Lemay running HI should stop the bleeding — both in terms of work quality and talent retention. I sincerely believe things might measurably improve, but I’m more sure that things will stop getting worse. That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago.

Alan Dye is not untalented. But his talents at Apple were in politics. His political skill was so profound that it was his decision to leave, despite the fact that his tenure is considered a disaster by actual designers inside and outside the company. He obviously figured out how to please Apple’s senior leadership. His departure today landed as a total surprise because his stature within the company seemed so secure. And so I think he might do very well at Meta. Not because he can bring world-class interaction design expertise — because he obviously can’t — but because the path to success at Meta has never been driven by design. It’s about getting done what Zuck wants done. Dye might excel at that. Dye was an anchor holding Apple back, but might elevate design at Meta.⁵

My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”

Alan Dye may have left for a more lucrative offer from Meta, but this is absolutely a good thing for Apple, which also benefitted from “losing” Jony Ive.

There’s no doubt Jony has good taste, by the way. He and his team designed great products during the first half of his tenure at Apple. But as he became wealthier, he started to conflate good taste with luxury. Jony often described Apple products with words about craft, material, and precision, all things that appeal to a luxury market. Apple shifted away from making products “for the rest of us” and started making products that appealed specifically to rich people.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they started making products that appealed to themselves. Because since Steve Jobs died, Apple, its executives, and its corporate employees got significantly wealthier. It wasn’t just Jony who took an interest in luxury. The whole company did. Anyone with even a little bit of power in the company started to dress more expensively. They all look like they could walk right out of a fashion advertisement.

This is all to say Apple’s restyling was not just with iOS 7 or even Liquid Glass. It was in how Apple presented themselves as people who had good taste, because that’s their way of communicating authority on the subject of design.

It’s like the trope of overlaying the golden ratio on a logo, or drawing excessive guidelines to “prove” it was thought through. To me, if you have to explain it for people to get it, then it’s not that good, actually. And that’s how all those video presentations from Jony or Alan sound to me. It’s just marketing with a veneer of design. I think we all know that.

Speaking of those video presentations, I recall Jony’s use of the word “familiar” during the introduction of Apple Watch. He used it as a way to bridge the gap between iPhone and Apple Watch. If I remember correctly, Alan Dye also used this word when introducing Liquid Glass. Despite using this word, modern UI design has drifted away from what’s familiar, both in real world analogs—that we called skeuomorphism—and from traditional UI elements and arrangements that many of us have used for many years.

Familiarity is a great tool designers can use to get people quickly to an understanding about what they’re using. Not just in software, but in real life, you can utilize certain forms and materials to encourage people to use something in a way they already know how. It’s only when something feels unfamiliar that we become puzzled and ask for help.

And hasn’t this been happening—ironically—more since they started using this word? How many of us have searched the Internet for ways to “turn off” a new thing or “revert” to a previous arrangement of UI to feel more familiar? How many times has Apple specifically introduced a new setting just so we can do that? I use the “Tinted” setting for Liquid Glass, the “Bottom” tab style in iOS Safari, the “Classic” view for Phone, and “List View” rather than “Categories” in Mail.

Neither Jony nor Alan should ever have been in charge of UI design or product design. Elevating Jony was a bad decision on Tim Cook’s part. And it’s unfortunate that resulted in Jony putting Alan into this position to begin with, because it only lengthened this period of time where bad taste and poor sensibility in software prevailed. There was no reason to believe Jony would be good at this, and there was never any evidence Alan would be good at this either. I’ve never found any examples of Alan’s professional work prior to having this job. In any case, I hope neither of them step foot inside Apple ever again.

I don’t have much to say about Steve Lemay. He was the hiring manager for my first interview at Apple fifteen years ago. It didn’t work out, and I went to work on iTunes and iLife instead. But he had already been at Apple for a long time, and I have lots of respect for him for his platform knowledge and expertise. I don’t expect any big changes because I don’t think he or Apple are looking at this as an opportunity to undo Jony and Alan’s influence on the company, but I do sincerely think this will all feel better with Lemay’s leadership. I wish him the best.

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This Black Fungus Might Be Healing Chernobyl By Drinking Radiation. The fungi contain melanin, which “absorbs radiation, which is then converted into usable energy, allowing it to grow in areas with intense radioactive exposure.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Mastodon 4.5

This new release of Mastodon adds two of my most desired features!

The first is support for quote posts. This had already become an unofficial feature in the client apps I was using (phanpy.social on the web and Ivory on iOS) but now it's officially part of Mastodon's core platform.

Much more notably though:

Fetch All Replies: Completing the Conversation Flow

Users on servers running 4.4 and earlier versions have likely experienced the confusion of seeing replies appearing on other servers but not their own. Mastodon 4.5 automatically checks for missing replies upon page load and again every 15 minutes, enhancing continuity of conversations across the Fediverse.

The absolute worst thing about Mastodon - especially if you run on your own independent server - is that the nature of the platform means you can't be guaranteed to see every reply to a post your are viewing that originated on another instance (previously).

This leads to an unpleasant reply-guy effect where you find yourself replying to a post saying the exact same thing that everyone else said... because you didn't see any of the other replies before you posted!

Mastodon 4.5 finally solves this problem!

I went looking for the GitHub issue about this and found this one that quoted my complaint about this from December 2022, which is marked as a duplicate of this Fetch whole conversation threads issue from 2018.

So happy to see this finally resolved.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: mastodon

OpenAI (MacRumors, Reddit):

Today we’re introducing ChatGPT Atlas, a new web browser built with ChatGPT at its core.

[…]

With Atlas, ChatGPT can come with you anywhere across the web—helping you in the window right where you are, understanding what you’re trying to do, and completing tasks for you, all without copying and pasting or leaving the page. Your ChatGPT memory is built in, so conversations can draw on past chats and details to help you get new things done.

[…]

ChatGPT Atlas is launching worldwide on macOS today to Free, Plus, Pro, and Go users. Atlas is also available in beta for Business, and if enabled by their plan administrator, for Enterprise and Edu users. Experiences for Windows, iOS, and Android are coming soon.

Alas, it doesn’t support AppleScript and has System Settings–style preferences.

Nick Heer:

Atlas, like Perplexity’s Comet, is a Chromium-based browser. You cannot use it without signing in to ChatGPT.

[…]

The company says it only retains pages until they have been summarized, and I am sure it thinks it is taking privacy as seriously as it can. But what about down the road? What could it do with all of this data it does retain — information that is tied to your ChatGPT account?

Matt Birchler:

The new tab page is predictably a text box that intelligently does what you ask it to do, routing your queries to perform web searches, start a standard ChatGPT chat, or simply load a website from your bookmarks or history. You can, of course, also just paste in the URL and go.

[…]

I’m also a big proponent of the “show full URL in address bar” feature in all browsers, and I’m happy to see this is here as well. It’s a little thing, but I’m always worried it’s on its way out.

[…]

The app does not have an agent mode as of yet, but it sounds like that will be coming in the relatively near future. My experience with these modes in other browsers has been a major letdown, so we’ll see if OpenAI can do any better, but I’m not holding my breath here.

Nicolas Magand:

I use the ChatGPT app at work, and I actually like having a separate window for all A.I. shenanigans: I can switch apps quickly, I can close it, and I can call it with a keyboard shortcut. Sure, it’s way more limited, and I need to jump from one app to another more often, but I actually see this as a feature.

This is not just about Atlas; I haven’t read about any cool use case of an A.I. browser, whether it is Dia or Comet. Maybe this new browser will change things, maybe it will reach more people and we will see good examples, but so far, it feels like even folks at OpenAI struggled to find compelling use cases. Or maybe I was too bored by the video to pay attention?

Previously:

• AI in Chrome, Neon, and Dia

Picking an iPhone used to be easy.

For years, the only real option was what color you wanted, at least for some models. Then came the iPhone 6 and superior-yet-a-little-bendy 6 Plus, which made things a little more complicated.

A few years later, things started getting weird. In rapid succession, we saw the 8 and X, then the XR and XS and XS Max, then the 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max.

Starting with the iPhone 12, Apple introduced four new iPhones each year: two regular iPhones and two Pro iPhones. The iPhone mini came and went, with the Plus replacing it.

That brings us to 2025, and the iPhone family still has four members, but picking the right one is more complicated than ever.

Trust me: I have an iPhone 17 Pro and an iPhone Air on my desk.

The Most Pro Ever

When reviewing the M3 MacBook Pro a couple of years ago, John Gruber wrote:

The wildcard in Apple’s MacBook lineup is what I’m cheekily calling the “Pro Jr.” model. For the last few years, that’s been the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar — a laptop that most expert users thought shouldn’t even exist, but which Apple has stated was the company’s second-best-selling laptop. There are a lot of buyers who want a MacBook Pro, even if they don’t need — or want to pay for — truly professional performance specs.

With the introduction last week of the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the regular M3 chip, Apple has fixed this tier. I often note that Apple means several different things when it describes a product as “pro” — it sometimes means professional, but sometimes means nicer or better. The regular M3 MacBook Pro exemplifies this latter meaning. It has the same industry-best 14-inch display as its M3 Pro and M3 Max siblings, the same excellent 6-speaker sound system, and the same modern form factor. It is, by all appearances, a MacBook worthy of the name “MacBook Pro” heading into 2024.

That line I made bold has applied to the iPhone for years. Previous iPhone Pro models had better features than their non-Pro siblings, but they were also nicer, with stainless steel or titanium rails as opposed to the more traditional aluminum found on mainstream iPhones.

With the iPhone 17 Pro, Apple went back to the drawing board. It has been rebuilt from the inside out to serve as a tool for creation. Its new thermal system keeps it from getting hot, an issue that has been a problem for a couple of years now. The cameras are better than ever and can do some truly amazing things. The battery life is fantastic, and its A19 Pro SoC is going to be fast for years to come.

All of these changes are housed in a new chassis whose industrial design is a big departure from previous iPhones. The 17 Pro is not beautiful in the same way the gold iPhone XS or the iPhone 15 in the natural titanium finish were. It is decidedly utilitarian, and I really dig that.

It feels like this iPhone Pro really deserves its name.

The New Kid

In a normal year, I would have spent more than a mere 375 words writing about the iPhone Pro, but it is living in the very thin shadow of the iPhone Air.

In some ways, the iPhone Air reminds me of the iPhone X. I closed my review of that phone with this:

All in all, with the iPhone X, Apple has dumped a whole lot of revolution on its most important product. The screen, body, cameras, and more are all better than before, but the iPhone X is more than the sum of its parts. It’s the first chapter in a new era of iPhone design. The things that seem special about this iPhone will soon be normal, as evolution kicks in again.

That’s how these things go. Evolution may be important, but revolution is where all the fun is, and the iPhone X has plenty of it to go around.

Those two paragraphs have held up incredibly well. Every new iPhone since 2017¹ has looked and worked a lot like the iPhone X. It was a critically important iPhone for Apple, and its then-new features are taken for granted today.

The iPhone Air feels important in a similar way.

Its design is breathtaking. I’ve been using it as my primary phone for almost two weeks, and every time I pick it up, I get a little jolt of disbelief. Sometimes when devices are thin and light, they feel cheap but Apple has avoided that with the iPhone Air, probably thanks to its shiny titanium rails and glass back.

It’s a bit cliché to say that you need to go to an Apple Store to check it out, but you really need to go to an Apple Store to check it out.

To make this possible, Apple has done some incredible engineering. iFixit’s teardown video shows off how much work went into this phone. The majority of the computery bits are crammed into the plateau and the area right above and below it. The rest of the chassis is filled with battery, to the point that Apple doesn’t even ship a version that supports a physical SIM card.

I switched over to eSIM a few years ago, and it’s been great. They are extremely easy to transfer, which has been especially handy this year, as I’ve spent time with both the 17 Pro and Air. If your carrier supports it, I can heartily recommend switching, even if Steve Troughton-Smith may say otherwise.

The physical SIM slot isn’t the only thing the Apple tossed overboard to build this iPhone. The lack of a bottom speaker leaves the earpiece speaker alone in its sound duties. The iPhone Air is fine for playing podcasts, but when it comes to music, it lacks the punch that other modern iPhones have.

Then there’s battery life. I haven’t killed the battery in a single day, but I work at home. On days I have been out and about, I’ve landed in the 20-30% range by the evening. I’ve not seen that on an iPhone Pro in years, but your mileage certainly will vary. Apple seems well aware of this, hence the new-but-sadly-iPhone-Air-only MagSafe Battery Pack. I have not needed to rely on it, but I think keeping it in my backpack on a travel day would be wise.

This thin battery was required to make the iPhone Air what it is, but it also speaks to how far Apple silicon has come. Apple is building the best SoCs on the market, both in terms of capability and efficiency. It’s hard to imagine Apple creating the iPhone Air without Johny Srouji’s team.

The biggest tradeoff Apple made with the Air is the single rear camera. It clocks in at 48 megapixels and has many of the same features as the main cameras found on the 17 and 17 Pro, including a 2x crop/zoom, focus and depth control, and it matches the 17 with its 4K video recording at 60 fps.

In my usage, photos from the Air look great, but coming from an iPhone 16 Pro, the lack of zoom has been frustrating. Trying to get decent pictures or video at things like my daughter’s cross-country races has proven futile. Often, I need more than 2x’s worth of reach.

Moving from the far to the near, I also miss macro mode when using the Air. I don’t take many macro photos, but it’s a nice feature to have.

The Way Forward

Those tradeoffs make the iPhone Air a worse option than the Pro for me, but when I pick the phone up or slide it into my pocket, I forget all about its shortcomings.

Apple may overuse the word magical in its marketing, but hot damn, this iPhone fits the bill. It’s the most incredible iPhone Apple has ever shipped, and it is the most interesting phone since the iPhone X.

But is it the best iPhone for sale right now?

For me — and probably for you — it’s not. To create something that feels like the future, Apple had to draw on some specifications from the past. For me, the primary thing that holds the Air back is its single camera. For others, it may be the battery life.

However, hardware compromises tend to fade over time. Look no further than the top of your iPhone. After years of the notch, Apple was able to move to the Dynamic Island. We all bought new Lightning cables in 2012 and replaced them with USB-C cables 11 years later.

For some, the compromises that define the iPhone Air are worth it. For me, that’s not quite true. I love the iPhone Air, but I want the camera system found on the iPhone Pro.

Some people have suggested that the iPhone Air is not only the foundation of a future folding iPhone, but how all iPhone will be in the future. I have no doubt a folding iPhone is in the works using the technology found in the Air, but I don’t see all iPhones being like the Air any time soon.

One look at the iPhone 17 Pro should tell you that Apple is very willing to make an iPhone with the opposite trade-offs than the Air. Apple seems more willing than ever to offer its customers options, and I don’t think we should do anything to discourage that, even if it leads to hard decisions when standing in the Apple Store.

So, is the Air the key to the future of the iPhone? Will it take the crown from the Pro and become the default choice for people who want the best iPhone possible?

In its current form, no. It’s an incredible device, but it’s a device waiting in the wings until technology evolves to a point where Apple can build something as capable as the iPhone Pro in the chassis of the iPhone Air. One day it may take the throne from the iPhone Pro, but it hasn’t yet.

Until then, it’ll be the best iPhone in my heart, but not in my pocket.