Slower Charging

Now, we’ll move on to one of the smaller limitations. Despite Apple upping its wired charging speeds on this year’s iPhone 17 lineup, the iPhone Air shows its outsider status by retaining the same speeds as last year’s models (which have remained unchanged since 2017).

That means that an iPhone Air will still take about 30 minutes to charge up to 50 percent from a 20W power adapter, according to Apple’s official specs. That’s the same time the iPhone 17 models take with the same adapter, but if you plug those into a more powerful 40W adapter, you can cut that initial charging time down to 20 minutes.

We’ll have to wait for some real-world tests to see how this plays out in terms of total charging times, but the smaller battery on the iPhone Air likely means the overall charge time might be quicker, although, of course, you’ll still be leaving the house with less juice overall.