The Information: Second-Gen iPhone Air Postponed Until Spring 2027, but Might Gain Second Camera

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information on Tuesday (paywalled, alas, but summarized by 9to5Mac here and here):

Apple has since sharply scaled back production of the first iPhone Air and delayed the release of an updated version that was meant to launch in fall 2026, The Information reported earlier this week.

Instead, some Apple engineers are hoping to release a redesigned version with a second camera lens in spring 2027 alongside existing plans to release the standard iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e at that time. It’s still too early to tell whether they can successfully redesign the iPhone Air in time to make that new release window, the people said.

My question: Would that second camera provide an ultra-wide (0.5×) or a telephoto (3× or 4×) lens? The regular non-pro iPhones provide an ultra-wide lens as their second camera. But when the premium iPhones had only two (rather than three) lenses, the second lens was telephoto, not ultra-wide. Apple first used the adjective “Pro” with the iPhones 11 Pro and Pro Max, and all iPhones to date with “Pro” in their name have had three lenses. But the iPhones XS (2018), X (2017), 8 Plus (also 2017), and 7 Plus (2016) all had 1× main and 2× “telephoto” lenses.

In other words, when a premium iPhone had only one extra lens, that lens added additional reach, not ultra-wide perspective. The iPhone Air costs more than a regular no-adjective iPhone, so if that patterns holds, a two-camera second-generation model would add a telephoto, not ultra-wide lens. Personally I’m hoping that’s what Apple will do.

Looking at my own photo library and using smart albums to count the photos I’ve taken using each particular lens on each particular iPhone, roughly speaking, over the past few years, I shoot about 10 percent of my photos with the ultra-wide lens, 10 percent with the telephoto, and 80 percent with the main. But a lot of my ultra-wide photos are really just close-up macro shots of things like product labels. If I were less lazy, I’d go through them and trash a lot of them. I could capture equivalent photos, for a lot of these throwaway macro shots, with the main 1× camera lens just by holding the phone a little further from the subject. Adding a 0.5× ultra-wide to the iPhone Air just wouldn’t add much utility, at least for me, compared to the obvious utility of a telephoto lens with more reach.

(The iPhone Air’s lone 1× camera has a minimum focus distance of 15 cm; the minimum focus distance of the 1× cameras on the iPhones 17 Pro, 16 Pro, and 15 Pro is 20 cm. That 5 cm difference is a largely unheralded advantage for the iPhone Air’s camera, and significantly makes up for the lack of an ultra-wide lens for close-up photography. 5 cm doesn’t sound like much, but in practice it’s very noticeable. That said, for actual macro photography, the 0.5× ultra-wide camera on the iPhone Pro models has a minimum focus distance of just 2 cm.)

★ Friday, 14 November 2025