“They’re leveraging their scale to try to keep prices where they are,” said Tom Mainelli, head of IDC’s Device & Consumer Research Group.
“I think Apple, like most tech vendors, are acutely aware, particularly in the US, that tariffs are going to impact consumers’ ability to spend in the second half of this year. So … they’re going to hold a line on prices and try to make it possible for people to upgrade between now and the end of the year at the same price as last year.”
The iPhone Air will go head-to-head against Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy S25 Edge, and analysts told Reuters it could be a stepping stone toward competing with Samsung’s folding phones, which are in their seventh generation. A foldable phone is important for Apple to appeal to customers in China, where consumers like foldables and the company has been losing market share.
“This new device will bring a sense of newness to the iPhone, which has remained the same for too long,” said PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore. He said the “new and much-improved iPhone line-up looks impressive, which puts (Apple) in a strong position to cater for different segments”.
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The event was light on commentary on how Apple aimed to close the gap with the likes of Google, which has used its latest flagship phones to showcase the capabilities of its Gemini AI models. The company has leaned on a partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI to power many AI features on its devices.
Apple sidestepped “the heart of the AI arms race while positioning itself as a longtime innovator on the AI hardware front, with silicon and device-level integration,” said eMarketer analyst Gadjo Sevilla.
Apple said the iPhone Air will also feature a new “N1” chip to handle Wi-Fi communications and new “C1X” modem for cellular data. Chips for those functions in Apple’s premium devices were long supplied by Broadcom and Qualcomm, whose shares were down 2.3 per cent and 1.1 per cent, respectively, late on Tuesday afternoon.
“This is MacBook Pro levels of compute, in an iPhone,” Tim Millet, one of Apple’s chip executives, said during the presentation at the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters. The iPhone Air will have two cameras and eliminate the physical SIM card slot, freeing up more room for battery capacity.
