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Deceptive pricing during deals events is common enough – half the reason people like me do what we do is to help vet and identify the actual deals among the throngs of fake discounts and misleading offers – but that doesn’t make it any less galling when you stumble upon one like this.
The iPhone Air is the only Apple handset to participate in the Prime Day sale, and at first glance, it appears to be quite a substantial deal, which is very rare indeed for Apple phones. Upon closer inspection, however, we find Amazon engaging in the age-old practice of comparing the deal price to the RRP, which certainly makes the offer look more impressive, but doesn’t realistically reflect how much of a discount you’re actually getting compared to just before the sale.
We instead compare to the average price over the past 180 days (where possible) and the ironic thing is that by that metric, this iPhone Air deal is actually decent. It’s just nowhere near as good as Amazon claims.
What’s wrong with this iPhone Air Prime Day deal?
The entry-level iPhone Air with 256GB of storage is currently discounted down to £719 – the cheapest price it has ever been on Amazon. That part is all well and good. The dishonesty comes with the price that Amazon is comparing it to: the £999 RRP.
Putting this under the deal price with a strikethrough certainly implies that it was the previous price, and the big red “-28%” solidifies that you are supposed to believe that the iPhone Air jumped from £999 to £719. What a bargain.
Nudging back the curtain with my Keepa tool (which tracks prices on Amazon over a selected period of time) reveals that this couldn’t be further from the truth. The iPhone Air didn’t sell particularly well, and in order to shift more units, it appears that Apple cut the price down permanently to £799 at the start of this year.
You can see this reflected by the pricing at other retail outlets – Currys, John Lewis, Argos… all have the 256GB iPhone Air priced at £799. Again, Amazon is offering a legitimate deal with the sale price of £719, it’s just that it amounts to a discount of around £80, rather than the £280 price drop the retail giant would have you believe it is.
Is the iPhone Air a good phone?
The iPhone Air is an interesting phone. Whether or not that amounts to good will entirely depend on what you’re looking for from your next smartphone. The slim build is the main appeal, and it certainly impressed: the titanium frame is just 5.6mm thick and it weighs an airy 165g.
It’s still a strong performer, with the Apple A19 Pro chipset delivering scores that were just a little weaker than the iPhone 17 Pro in our CPU and GPU testing. Despite using a relatively small 3,149mAh battery, it also achieved surprisingly good results in our battery life test, running the looping video for over 27 hours – better than the iPhone 17e and just a couple of hours shy of the standard iPhone 17.
You’ve got a grand total of two cameras (including the selfie lens) but they are, at least, decent shooters. In particular, the main camera captures fantastic detail in low-light, the Centre Stage selfie camera uses a square sensor to shoot portrait or landscape selfies without you having to turn the phone and video can shoot 4K/60fps Dolby Vision footage.
Last but not least, the 6.5in 120Hz AMOLED display is excellent, too. My colleague Jon put it through all the usual tests with a colourimeter and recorded outstanding peak brightness of 2,980 nits when displaying HDR content and an average Delta E of just 0.75, which translates to spot-on colour accuracy.
Why didn’t the iPhone Air sell well?
As we saw with the equally unpopular Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, these ultra-slim smartphones are a tricky proposition at launch; their prices are high, they generally have smaller batteries than the similarly priced siblings, they lack telephoto cameras (and, in the case of the iPhone Air, don’t even include an ultrawide camera) and the slim frames are more liable to struggle with thermal throttling when engaging in heavy-duty actions like intense 3D gaming.
The slim build is fun and they feel great in the hand, but the bottom line tends to be that you’re better off spending less money and getting more with a slightly thicker phone like the iPhone 17 or Samsung Galaxy S26.
Indeed, there only being a single rear camera and the iPhone 17 being £200 cheaper were highlighted as main concerns by the venerable Jon Bray in his iPhone Air review. There was also the fact that the enormous camera bump undermines the slimness of the rest of the build, measuring around double the thickness of the main body, and there only being a single speaker means that audio sounds quite tinny.
Should you buy this iPhone Air Prime Day deal?
If you’re taken with the idea of an ultra-slim phone and you’re an Apple fan, this discount is genuinely the best way to satisfy both cravings at this point in time, even accounting for Amazon’s deceitful salesmanship. For anyone else, however, I’d say that the pros struggle to bear the weight of the cons.
It may not be included in the Prime Day sale, but the standard iPhone 17 is currently discounted down to £737. So it’s a little more than the Air but for that additional £20, you’re getting an ultrawide camera, better battery life and a second speaker that makes a significant difference to audio quality.
If you’re open to exploring pastures beyond Apple’s orchard, I’m gathering together the most tantalising Prime Day phone deals, including some keen Android options that are better value for money than this iPhone Air deal. We’ve also got our central Prime Day deals hub, which has our top deals on everything from fans and coffee machines to TVs and laptops.
