iPhone 17 Air vs Nothing Phone (4a) Pro

iPhone 17 Air

The 6.5-inch LTPO Super Retina XDR OLED is identical in spec to the iPhone 17 Pro Max panel — same 1-120Hz ProMotion, same 3,000-nit peak brightness, same anti-reflective coating, same Dolby Vision HDR support, same always-on display. It sits exactly between the 6.3-inch iPhone 17 and the 6.9-inch iPhone 17 Pro Max in size, which most reviewers consider the sweet spot for a one-handable big-screen phone. The Dynamic Island sits slightly lower on the Air to accommodate the camera plateau, and a few apps haven't adapted, but the visual quality itself is universally praised. No reviewer found a real complaint with the display.

• The 6.5-inch OLED screen feels improbable in this thin and light design — bright enough to read in direct sunlight, with a 120Hz refresh rate that finally brings the regular iPhone family up to Android-standard smoothness.
• Peak brightness is 3,000 nits with ProMotion 1-120Hz, and putting a display this good in a body this thin sometimes really does look like a magazine page floating in your hand.
• The iPhone Air screen is glorious — there's not much separating it from the Pro models in screen terms. Both hit 3,000 nits peak and 1 nit minimum, fantastic in bright and dark conditions.
• I have no complaints about the Super Retina XDR display — great viewing angles, the new anti-glare coating actually reduces reflections, and it's as good as a phone screen gets.
• A 6.5-inch screen is the perfect Goldilocks size — big enough to watch Netflix comfortably on the train, but small enough to use in one hand, something I couldn't do with the 6.9-inch Pro Max.
• After a year on the 6.3-inch iPhone 16 Pro, holding the Air's 6.5-inch panel in a 5.6mm chassis feels like holding the future.
• The screen is wider and taller than the 6.3-inch phones, but a little of that size is wasted on the no-man's-land above the Dynamic Island, which iOS apps can't really use.
• In GSMArena's lab the panel hit 998 nits in auto mode and 780 nits in manual mode, with exceptional sunlight legibility in real-world use.
• The Dynamic Island sits slightly lower on the iPhone Air to accommodate the camera plateau, and some notifications expanding from it haven't been updated to accommodate that change.

Nothing Phone (4a) Pro

A 6.83-inch 1.5K AMOLED at 144Hz with 2,160Hz PWM dimming — reviewers agree it's the best screen Nothing has built, with realistic outdoor brightness around 1,600 nits. The headline 5,000-nit peak, though, only materialises with special HDR test files; everyday brightness is far lower.

• Nothing's best-ever display: a 144Hz panel with 1,600 nits of outdoor brightness and a claimed 5,000 nits peak; the main camera is solid too with nice detail and well-reproduced colours.
• A claimed 1,600-nit outdoor brightness is realistic — no major visibility issues outdoors even in strong sunshine, putting it among the best affordable phones, and Nothing OS has some of the best design consistency of any Android UI.
• The 4,500-nit HDR peak was only validated with specific HDR test files, not actual video playback — real-world output is around 700 nits in SDR and 1,550–1,600 in HDR.
• The '5,000-nit peak brightness' spec means nothing in practice — a marketing figure pulled from a single-pixel measurement.
• 144Hz refresh (vs 120Hz on the regular 4a) and 1,600 nits white brightness / 5,000 nits peak, marketed as 66% brighter than the Phone (3a) series — though there's no extra output on a small 10% window.

iPhone 17 Air

Apple put the A19 Pro chip in the iPhone Air rather than the regular A19 — but it's a slightly cut-down variant with five GPU cores instead of the six in the 17 Pro, no ProRes video support, and crucially no vapor chamber cooling. The result is benchmark scores roughly on par with the iPhone 17 (sometimes lower, because of thermal throttling), but with the 12GB of RAM the iPhone Air keeps apps in memory longer than 8GB phones. Day-to-day everything feels snappy. Under sustained gaming or 4K editing the camera-bar area heats up noticeably and frame rates drop — Ars Technica measured aggressive throttling that put the Air's GPU performance closer to last year's A18 than the 17 Pro. The C1X modem (no mmWave) is up to 30% more efficient than the iPhone 16 Pro's Qualcomm chip and tested faster in weak-signal areas.

• The A19 Pro has 12GB of RAM and benchmarks 15% faster in CPU and GPU than the A18 Pro — though we'd expect the Air's performance over time to be worse than the Pro's because of thermal throttling.
• Geekbench multi-core hits 9,630 and 3D Mark Wild Life 3,626 — great in short bursts, but it falls off compared to the iPhone 17 Pro in longer tests because of the missing cooling chamber.
• Without a vapor chamber, performing intensive tasks heats the area around the camera module noticeably — I measured 115°F on the Air after an hour of Assassin's Creed Mirage versus 110°F on the iPhone 17, and the extra heat throttled performance.
• Flipping between apps is essentially instantaneous and demanding titles like Destiny: Rising kept stable frame rates — but watch out, the Air can get a bit warm on the camera bump during prolonged high-performance tasks.
• Apps stay in memory longer on the iPhone Air than my iPhone 16 Pro thanks to the 12GB of RAM — Reminders stayed alive across three different grocery store trips with Apple Maps in between.
• Apple's new C1X modem benchmarks around 15-20% faster than the iPhone 16 Pro's Qualcomm chip in weak-signal areas, using 30% less energy — but it doesn't support mmWave 5G.
• Gaming on the iPhone Air is slightly worse than 17 Pro Max — testing Genshin Impact maxed out, the Air experiences a lot more lags despite the phone being in normal temps.
• The A19 Pro is FAST — trades blows with the iMac Pro, RX 570, and even the M4 chip. Apps launch faster than the iPhone 14 Pro and browsing feels app-like rather than web-like.
• Ars Technica's graphics tests showed aggressive thermal throttling on the iPhone Air — the GPU sometimes performs more like the A18 from last year's iPhone 16.

Nothing Phone (4a) Pro

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 with UFS 3.1 storage is a clear, tangible step up from the Phone (3a) generation — Nothing claims +27% CPU, +30% GPU and +65% AI. It's a perfectly capable everyday chip that feels noticeably quicker, but it's explicitly not a gaming powerhouse and warms up under sustained heavy load.

• Backed by OS optimisations and a custom CPU scheduler, the chipset delivers 27% better CPU, 30% better GPU and 65% better AI performance than the Nothing Phone (3a); storage is 147% faster in reads and 380% faster in writes.
• Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 is a perfectly acceptable chip across the board, and the upgrade to UFS 3.1 makes this feel noticeably quicker compared to the Nothing Phone (3a) and prior.
• The CPU performance difference between the 4a Pro and the vanilla 4a is not massive, but it is still very much notable.
• Available in 8GB+128GB, 8GB+256GB and 12GB+256GB configurations, all running near-stock AOSP-style Nothing OS.
• Like most phones in this segment, it shows some basic heat build-up during really extensive tasks like gaming or 4K editing in high-end software, though it stays responsive while gaming.

iPhone 17 Air

Apple's biggest engineering challenge: fitting useful battery life into a 5.64mm chassis. The Air ships with a 3,149 mAh cell (the smallest in the iPhone 17 lineup), rated 27 hours of video playback versus 30/33/39 hours for the 17/17 Pro/17 Pro Max. The Tech Chap's real-world battery test pegged it at 6h 43m — about 12 minutes behind the iPhone 17 and 76 minutes behind the 17 Pro Max. Reviewers split between 'better than I expected, fine for a normal day' and 'this is the lineup's weakest battery and you'll need to top up before dinner on travel days.' Charging tops out at 20W wired (USB-PD 2.0) and 20W MagSafe/Qi2 — slower than the 40W wired and 25W MagSafe on the iPhone 17. Apple sells a $99 dedicated MagSafe battery pack that adds ~65% charge and is sized specifically for the Air; whether you 'need' it depends entirely on usage and routine.

• Battery life is just okay — heavy use brought the battery into the 20s before dinnertime with around five hours of screen-on time, and Apple's recent track record on battery longevity isn't stellar either.
• Battery life is better than I expected — five hours of screen-on time with 18% left by 10:30pm. I didn't feel as battery-anxious as I did with the Galaxy S25 Edge.
• Streaming video rundown lasted 23h 39m — barely an hour less than a base iPhone 17 — and on a day with over seven hours of screen-on time I still had 25% left in the tank.
• After a week I can confidently say I can't make it through a full day on a single charge — on a good day I make it just past dinner, on a bad day I'm on the charger by late afternoon.
• The Tech Chap's real-world battery test had the iPhone Air last 6 hours 43 minutes — 12 minutes behind the iPhone 17 (6h 55m) and 76 minutes behind the 17 Pro Max (7h 59m).
• Six months in, battery life has not been a problem — the iPhone Air consistently delivers around four hours of screen-on time, comfortably covering my daily needs. For mostly-communication usage it lasts a full day without issue.
• Five months on the verdict has stood the test of time — I almost always get through the full day with a 90% charge limit set, typically finishing with over 30% remaining, sometimes 40%.
• The iPhone Air is not an endurance champ. It's also not an endurance also-ran — I'm fairly sure it slept through its alarm and forgot there was a race. I never had a full day off the charger.
• The Air contains a very small 3,149 mAh battery, but the phone can just about squeak by an 11-hour day for me on a single charge — enough for a normal work day, not a full-on all-day-outside type of day.
• Apple's $99 MagSafe Battery is more than erases the size and weight advantage of the Air, spoiling its light weight and thin profile — paying for Apple's particular solution feels sort of silly and only medium-elegant.
• Charging is slower than the iPhone 17 line — 50% in 30 minutes instead of 20 minutes — and the USB-C port is limited to USB 2 speeds (480 Mbps) versus 10 Gbps on the iPhone 17 Pro.
• Real-world battery from an early adopter: 7:10am to 3:42pm before dropping to 4% — 'not an all-day battery but passable if you don't mind the range anxiety.'

Nothing Phone (4a) Pro

The ~5,080mAh cell reliably gets through a day and endurance improved across all of GSMArena's tests versus the 3a Pro — but it's only an 80mAh bump over last year and looks small next to 6,000–7,000mAh budget rivals. 50W wired charging is the trade-off win; there is no wireless charging at all.

• Endurance has improved across the board in all tests compared to last year's Nothing Phone (3a) Pro; with a 68W USB-PD charger the phone peaked at around 42W.
• The review unit gets through a day without problems, but it'll certainly be into the red and close to done after about 15 hours of use; the OnePlus 15R has a much meatier battery to last longer.
• It's only an 80mAh increase over last year — small fry next to budget rivals like the Poco M8 Pro, which uses silicon-carbon tech to reach 6,500mAh.
• 50W wired charging is very respectable at this price — besting anything Google, Apple or Samsung offers below £500.
• Because the processor isn't power-hungry and the battery is large for the chip, real-world battery life is excellent.

iPhone 17 Air

The iPhone Air ships with iOS 26 and Apple's controversial new Liquid Glass UI — a layered, glass-like design that distorts content behind interface elements. Reviewers like the visual refresh but flag readability issues in places and a higher learning curve. Apple Intelligence is the same as on every other iPhone with 8GB+ of RAM and continues to underwhelm versus Google Gemini. The Air specifically uses Apple's new C1X cellular modem (no mmWave) and N1 networking chip (Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, Thread). Reddit threads on r/iphone and r/OnePlus call out iOS 26 as a step backward — some longtime iPhone owners have used iOS 26 + the Air's design as a reason to test-drive OnePlus 15 or other Android flagships.

• The iPhone Air uses the new Liquid Glass interface in iOS 26 — I like the design overall, but for every helpful update I find five more I hate.
• Apple Intelligence – the brand's first AI – isn't even a year old and already feels like an afterthought. It falls so far behind Google's Gemini that it shouldn't have any bearing on whether you buy this phone.
• Liquid Glass has potential to be problematic with readability, but I never ran into a situation where I had trouble reading the screen — the Music app's slide-behind-buttons effect adds nice immersion.
• Liquid Glass has more to do with marketing than usability — shiny visuals help keynote demos pop, but 'a feature called Liquid Glass sounds sexier than refinements to Safari's tab bar.'
• Liquid Glass feels designed specifically for the iPhone Air — you literally just tap on a thin piece of glass with no borders, and the effect lands perfectly on this hardware.
• iOS 26 destroyed the experience — the closed ecosystem gets boring after a while. After using iOS 26 on a 17 Pro Max I'm switching to the OnePlus 15.
• Apple updated iOS 26 with new AI tricks like pointing your camera at an invitation to add it to your calendar, which works — but Siri still stumbles on requests like 'navigate by bike to Wrigley Field' that Gemini gets right from the jump.
• Apple Intelligence still mostly stinks, but that may not be the case starting next year — performance headroom from the A19 Pro could come in clutch when Apple gets its AI plans back on track.

Nothing Phone (4a) Pro

Nothing OS 4.1 on Android 16 is the universal favourite: near-stock AOSP functionality with a distinctive monochrome visual identity, almost no bloatware, and AI that's present but not forced. The one hard reservation is update length — only 3 years of OS upgrades against 6 years of security patches.

• Nothing OS sticks close to a clean, near-stock Android (AOSP) experience in functionality, but stands out with its distinctive visual identity.
• After a week the phone is 'absolutely brilliant'; software is where Nothing phones shine, even if the camera 'window' at the top of the display is basically a pseudo-iPhone look.
• Software is where Nothing phones absolutely shine — the clearest reason to pick this over rivals.
• There's a smattering of AI here, but it's not shoved down your throat — and the software is basically the same clean setup as the regular Nothing Phone (4a).
• Unlike Samsung's Galaxy AI which is in your face from day one, Nothing's AI stays out of the way — an impressive, restrained package overall.