Even if you’re an Android user, you know very well what a standard iPhone looks like. Sure, there are slight variations but for the past few generations, Apple hasn’t exactly done anything radical to the design of its phones — so much so that most people wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell whether you have the latest version of its flagship or not.

But at Tuesday’s Apple event, which brought us the iPhone 17 lineup along with the AirPods Pro 3 and the Apple Watch 11, the company has shaken things up. 

The long-rumored iPhone Air is real and it’s not just shockingly thin, but shiny too, making it a real target for the magpies among us. I don’t know about you, but my first thought when I clapped eyes on the new device was, «I want to touch it.» I’ve been writing about iPhones for more than a decade and I can’t remember the last time that was the case.

For most of its length, the Air is just 5.6mm thick. This tantalizingly svelte profile is only further enhanced by the gloss-mirror finish. If you’re among the first to get your hands on this phone, you can guarantee it will draw the eye of everyone in your vicinity, in a way that tends not to happen with tech in 2025.

It hasn’t always been this way. When I was growing up I often couldn’t afford the most advanced or expensive phone — so instead I’d search out the weirdos. Some favorites included the navy blue Sony Ericsson Z200, which had a little circular orange screen on the front, as well as the teeny tiny Sagem MW 3020. These phones were conversation starters — often when I whipped them out of the inside pocket of my school jacket, it was the first time people had ever seen them.

Unless you have a foldable phone, that’s a rare occurrence these days. But I predict the iPhone Air is likely to be a real scene stealer — at least at first. Be warned that people are going to want to hold it, touch it and pretend jokingly to bend it or drop it, so keep it in your pocket if you’re precious about others laying their grubby paws on your tech. If you do unveil it in front of your friends, though, you are likely to be the envy of them all.

«It has been a few years since Apple has had new iPhones that you could put on the table in a coffee shop, meeting room or pub, and people would ask, ‘Is that the new iPhone?'» says Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight. He adds that the iPhone Air «feels differentiated enough that people would consider visiting a store to see it in person.» 

These looky-loos will be great for Apple and other phone retailers, even if people don’t end up buying an Air, Wood says. Every time someone walks through the Apple Store door it’s an opportunity to sell them an accessory or an upgrade, so the ripple effect of increased foot traffic inspired by the Air could be felt across Apple’s portfolio. «This is very valuable at a time when people are holding onto their smartphones for longer than ever,» he says.

The iPhone Air isn’t necessarily the new iPhone that will be at the top of everyone’s wish list, but it’s perhaps the one that’s likely to carry the most social cachet for the next year — until of course Apple unveils the long-awaited foldable iPhone, which will no doubt cast this year’s triumph of minimalist design and engineering into the shade.

Apple on Tuesday unveiled its highly anticipated iPhone Air, which starts at $999 (£999, AU$1,799). The company debuted the 5.6mm-thick phone at its fall keynote at Apple Park in Cupertino, California. It has a titanium frame for a durable, lightweight build, clocking in at 165 grams. The company’s Ceramic Shield covers the front and back.

The Air has a big 6.5-inch display. Like the baseline iPhone 17, it has a 120Hz variable refresh rate, meaning it supports an always-on display, so you can see your notifications without waking the screen. It also has 3,000 nits peak brightness. 

The phone packs an A19 Pro chip. It also has Apple’s N1 chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, as well as a faster and more efficient version of its in-house 5G modem, the C1X, which is an update to the C1 modem it debuted on the iPhone 16E earlier this year.

Apple on Tuesday called the Air the «most power-efficient iPhone we have ever made,» and says it has all-day battery life — though you can buy a MagSafe battery that Apple is already touting to extend that life. Adaptive Power in iOS 26 can also help conserve battery life by automatically adjusting your iPhone’s performance based on how you’re using it at that moment, according to Apple.

On the back, the iPhone Air has a 48-megapixel fusion camera, which also allows for 2x telephoto pictures. On the front, you’ll find Apple’s new 18-megapixel Center Stage selfie camera that works in both a landscape and portrait orientation. 

Preorders for the iPhone Air and the entire iPhone 17 lineup begin on Friday, with the new device hitting stores the following Friday, Sept. 19.

It took less than a minute after donning a Meta Quest 3 headset before I was reliving some of my best memories from childhood in augmented reality, sitting on the floor with my digital Star Wars action figures creating fantastical scenes from a galaxy far, far away.

Last week, I visited Meta’s Los Angeles offices a mile from the city’s sunny beaches to try out an upcoming game, Star Wars: Beyond Victory, due out October 7 only for the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S headsets. The game is developed by Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects wizards that brought the Star Wars galaxy to life with starships and lasers, lightsabers and space battles. 

Star Wars: Beyond Victory was first revealed at Star Wars Celebration earlier this year, where ILM teased the game’s central story mode. In it, players take on the role of an up-and-coming podracer guided by the legendary Sebulba, racing rival of Anakin Skywalker in Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In Meta’s offices, I donned a Meta Quest 3 headset and played an early section of the story, including a podrace.

While I was expecting immersive full-screen podracing much like in the Nintendo 64 classic game Episode 1: Racer, Star Wars: Beyond Victory is very different, leaning into the Meta Quest’s augmented reality capabilities to portray racing on, functionally, a digital game table hovering above the real world room I was in. ILM’s developers told me that given concerns over making players nauseous when racing in high-speed VR, they opted to make the game’s action play out on a table in AR that gamers can resize to their liking, while still controlling their racer from a bird’s eye view. 

«The original podracing prototypes were based on slot car races because that was like thinking about racing cars in your room,» said David Palumbo, senior experience designer at ILM and for Star Wars: Beyond Victory. «Eventually we hit on that holo-table prototype, and that sort of shifted the way we thought about mixed reality gameplay in a really fun way.»

In my four-person race I finished a distant third, but there’s a delightful novelty in reaching out with my Meta Quest controllers and — this will be important later — digitally grabbing the gameplay board to move it around or resize it to my liking. It felt tactile and responsive, letting me place it in the perfect spot to survey the action as I stood up. The ILM developers described their different approaches: one placed it before them while they were sitting, while another got down on the ground to play, much like they did with toy cars as a kid.

«I also think it plays really well with the nostalgia of what we’re doing with action figures and playing with these little toys,» said Harvey Whitney, senior producer at ILM and for Star Wars: Beyond Victory. «I remember as a kid every Christmas either getting a slot car or RC car, and so now being able to do that with Star Wars toys and flying them around and driving around, it just works so well.»

I only spent around 20 minutes with the Adventure mode, so it’s impossible to comment on how the storyline or podracing gameplay will be in its full release, though it does have an interesting voice cast including Lewis MacLeod (returning to voice Sebulba as he did in The Phantom Menace) and Saturday Night Live’s Bobby Moynihan. Set in the period between the third and fourth Star Wars movies with the Galactic Empire in power but before the Rebel Alliance gets organized, Beyond Victory will tell a story about racing life on the fringes of the galaxy — an aspect of the franchise that’s surprisingly rarely explored given how important hot-rodding was to creator George Lucas and how much it influenced the original films.

Throughout Beyond Victory’s story mode, your podracing rookie will run into some characters from ILM’s previous AR game, Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge, along with a few iconic figures from the movies. But you won’t just be meeting them: many of the cast in the Adventure mode can be unlocked to play with in the Playset mode, which is where I spent most of my time in my preview assembling my own Star Wars scene, bringing my childhood play to the augmented reality future.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory is for reliving your childhood

Adventure mode plays through a story with cinematics and climactic races, while Arcade mode allows you to play quick podracing matches, including taking your story rivals’ speedsters for a spin. The aptly named Playset mode lets players make their own dioramas using the characters, scene elements and special effects from Adventure and Arcade.

I clicked on Playset mode from the game’s menu…and immediately felt like I’d popped open a toybox. I used my Meta Quest controllers to sort through an in-game menu and pluck out aliens, droids, vehicles and objects to populate my scene. While I couldn’t physically pick them up, using the grabber functionality on my controllers (which looked like a pair of robot claw arms) was very intuitive. I carefully hovered over specific parts of each character, tweaking limbs and joints to pose them just so. 

Regrettably, I wasn’t allowed to take photos of my creation, which was less a film-accurate recreation and more a hodgepodge of oddball characters scattered around a metal causeway — exactly how it felt to upend my toy chest and cobble together a scene from whatever random action figures I had on hand. I sat bounty hunters and podracers around a table, lorded over by a giant slug-like Hutt walking on spider legs (Graccus, a crime boss from Adventure mode) and stood C-3PO up on the side wielding a lightsaber, because why not. 

While I couldn’t physically touch everything, there are several advantages to the digital nature of augmented reality. I could grab a character and make them bigger to more precisely move their limbs around and then shrink them back to the size I wanted (or leave them huge, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman-style). There were also digital effects to add, like explosions, smoke and laser bolts. It was while angling one of the Empire’s iconic TIE Fighter vehicles up above my diorama and placing green laser blasts as if they’d just been shot from the fighter that I felt a sort of technical glee from staging a scene — a frozen moment of tension and adventure that felt, well, Star Wars.

Playset mode and the «action figure»-esque technology behind it are inspired by a pre-visulization tool ILM built for filmmakers to stage their own scenes, albeit one far more technically complex that’s full of «menus within menus,» as Palumbo described it. The game’s developers made Beyond Victory’s version far more simplified for gamers, he continued, citing a mantra I heard repeated multiple times during my preview:  «The main driving philosophical difference was toys, not tools.» 

Palumbo has been working in virtual reality since the Oculus Rift’s second developer kit was released back in 2014 and emphasized how much playtesting went into developing Beyond Victory. He called out the game’s accessibility options like having both seated and standing modes to play as well as completely mirrored controls for players to be able to use either hand. It should be no surprise that ILM is filled with Star Wars fans who offered feedback on how things should feel in the game, with Whitney shouting out quality assurance manager Marissa Martinez-Hoadley’s specific corrections about how things like a lightsaber should feel and operate.

That attention to detail has been what’s made Star Wars toys the implements of magic for decades of kids (and kids at heart). Beyond Victory brings that joy to augmented reality with some novel perks using its visualization tech: during my preview upon the ILM developer’s suggestion, I took the lightsaber out of my toy-sized C-3PO’s hands and scaled it up fill my hand. With the press of a button, I ignited the lightsaber and waved it around, looking and sounding straight from the films — digital, perhaps, but real enough to thrill the kid inside me.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory will be released on Oct. 7 exclusively for the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S.