A lot has been written in recent days about the supposed frailty of the Apple iPhone Air's overall demand profile, barring China, where the new form factor appears to have been an instant hit, largely due to its eSIM-only novelty in a country where eSIMs for smartphones were generally not available until just a few days ago.
However, overall Apple appears to have deemed the iPhone Air's reception acceptable enough to retain its successor, the iPhone Air 2.
JP Morgan has provided a comparison of the specs for Apple's iPhone launches through 2027, retaining iPhone Air 2 and the iPhone Air 3 on the proverbial cards
Analysts working for the Wall Street titans typically excel at ferreting out important insights from Apple's sprawling supply chain. JP Morgan's recent investment note has been quite divulgatory, especially apropos the fate of Apple's iPhone Air variants going forward.
As is evident from the above X post by Max Weinbach, JP Morgan has penciled in the iPhone Air 2 for 2026 and the iPhone Air 3 for 2027, going against the prevailing chorus that had begun to discount a discontinuation of this new form factor.
This aligns with a recent note from TD Cowen, which claimed that Apple was not changing its production cadence for the iPhone Air, using "field work" as a confirmation mechanism to reiterate its previous production estimates for the ultra-slim iPhone.
As such, TD Cowen continues to expect Apple to produce 3 million units of the iPhone Air in the third calendar quarter of 2025, and 7 million units in the fourth calendar quarter of the ongoing year.
On the flip side, KeyBanc Capital found "virtually no demand for iPhone Air, and limited willingness to pay for a foldable" in its survey released in October.
Moreover, Nikkei Asia reported concurrently that the Cupertino giant was curtailing the production cadence of the iPhone Air, while boosting the production orders for the other models in the iPhone 17 lineup.
This thesis was then bolstered by the famous Apple analyst, Ming-Chi Kuo, who claimed that most iPhone Air suppliers were expected to slash capacity for the model by over 80 percent.
Nonetheless, after a firm denial by TD Cowen and JP Morgan's reiteration of Apple's implied commitment towards retaining the iPhone Air variant, we can safely conclude that the iPhone Air 2 and 3 are indeed coming in due course, barring a seismic shift in the demand profile of this new form factor.
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