Apple's iPhone Air has flopped so hard that it has managed to kill an entire genre of ultra-slim smartphones in utero. That's one way of going out with a bang, I guess.
DigiTimes: Xiaomi, Vivo, and others have halted their plans to take on the iPhone Air with a dedicated competitor
DigiTimes is now reporting that a number of Chinese OEMs, including Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo, have shelved their plans to launch their own competitors to the Apple iPhone Air.
For the benefit of those who might not be aware, China only authorized domestic eSIMs recently when Apple launched the iPhone Air as an eSIM-only variant. Now, according to DigiTimes, the Chinese OEMs are trying to exploit the ensuing novelty factor by incorporating eSIMs in a large array of models, instead of solely relying on an ultra-thin form factor to serve as the primary eSIM conduit.
The Information reported recently that Foxconn was slated to halt all production lines for the iPhone Air by the end of November. Meanwhile, according to the publication, the variant's only other assembler, Luxshare, had already halted its production lines for the ultra-slim iPhone back in October amid a slowing sales momentum.
In the same vein, The Information reported that the Apple iPhone Air 2 has now been delayed until the spring of 2027. While initial reports indicated that the delay was prompted by Apple's desire to equip its ultra-slim variant with a dual-camera setup, Bloomberg's prolific tipster, Mark Gurman, believes it has more to do with the upcoming A20 chip that would leverage TSMC's 2nm process, replete with Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) packaging, allowing components such as the SoC and the DRAM to be directly integrated at the wafer level.
Given the production constraints around TSMC's 2nm node, Apple's launch cadence changes - which would see the iPhone Air launch with the iPhone 18 and the iPhone 18e in the spring of 2027 instead of the fall of 2026 - might be an efficient way of managing limited supply for the A20 chip.
Gurman also reported that Apple always expected the iPhone Air to constitute between 6 percent and 8 percent of its annual iPhone sales. As such, the ultra-thin smartphone continues to retain utility for Apple as an experimental platform for testing out new technology.
Nonetheless, the Chinese OEMs, who apparently have no need for such experimentation, are now readily abandoning the ultra-thin form factor amid persistent apathy from most consumers, who appear to accord a substantially higher value to battery capacity over any marginal utility that superficial design aesthetics might command.
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