If you read reviews of iPhone Air, you will quickly find that the pundit class has concluded it's a mixed bag. A "compromised" product, even.

For tech reviewers lining up all these phones next to each other and weighing the pros and cons, I can absolutely understand how iPhone Air doesn't seem to earn its spot in the lineup at $999. Just look at all these downsides:

• Battery: The battery life is slightly worse than iPhone 17 and much worse than iPhone 17 Pro
• Performance: The A19 Pro chip in iPhone is not only binned (it loses a GPU core), it's so thermal-constrained it probably wouldn't be able to use that core anyway—one review saw significantly worse sustained performance from iPhone Air than the base level A19 in iPhone 17
• Speakers: iPhone Air lacks stereo speakers, a feature that was added in iPhone 7 (a consolation prize for dropping the headphone port, I guess)
• Cameras: iPhone Air offers the same(-ish) main camera as its model year brethren, but lacks an ultra-wide lens, a telephoto lens, and a LIDAR sensor. That means no macro mode, no optical quality zoom beyond 2x, no spatial photo or video capture, and reduced portrait/AR performance

In its preliminary assessment of Apple's offerings, The Accidental Tech podcast went so far as to speculate iPhone Air wouldn't appeal to tech enthusiasts at all, and perhaps will only sell to fashion-conscious consumers who won't know what they're missing.

Indeed, the through-line connecting every review I've read—whether framed positively or negatively in its conclusions—is a struggle to answer the question, "Who is iPhone Air for?"

Well, it's for me. That's who.

Whenever the claim is made that, "nobody is asking for a thinner iPhone," I make a point of piping up. My favorite iPhone of the last decade was easily the iPhone 13 mini, and when I upgraded to iPhone 14 Pro, it was so heavy that I got in the habit of leaving the house with only my cellular Apple Watch Series 8. My favorite Apple computer of all time was the 12" MacBook, and I am perennially disappointed that Apple has deprioritized weight ever since (the lightest Mac currently on offer is the MacBook Air, which is 33% heavier than the decade-old MacBook).

That's why I didn't hesitate to put in an order for the new iPhone Air, downsides and all:

• Battery: Where others see the 39-hour battery life on iPhone 17 Pro Max as a triumph, I see it as dead fucking weight. My iPhone spends 90% of every day on a MagSafe charger near my front door. The iPhone Air's battery is about a third smaller than iPhone 16 Pro's battery, but in the past year I've only seen my battery dip below 33% a handful of times. Tell you what, when I'm traveling, I'll bring an iPhone Air MagSafe Battery just to put your mind at ease. It's true, I may need the last third of my phone's battery 10% of the time, but I benefit from my devices' relative size and weight advantages 100% of the time
• Performance: There isn't a single thing I use my iPhone for that takes full advantage of its computing power, and if ever there was, it would be a signal to switch to a more serious device like an iPad Pro or a Mac. At the same time, I get it. It sucks to see your new device post shitty benchmark scores, because it confirms that you have a tinier penis than your friends. I'll just have to find a way to cope, I guess
• Speakers: I'm not here to judge, but I can't understand why anyone uses their iPhone speakers at all. The only ones I see using this feature are people's shitheel children, inconsiderate assholes, and airport workers on break who probably can't afford AirPods. If you use your speakers in some non-disruptive way, God bless—what goes on in the privacy of your own home is up to you
• Cameras: iPhone Air's rear camera system is undoubtedly a shortcoming. Since Becky is going Pro, she's enabling my Air purchase by signing up for the emotional labor of being the family's chief photographer for the 2025-2026 season. We trade off on this—I lugged my iPhone 16 Pro around last year so she could lighten her load with a green iPhone 16. Even still, last year fewer than 5% of my photos were taken with either of the ultra-wide or telephoto lens, so I doubt I'll miss them

As someone who has been using iOS 26 all summer, there's one more reason I'm glad to be switching to iPhone Air: information density is significantly lower throughout iOS 26, which has a dramatic negative impact on the usability of smaller displays, even the 6.3" iPhone 16 Pro. That's because with the 26 series of releases, the new unified design across Apple's platforms features much more negative space between its controls and views—all in the name of concentricity. As soon as I updated my iPhone 16 Pro to the iOS 26 beta, I was immediately put off by how much less text was being rendered and how much more I was scrolling to get what I needed. By ordering another 6.3" iPhone, I'd be locking in those losses. But iPhone Air's larger 6.6" display claws back just enough additional screen estate to make it a wash. I don't want a bigger screen, I want an OS that doesn't punish smaller screens. And it's nice to want things.

Will iPhone Air sell well? Don't ask me, I'm the guy who just said his favorite iPhone was iPhone 13 mini and favorite Mac was the 12" MacBook—both of which flopped. I'm certainly not arguing this thing is going to light sales charts on fire, simply that it's not entirely irrational to conclude that iPhone Air is the best phone in this year's line up.

Anyway, this is just my take. You do you.

I bought The Iconfactory's Tot app years ago when it first released, but found I didn't really have a need for a semi-ephemeral, intentionally finite scratchpad.

That changed this summer! Why? Because in this nascent era of terminal-based coding agents, I have found a semi-ephemeral, intentionally finite scratchpad to be invaluable.

Use cases include:

• Writing long prompts directly in the terminal only for things to go wrong can sometimes make it hard or even impossible to recover later, so instead I write them first in Tot and then paste them into my terminal. If anything goes wrong, I no longer try to multi-shot it and watch the model spin, I just restart the chat, tweak the prompt, and try again without any fussy in-terminal text editing
• While I could choose to parallelize the shit out of my coding agent and send it off to implement a half dozen features in separate git worktrees, my puny brain prefers to single-thread a single project at a time. As a result, I like to use each page in Tot to keep follow-up tasks in reserve. This way, as soon as I think of the next thing I want the agent to do, I have a place to immediately type it without interrupting the agent. As soon as it finishes its current task, I can keep the hopper saturated by pasting in the next-highest-priority task from the corresponding Tot page
• Maintaining to-do lists as text files within the working directory for the agent to work from can be a wonderful workflow, but there are times where I don't want to contaminate the agent's context with additional complexity until we're standing on a firm foundation. I've found that long to-do lists and plans will often lead to agents spreading themselves too thin by attempting to future-proof or cover a bunch of cases poorly

As I type this I'm sitting in my Vision Pro with the hilariously-wide Ultrawide Mac Virtual Display and literally running four top-to-bottom terminals, each cranking on separate projects simultaneously. Tot has become integral to my workflow as I spend more and more time playing whackamole to feed each agent work.

(While the agents are all humming along, I typically use that time reviewing each project's current changesets in Fork—another excellent Mac app—to identify what I need the agent to do next.)

James O'Sullivan has a banger of an editorial on the "late attention economy", including this bit illustrating the various platforms' pivot from active participation to passive absorption:

While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.

I'm grateful to be living a timeline-free life for the most part, but on the rare occasion I log in and catch myself scrolling, this haunting characterization resonates:

The timeline is no longer a source of information or social presence, but more of a mood-regulation device, endlessly replenishing itself with just enough novelty to suppress the anxiety of stopping. Scrolling has become a form of ambient dissociation, half-conscious, half-compulsive, closer to scratching an itch than seeking anything in particular. People know the feed is fake, they just don't care.

I suspect many of you reading this continue to use social media apps because you were around back when they were social networking apps and are having a hard time accepting the fact that isn't what they are anymore. Likewise, many businesses are still earnestly crafting useful blog posts, only to optimize them for search engines and social platforms that will only ignore them—they should probably figure out a new racket, too.

This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on September 11, 2025.

Hope you're having a lovely September so far. Hard to believe it's almost Fall! Always love seeing the first signs of the end of Summer—I refer, of course, to Apple's annual iPhone event.

In case you don't subscribe to my every waking moment, some highlights of stuff I put out over the last month:

• Shared some of what I've learned about using Apple's on-device LLM API
• Suggested a new Star Wars watch order
• Opined about why I wasn't cut out for management
• Recorded two normal podcasts (v42 and v43) as well as an interview with Scott Werner
• Repeated my tireless appeal to get folks blogging again
• Gave up on Claude Code (which Anthropic has now admitted they made dumber for over a month) in favor of OpenAI Codex—specifically, this fork
• Published a command-line tool called imsg for exporting iMessage archives
• From that, I documented a how-to guide on distributing scripts via homebrew
• Did an hour-long review and buyer's guide of the aforementioned iPhone event (pre-orders go up Friday morning at 8 AM Eastern!)

Every month, I scroll through the last month of photos for one to include in this newsletter. Not many pictures this month, so here's a little surprise Becky left me that showed up in our iCloud Shared Photo Library

I feel personally attacked. And thirsty.

Today, I'm writing you about my favorite topic: capitalism. Or, more specifically, I'm here to shed a little light on a few "special" kinds of people who tend to be highly-valued in the economy but who are often portrayed as stereotypical caricatures. Each is as stubbornly human as the rest of us. Each possess an unusual blend of attributes that make them well-suited for the current epoch. My consulting career brought me face-to-face with more than my fair share of these people. The experiences I reflected back on while writing this were sometimes interesting, sometimes impressive, and rarely both.

Spoiler alert: there's more to this…

v43.1 - iPhone 17 Event Review

Feature Release Breaking Change - Feature

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