The iPhone Air is proof that Apple’s AR glasses will be stunning

Apple has debuted its long-rumoured ultra-thin flagship smartphone in the form of the iPhone Air.

It’s an impressive bit of kit, managing to squeeze flagship-level specs into a chassis just 5.6mm thick, a whole 0.2mm thinner than the competing Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge that launched earlier this year.

While ultra-thin phones are a joy to use and hold, Apple’s iPhone Air gets me excited for the eventual release of its rumoured AR smart glasses.

AR glasses have a hardware-themed problem

Smart glasses, after years of being a Sci-fi dream, are finally becoming a reality. We’ve already seen the first step towards these glasses with smart specs like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses – but these aren’t true AR glasses with screens built in. 

Instead, in the case of the Meta specs, they offer built-in cameras, music playback, call support and support for on-board AI to help you learn more about your surroundings. 

To be fair, I’ve been a huge fan of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses since they launched back in 2023, and they’re my go-to on the rare occasion that we get a sunny day over in Blighty. They’re great for capturing POV-style photos and videos without reaching for my phone, allowing me to stay in the moment rather than worrying about camera angles. 

Importantly, they look like a regular pair of sunglasses. They’re not thick or chunky, and unless you’ve got the semi-transparent pair I have with all the internals partially visible, the only real giveaway is the embedded camera and LED on the front. 

But like I said, these aren’t true AR-style smart glasses. They don’t have built-in displays, nor can they overlay graphics onto the real world like they do in those Sci-fi movies from the early 00s.

The good news is that these AR-enabled smart glasses are starting to hit the market. We saw the Even Realities G1 launch late last year, and throughout 2025, we’ve seen entries like Xreal Air, RayNeo Air 3S, and most recently, the Rokid Glasses.

I actually went hands-on with the Rokid AR glasses at IFA 2025 last week. They’re a pretty cool pair of AR-enabled specs that utilise beamforming microphones to provide real-time translation when you’re looking directly at someone, and also include elements like Google Maps-powered mapping software, notification support, and more.

The catch? They don’t look like a regular pair of glasses. It’s clear, even from a fair distance, that these early AR glasses are exactly that – AR glasses. 

They’re thicker, usually on the arms where many of the smarts are packed, with slightly thicker lenses to accommodate the AR screen tech. They also tend to look rather cheap, usually covered in shiny plastic that’s not exactly fashionable – especially when they are quite expensive. 

For AR smart glasses to go truly mainstream, they need to be indistinguishable from regular glasses. And with the iPhone Air launch, Apple has proved that it’s more than up to the task. 

Apple’s iPhone Air is an impressive feat of engineering

The iPhone Air is an impressive bit of tech, no matter how you frame it. The Air, like Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge from earlier this year, manages to shrink the flagship tech usually found on flagships into something significantly thinner and lighter.

However, it’s the design of the Air’s internals specifically that makes it so impressive, arguably more so than Samsung’s alternative. Most of the rear of the phone is taken up by a battery – so where do the rest of the internals – the processor, sensors and other precious tech – go?

Apple’s answer? The camera bump, or ‘plateau’ as Apple has affectionately dubbed it. Despite the iPhone Air featuring just a single 48MP rear camera, the camera bump extends across the entire rear of the phone. For a camera housing, it’s unusual, but when you understand what’s happening underneath, it makes much more sense.

As Apple showcased during its reveal with a flashy X-ray-style shot, most of the Air’s components have been shrunk down to fit in that camera housing. That means that the phone’s powerful A19 Pro chipset, alongside the new N1 networking chip, and all the other tech that make the phone work – bar the battery and a few other components – live within that relatively tiny housing.

I have reservations about the thermal performance in such a small space, especially when paired with Apple’s new top-end chipset, but we’ll have to see how the Air performs once it’s released next week.

That said, if Apple can shrink down flagship-level smartphone components to fit into something as small as a camera housing, what will its rumoured AR glasses look like?

Apple’s AR glasses could look very sleek

It’s a bit of an overused trope at this point, but Apple’s strategy of ‘not being first but being the best’ truly could apply to its long-awaited AR glasses, given what we’ve seen from the iPhone Air. 

Apple has long been rumoured to be working on a pair of smart specs, with the most recent rumours pointing towards a possible launch in 2027 – though it’s unclear if these will be full AR-style specs or a competitor to Meta’s Ray-Ban specs. 

Regardless of when the AR specs do appear, given what we’ve already seen from the Air, it’s plausible that Apple could shrink the hardware components down to a level we’ve yet seen from brands like Rokid and even giants like Meta. 

This would translate to a pair of glasses that, hopefully, would be near-indistinguishable from a regular pair of glasses. They wouldn’t weigh too much on your face, get hot around the temples after constant use or even require touch controls. 

We’ve already seen Apple’s excellent hand-tracking tech from the Vision Pro, and combining that with AR glasses seems like a logical next step for a more immersive, intuitive AR-based experience. 

And, of course, we’ve got Apple’s massive library of AR games and apps already available on iPhone and iPad. These should translate even better to the glasses form factor, negating the need to see the AR world through your phone or tablet screen – it just all depends on how easy Apple makes it for devs to port content over.

This is all pure speculation, of course, but based on what I’ve seen from the iPhone Air, I’ve got a feeling that Apple’s AR glasses could be the specs that make the form factor go mainstream.

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