iPhone Air marks a new chapter in Apple’s long-standing history as a premium brand. This is the thinnest and lightest iPhone ever to grace the consumer market. At only 5.6mm profile, the “Air” is even skinnier than the current slim-king, the Galaxy S25 Edge (5.85mm). The newcomer just hit the Geekbench scoreboard, and here’s how it fares against the Edge.
The Galaxy S26 Edge, at least on paper, has the potential to outperform the Air in pure numbers, even though it’s at a clear disadvantage. It uses a year-old Snapdragon 8 Elite, against Apple’s brand-new A19 Pro silicon. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, by any means (no pun intended).
Thin phones like these, without proper cooling solutions, have lower sustained performance or performance over longer durations. So the initial results on synthetic benchmarks meet the expectations, but scores tumble down as you continue to test the device over and over again.
The first iPhone Air Geekbench scores appeared a few days ago. And in the last few hours, more single/multicore benchmarks have appeared on the platform with clear deviation in results. This iPhone latest Air model varies from 3,206 to 3,700 points on single-core and 8,546 to 9,737 on multicore tests.
| Best Score | Average Score | |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone Air | 3,736 | 3,642 |
| Galaxy S25 Edge (single-core) | 3,025 | 2,634 |
| iphone Air (multi-core) | 9,735 | 9,496 |
| Galaxy S25 Edge (multi-core) | 10,102 | 8,818 |
S26 Edge’s single-core is lackluster, next to the iPhone Air’s. But, on multicore tests, the Slim Galaxy phone hits as high as 10,102 points. Since the Edge debuted a while ago, it has been tested in all sorts of non-ideal conditions by users, so don’t be alarmed by the performance variation.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite on S25 Edge ranged from 1,579 to 3,205 points on single-core and from 6,564 to 10,102 points in multicore tests throughout its journey. We suspect the Air will face the same thermal challenges as the S25 Edge once it reaches the buyers.
The iPhone Air is on standby waiting for the pre-order window to end on September 19th. Apple may have won this round, but the Galaxy S26 series is right on its tail. We are rooting for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to redeem the Android platform again. Qualcomm’s new chip will debut by the end of this month. Let’s wait and see how far the company has pushed the SoC this time.