iPhone 17 Pro Max Shines While iPhone Air Struggles to Justify Its Premium Price

Each year, Apple's iPhone lineup asks a quiet philosophical question: what do people actually need from the device they carry closest to them? The iPhone 17 Pro Max answers with conviction—better optics, longer endurance, and tools that invite genuine creative work—while the new iPhone Air, at $999, offers thinness as its primary argument, a proposition that history suggests most buyers will quietly decline. Apple has tried before to invent a middle tier between the budget-conscious and the premium-seeking, and the pattern holds: customers already know which camp they belong to. The Air may be