The one software tweak the iPhone Air needs

September 26, 2025

One trick doctors hate that will make your iPhone… Sorry.

I’ve been loving my iPhone Air. A week in I think it’s my favorite iPhone since the iPhone X.

It has that indescribable feeling that the original MacBook Air had. That, “Wow, computers can be like this?” feeling that’s hard to quantify when you’re just looking at a spec sheet. Picking it up still makes me smile, and I love that the screen is bigger than any iPhone I’ve ever had, while the device overall feels smaller because it’s so thin.

Even the battery has been surprisingly good, I feel like I have more at the end of the day than I did with my 15 Pro that I’m upgrading from, and Apple’s numbers seem to back this up, showing 23 hours of video playback on the 15 Pro and an increase to 27 on the Air.

The only area I’ve kinda been disappointed on is the camera situation. No, not the telephoto, I really never used that personally. And not the ultrawide, for me that just felt too wide. But the ultrawide did allow for awesome macro capabilities that this iPhone Air is sorely lacking. At least currently.

The problem

The iPhone Air’s minimum focus distance is just too short. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a hair better than my 15 Pro’s main sensor, allowing you to get maybe 15% closer to the subject, but it still does that annoying thing where when you want to take a picture of a small object and have it take up the full field of view, it often goes blurry right when you get it framed up.

But then I was like, duh, it’s a 48 MP sensor, so I can zoom into 2x to get twice as close and still get a nice 12 MP photo. So you just pull the phone back a bit, hit 2x, and bam, you have a beautifully framed close shot, that’s actually in focus.

An “easy” solution

Look, I won’t claim camera sensor software is in any way easy, but all the other iPhones do an awesome job of detecting when the main sensor reached its minimum focus distance and then hopping over the the ultrawide to get a nice macro shot that’s still in focus.

I’d love if Apple implemented similar software magic on the Air, where instead of having to manually hit that 2x when it gets blurry, Apple detected you hit the minimum focus distance and instructed you to “back up a bit” and then automatically made it in focus through cropping in on the main sensor.

Would it change the world? No, but it’d take out a manual step I’m finding myself doing somewhat frequently.

Will this level up your macro photography so that you can take pictures of the pollen on the leg of a bee? No, absolutely not. But getting about twice as close to your subject is a massive difference, especially since I find right now the Air’s minimum focus distance is just on the edge of where I want it to be when holding things close.

Hopefully the brilliant folks at Halide, (Not Boring), or Obscura (listed in alphabetical order so I don’t have to rank my friends) can integrate something like this into their awesome apps if Apple themselves do not.