Apple did something wild at its big annual new iPhone event on Tuesday: It announced a phone that’s actually new. It’s called the iPhone Air, and it’s thin — “the thinnest iPhone ever” — light, and eye-catching. Also its battery life sort of stinks.

You might not want a super thin phone with crappy battery life, but that’s probably not why Apple built the iPhone Air.

Apple built the iPhone Air after years of releasing iPhones that looked and worked the same as the previous year’s iPhones, each new model only slightly better than the last. But its competitors have been getting creative, releasing phones that fold in half or unfold to create bigger phones. Several industry analysts believe that the iPhone Air is just a test run for Apple’s own folding phone: If you attach two iPhone Airs with a hinge and a little extra screen to create one seamless display, and boom, there’s your folding iPhone.

In a sense, the iPhone Air is just Apple showing off. “Apple as a technology company, you know, their ability to miniaturize is almost unmatched, and so I think it very much is, ‘Look at what we can do,’” Tom Mainelli, head of device and consumer research at the market intelligence firm IDC, told me Tuesday from the iPhone event in Cupertino, California.

As impractical as a super thin, very fragile-looking iPhone with crappy battery life may be, plenty of people will pay a lot of money to have it as a status symbol. In the meantime, Apple gets to see what works with this design and apply it to the next completely new iPhone, which analysts expect will come out next year and the year after that. Overall, iPhone sales have slowed recently, but with this new push, Apple might be able to spark the kind of upgrade cycle that helped make the iPhone a cultural phenomenon.........

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