It’s no secret that some Android OEMs love to use Apple’s overall design ethos as inspiration when launching new products, whether that be an OS redesign or a new piece of hardware. Even so, Honor’s latest phone might just score the top spot among unabashed clones, all while falling short of the only metric that makes the iPhone Air appealing in the first place.
Honor’s Magic 8 Pro Air is official, as spotted by GSMArena, and at first glance, it sure does look like an iPhone Air knock-off in more than a few crucial ways. Personally, though, I’d go one step further — Honor’s latest flagship actually manages to look like every current-gen iPhone consolidated into a single device, with very little of its own identity. Place it next to last year’s Magic 8 Pro and I’m not sure even the most dedicated Honor fans would confidently claim both devices carry the same brand.
At its core, the Magic 8 Pro Air looks the most like the iPhone Air, featuring a slim build, a wide, pill-shaped camera module, and a large circular casing for its main sensor. Honor has managed to build in a few distinctions between its device and Apple’s though, including two additional sensors (a 64MP periscope telephoto lens and a 50MP ultra-wide) placed in a very Pixel-esque fashion. The Magic 8 Pro also managed to bundle in a 5,500mAh silicon-carbon battery, though it comes at the cost of a bulkier 6.1mm chassis — a half-millimeter increase from the iPhone Air’s 5.6mm build.
The rest of Honor’s changes, though, all essentially spawn from Apple’s other iPhones. The orange colorway is the most notable example, an obvious play on the iPhone 17 Pro’s marquee hue. Having spent a week walking around CES earlier this month, I can tell you that orange shade is immensely popular this year — it’s a shame companies like Honor weren’t brave enough to try it out on their own. The flat, matte sides on the Magic 8 Pro Air also appear to pull from the rest of the iPhone 17 series. And honestly, from the front, it looks more like Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge than anything Honor’s released in recent years.
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Design aside, its specs sheet appears pretty impressive. A 6.31-inch QHD+ AMOLED display that apparently tops out at a whopping 6,000nits of peak brightness? A main 50MP 1/1.3-inch f/1.6 sensor in a device of this size? 80W wired charging paired with 50W wireless? Sign me up for all of this — maybe just in a package that looks a little less like every iPhone 17 rolled into one device, Katamari Damacy-style. The Honor Magic 8 Pro Air also comes in black, purple, and white, and starts at CNY 4,999 (or about $717). It’ll be available in China starting on January 23rd.
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