Who knew, the iPhone Air didn’t have enough hype for Samsung

Well, it’s happened. Apparently, Samsung has decided to cancel the Galaxy S26 Edge. In a tragic, disappointing, and entirely unexpected move, there won’t be a second generation of Samsung’s ultra-thin flagship. And, as someone who has spent plenty of time with the Galaxy S26 Edge, comparing it to just about every other flagship out there, let me tell you, I’m shocked.

Except I’m not. I’m not shocked, even a little bit. Samsung’s goal with the Galaxy S25 Edge was clear from the start: To mooch off the hype for Apple’s upcoming iPhone Air. It wanted to beat Apple to the punch, but in its haste, forgot how to make that punch land, and now there’s no escaping its most obvious copycat attempt yet.

I still remember Samsung’s first teaser of the Galaxy S25 Edge, almost as if it were only a few months ago — because it was. Samsung included a clip of its ultra-thin smartphone coming together at the very end of its larger Galaxy S25 announcement, and it gave me just a glimmer of hope. After all, I’d been left so underwhelmed by the second annual Galaxy S24 launch that I was looking for any sign of life out of Samsung.

However, by the time Samsung pulled the covers all the way back in May 2025, it was clear that it had only mostly thought through its latest big idea. Although the Galaxy S25 Edge certainly met the criteria for being thin, it did so at the expense of its telephoto camera, battery capacity, and cooling technology — all of which are pretty important when you don’t have Apple’s degree of control over optimization.

And, while I was more than happy to marvel at Samsung’s design from the moment I took the Edge out of its extra-thin box, I felt like the good times stopped there. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset burned too bright for the Edge’s lack of cooling hardware, which then caused the pint-sized 3,900mAh battery to drop like a stone, dragging the display brightness and sustained performance under load with it. Mix in a camera duo that’s less flexible than the one you get on the much cheaper Galaxy S25 FE, and it becomes even harder to justify spending $1,099 on the Edge.

Of course, I wasn’t sure just how underbaked the Galaxy S25 Edge would truly feel until Apple announced its iPhone Air. When it did, it put its history of doing more with less on full display. No, I won’t make an excuse for Apple’s decision to dot just one sensor on its camera peninsula, but the rest of the iPhone Air comes together in a way that Samsung didn’t match. It stretches an even smaller battery just as far, squeezes comparable performance out of the A19 Pro chipset, and sports a slim titanium frame that feels natural in the hand rather than boxy and industrial.

Perhaps worse for Samsung is the fact that I don’t love the iPhone Air, either. I think it looks better than the Edge, feels better than the Edge, and runs smoother than the Edge, but it’s bound by many of the same limitations. Its cooling hardware is fine, but not great; its battery is truly tiny, and I’ve never wanted a single camera on a phone that costs $1,000. And yet, I’d come much closer to using the iPhone Air again, simply because it feels so good to hold.

If there’s one thing I want Samsung to take away from the disappointing chapter that was the Galaxy S25 Edge launch, it’s this: Apple doesn’t always get it right. It’s as simple as that. Just because Apple decided to go slim for the iPhone Air doesn’t mean Samsung needed to do the same. Just because it could beat Apple to market doesn’t mean it should have.

More specifically, I think both Apple and Samsung invested too heavily in the thin phone hype they created. I don’t know of anyone, whether an iOS fan or an Android fan, who has ever asked for a phone that does less, certainly not one that does less and costs more. And, if Samsung had done what it usually does — copied Apple after the fact — it would have learned that. It would have watched the iPhone Air bring up the rear of the iPhone 17 series (according to MacRumors and Morgan Stanley) and decided not to give it a try.

Instead, Samsung jumped into the fire first, and I think we can say it got burned. It found out the hard way that you can’t steal hype from a product that didn’t have much hype to begin with, and that you can’t push the limits of optimization when your opponent has long been the king of smartphone optimization. But, now that the Galaxy S25 Edge exists — at least for a few more months — Samsung needs to find a silver lining. It needs to take some of the hardware advancements from the Edge and find a way to work them into other Galaxy devices that people will actually buy.

In my opinion, that means letting the Galaxy S25 Edge inform the future of the Galaxy Z Flip and Galaxy Z Fold. It means learning lessons from the subpar cooling architecture that comes with an ultra-thin frame, lessons from pairing a smaller battery with a more powerful chipset, and lessons from the idea that less isn’t more. So far, those lessons have worked pretty well on the Galaxy Z Fold 7, but Samsung needs to push them even further.

And, at the very least, Samsung needs to stop letting Apple act as the be-all and end-all trendsetter that it has somehow become, because it will not be able to beat Apple at its own game.