If you suffer from that recurring nightmare that you’re at the airport but have forgotten your wallet,¹ fret no longer: starting today, holders of U.S. passports can create a Digital ID in Apple’s Wallet app, which can be used at TSA checkpoints across the country for domestic flights—even if you don’t have a REAL ID-compliant state ID card or driver’s license.

First announced at this year’s WWDC, Digital ID is an iOS 26 features and works along the same lines as the various ID and driver’s license systems that Apple Wallet currently offers in 12 states, Puerto Rico, and Japan.

If you hold a U.S. passport, you’ll be able to add a Digital ID by first taking a picture of the machine-readable page in your passport (the one that contains your data and photo), confirming the information by scanning the chip in your passport, and then completing a few steps that help verify that you’re really you, including taking a selfie and then making certain face and head movements. Note that if you have a passport card, you can’t use it to create a Digital ID, as there’s no embedded chip like with a passport book.

As with the existing ID cards in Wallet, using Digital ID does not require you to unlock, hand over, or even show your phone to the requesting entity. For example, at a TSA checkpoint, you’ll double click your phone’s side button to bring up Wallet, then hold it over the scanner as you would for an Apple Pay transaction. The phone will tell you what information is being requested and you’ll have to authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID to then provide that information. Once you’ve set up a Digital ID, it will also be available via Wallet on the Apple Watch as well.

Apple, as usual, stresses the security and privacy of this feature. Your information is encrypted on your device and protected with your biometric information (preventing somebody who knows your passcode from presenting or even viewing your ID card), and Apple does not itself know anything about where, when, or what information is presented. Additionally, because the Digital ID is essentially a digital version of your passport, when that document expires, the Digital ID expires as well, at which point it is automatically removed and you would have to manually add your new passport.

The system is also designed with privacy in mind, so that the least amount of necessary information is provided. For example, if you were to use your Digital ID to verify your age, the only data that would be provided would be your ID picture and a simple “Yes” or “No”. Other information, like your name or birthdate, wouldn’t even be given. That is, in some ways, an advantage over handing over your physical ID card which can not only include those, but other sensitive information like your address.

The Digital ID should be accepted starting today at more than 250 airports in the U.S., though certain specific checkpoints within those airports may not yet have been updated to support mobile IDs. Though Digital ID is based on ISO standards for personal identification and mobile documents, it’s not currently valid for international travel or border-crossing as there is not yet an international standard in place for using mobile IDs for those purposes. However, that’s not to preclude it from happening in the future, should such a standard be adopted.

While air travel is the first place you’ll be able to use your Digital ID, further applications are in the works. Apple provides APIs to allow verification of both identity and age, allowing third parties to implement these features in their apps or on the web. (Many states have already rolled out age-verification apps to work with the mobile ID standard.)

The addition of Digital ID is a clever move. Apple’s been working with states for several years to add mobile IDs and driver’s licenses for several years—the first state, Arizona, rolled out in 2022, and while adoption has been steady, it’s been a slow trickle. Using a federal document allows the company to make an end-run around states dragging their feet², helping drive adoption of the feature and hopefully encouraging lagging states to get onboard.

Updated on 11/13/25 with more details about passport cards and passport expiration.

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information on Tuesday (paywalled, alas, but summarized by 9to5Mac here and here):

Apple has since sharply scaled back production of the first iPhone Air and delayed the release of an updated version that was meant to launch in fall 2026, The Information reported earlier this week.

Instead, some Apple engineers are hoping to release a redesigned version with a second camera lens in spring 2027 alongside existing plans to release the standard iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e at that time. It’s still too early to tell whether they can successfully redesign the iPhone Air in time to make that new release window, the people said.

My question: Would that second camera provide an ultra-wide (0.5×) or a telephoto (3× or 4×) lens? The regular non-pro iPhones provide an ultra-wide lens as their second camera. But when the premium iPhones had only two (rather than three) lenses, the second lens was telephoto, not ultra-wide. Apple first used the adjective “Pro” with the iPhones 11 Pro and Pro Max, and all iPhones to date with “Pro” in their name have had three lenses. But the iPhones XS (2018), X (2017), 8 Plus (also 2017), and 7 Plus (2016) all had 1× main and 2× “telephoto” lenses.

In other words, when a premium iPhone had only one extra lens, that lens added additional reach, not ultra-wide perspective. The iPhone Air costs more than a regular no-adjective iPhone, so if that patterns holds, a two-camera second-generation model would add a telephoto, not ultra-wide lens. Personally I’m hoping that’s what Apple will do.

Looking at my own photo library and using smart albums to count the photos I’ve taken using each particular lens on each particular iPhone, roughly speaking, over the past few years, I shoot about 10 percent of my photos with the ultra-wide lens, 10 percent with the telephoto, and 80 percent with the main. But a lot of my ultra-wide photos are really just close-up macro shots of things like product labels. If I were less lazy, I’d go through them and trash a lot of them. I could capture equivalent photos, for a lot of these throwaway macro shots, with the main 1× camera lens just by holding the phone a little further from the subject. Adding a 0.5× ultra-wide to the iPhone Air just wouldn’t add much utility, at least for me, compared to the obvious utility of a telephoto lens with more reach.

(The iPhone Air’s lone 1× camera has a minimum focus distance of 15 cm; the minimum focus distance of the 1× cameras on the iPhones 17 Pro, 16 Pro, and 15 Pro is 20 cm. That 5 cm difference is a largely unheralded advantage for the iPhone Air’s camera, and significantly makes up for the lack of an ultra-wide lens for close-up photography. 5 cm doesn’t sound like much, but in practice it’s very noticeable. That said, for actual macro photography, the 0.5× ultra-wide camera on the iPhone Pro models has a minimum focus distance of just 2 cm.)

We have no idea how many of them they made, but seemingly, the price was not a problem for this product.

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