According to a new report from Ookla, the iPhone Air is about twice as successful as the Plus model it replaced, namely the iPhone 16 Plus. The iPhone Air made up 6.8% of the sales of the iPhone 17 generation, whereas the iPhone 16 Plus only made up 2.9%.
Apple iPhone 17 Air
| 256GB 12GB RAM | $ 799.99 |
€ 746.13 |
| 512GB 12GB RAM | $ 969.95 |
€ 934.00 |
| Show all prices | ||
The iPhone 17 is also more successful than the iPhone 16, with 7% of the overall pie, compared to 5.9%. Naturally then, as you’d expect, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are decreasing their share of the overall iPhone 17 family sales compared to the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. The image below explains it all. As you can see, the Pro model saw the biggest decrease, so we can assume that some people went for the Air instead of the Pro.
This is based on Speedtest by Ookla samples, so of course it’s not official in any way. But if this pans out, it looks like Apple’s bet on thinness did pay off at least a little bit. If nothing else, the iPhone Air has a much more obvious unique selling point compared to the iPhone 16 Plus, which was just a bigger iPhone 16.
Interestingly, Ookla says the iPhone Air out-samples Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge by a margin of 3-to-1 in the US, while the S25 Edge’s penetration in the UK and Germany is minimal, with a share of less than 1%.
The same source claims Apple’s C1X modem featured in the iPhone Air “has reached a critical maturity point, shifting the conversation from a performance gap” versus Qualcomm to “a strategic equalizer in real-world performance”. This is based on a comparison with Qualcomm’s X80 modem, to which the C1X gets very close in download speeds across the globe, unlike the C1 (which debuted on the iPhone 16e) that can only achieve much slower download speeds.
Source