Apple changed its massive baseline mannequin, the iPhone 16 Plus, with the super-thin iPhone Air in its lineup final September, and a brand new report says uptake tripled — suggesting the firm’s wager on higher design received over followers. But it is nonetheless a drop in the bucket in comparison with the Pro fashions, which made up 86% of all iPhone 17 sequence telephones sampled.
Mobile analytics agency Ookla launched a new report exhibiting that 6.8% of iPhone 17 sequence house owners who ran Speedtests in the fourth quarter of 2025 used the iPhone Air. That compares with 2.9% who used the iPhone 16 Plus in the earlier technology. That exhibits a rise in enchantment for the 6.5-inch skinny cellphone over the handset it changed, which had a barely bigger 6.7-inch show. Thin was barely extra in. (Disclosure: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, the similar dad or mum firm as CNET, but was recently sold to Accenture.)
Ookla’s graph exhibiting the break up in cellphone possession between generations of the iPhone 16 sequence (in grey) and iPhone 17 lineup (in blue). Note the second from the high comparability, which is between the iPhone 16 Plus and the iPhone Air.
That enhance needed to come from someplace. According to Ookla’s information, the share of individuals operating Apple’s smaller iPhone 17 Pro fell to 30.6%, down from 34.9% for the iPhone 16 Pro the earlier 12 months.
With 55.5% of Speedtest customers operating the iPhone 17 Pro Max — solely barely down from the 12 months earlier than — which means 86.1% selected Apple’s pricier fashions over its extra fundamental ones. The normal iPhone 17 trailed with 7%, up from 5.9% the 12 months earlier than.
That’s a staggering supermajority of iPhone 17 sequence house owners favoring the costlier, fuller-featured fashions, not less than amongst those that use Ookla’s Speedtest to measure connectivity speeds. Whether Ookla’s pattern is consultant of the broader iPhone-owning inhabitants is one other query.
The Galaxy S25 Edge (proper) as in comparison with, what else, a slice of thin-crust pizza (left).
More folks use the iPhone Air than the Galaxy S25 Edge
Another discovering from Ookla’s report exhibits that amongst Speedtest customers, extra folks globally use the iPhone Air than the Galaxy S25 Edge — a spot that is even wider in the US, the place Apple’s slim cellphone outnumbers Samsung’s handset 3-to-1. In nations similar to South Korea, the place model loyalty to Samsung is powerful, the hole is narrower, but the iPhone Air nonetheless leads.
Ookla’s report measured the mannequin break up solely amongst customers of its Speedtest, so it might not mirror precise gross sales variations between the two fashions — simply the subset of customers who run connectivity exams. We’ve reached out to Ookla for clarification on these numbers.
The iPhone Air is extra in style in South Korea, Japan and Sweden
While the US noticed a modest 6.8% share of iPhone Air customers amongst the iPhone 17 sequence, the slim cellphone seems to be extra in style in different nations, although nowhere did it critically rival the Pro fashions.
South Korea led, with the slim handset accounting for 11.2% of iPhone 17 sequence customers, adopted by Japan (8.9%), Sweden (8.6%) and Singapore (8.4%). Those figures counsel that consumers in these nations prioritized design over options supplied by the Pro fashions, similar to an additional telephoto digicam and longer battery life.
Conversely, Ookla famous that the iPhone Air, which begins at $999, accounts for a a lot smaller share in nations the place consumers are extra price-sensitive and like reasonably priced handsets. This is very true in markets the place telephones are sometimes paid for upfront reasonably than by means of month-to-month service installments, as is frequent in the US and components of Europe. Brazil, Indonesia, India and Malaysia every noticed underneath 6% adoption amongst iPhone 17 sequence fashions.
A modem comparability between the Apple C1 (orange), Apple C1X (mild blue) and Qualcomm X80 (darkish blue). The C1 is utilized in the iPhone 16E, the C1X in the iPhone 17E and the Qualcomm X80 in the iPhone 17 sequence. This graph exhibits the obtain speeds of every modem working in the US market.
Apple’s modems are lastly rivaling Qualcomm’s, says Ookla
Another metric Ookla measured — becoming with its Speedtest deal with connectivity — compares Apple’s modem with Qualcomm’s rival chips. Apple has spent years growing its personal in-house cell modem, which it first launched with the C1 in the iPhone 16E. However, the iPhone 17 sequence didn’t use Apple’s modem, as a substitute sticking with Qualcomm’s X80. The newer iPhone 17E, in the meantime, makes use of Apple’s up to date C1X modem.
Ookla’s Speedtest information comes from round the world, with every nation’s distinctive 5G community setup creating totally different circumstances for obtain speeds. By and huge, whereas the C1X did not outperform Qualcomm’s X80, it reached parity — matching or approaching its rival’s obtain speeds.
More importantly, Ookla’s information exhibits Apple’s latest modem considerably surpassing the speeds of its predecessor, the C1 modem. “Apple’s silicon has reached a critical maturity point,” Ookla’s report states, and that seems to be true based mostly on the numbers. That might imply Apple modems will seem in the iPhone 18 lineup — although they’re going to be competing in opposition to even newer modems utilized in Android telephones, similar to the Qualcomm X85 and MediaTek M90.
The Speedtest information does not simply present iPhone capabilities for downloading fundamental information, but additionally their aptitude for different duties that may require fixed connectivity in the future, similar to accessing cloud-based AI for every thing from ChatGPT to AI brokers. Beyond smartphones, Ookla additionally factors to the C1X’s potential for successor modems that could possibly be utilized in future MacBooks, permitting laptops to connect with networks past Wi-Fi, “and in doing so, redefine baseline expectations for portable computing,” Ookla’s report mentioned.
