The iPhone 17 Pro Phones Far Outnumber Their Siblings, but the iPhone Air Has Fans
Apple replaced its large base model, the iPhone 16 Pluswith the super fine iPhoneAir in its lineup last September, and a new report says adoption has tripled, suggesting the company’s bet on better design has won over fans. But that’s still a drop in the ocean compared to the Pro models, which accounted for 86% of all iPhone 17 series phones sampled.
Mobile analytics company Ookla released a new report showing that 6.8% of iPhone 17 series owners who took speed tests in Q4 2025 used the iPhone Air. This compares to 2.9% who used the previous generation iPhone 16 Plus. This shows an increase in appeal for the slim 6.5-inch phone compared to the handset it replaced, which had a slightly larger 6.7-inch screen. Thin was slightly more present. (Disclosure: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as CNET, but was recently sold to Accenture.)
Chart from Ookla showing the distribution of phone ownership between generations of the iPhone 16 series (gray) and the iPhone 17 line (blue). Note the second comparison at the top, which is between the iPhone 16 Plus and the iPhone Air.
This increase had to come from somewhere. According to Ookla data, the share of people using Apple’s smaller iPhone 17 Pro fell to 30.6%, compared to 34.9% for the iPhone 16 Pro the year before.
With 55.5% of Speedtest users running the iPhone 17 Pro Max — only down slightly from the previous year — that means 86.1 percent chose Apple’s more expensive models over the more basic models. The standard iPhone 17 lagged behind at 7%, up from 5.9% the year before.
This is an overwhelming majority of iPhone 17 series owners favoring the more expensive and feature-rich models, at least among those who use Ookla’s Speedtest to measure connectivity speeds. Whether Ookla’s sample is representative of the broader iPhone-owning population is another question.
The Galaxy S25 Edge (right) compared to what else, a slice of thin crust pizza (left).
More people use the iPhone Air than the Galaxy S25 Edge
Another finding from Ookla’s report shows that among Speedtest users, more people around the world use the iPhone Air than the Galaxy S25 Edge – an even bigger gap in the United States, where Apple’s thin phone numbers outnumber Samsung’s by a ratio of 3 to 1. In countries like South Korea, where Samsung brand loyalty is strong, the gap is narrower, but the iPhone Air still leads.
Ookla’s report measured the model’s distribution only among users of its Speedtest. So it may not reflect actual sales differences between the two models, but only the subset of users who are running connectivity tests. We’ve reached out to Ookla for clarification on these numbers.
iPhone Air is more popular in South Korea, Japan and Sweden
While the US saw a modest 6.8% share of iPhone Air users among the iPhone 17 series, the slim phone appears to be more popular in other countries, although nowhere has it seriously competed with the Pro models.
South Korea leads the way, with the slim handset accounting for 11.2% of iPhone 17 series users, followed by Japan (8.9%), Sweden (8.6%) and Singapore (8.4%). These numbers suggest that buyers in these countries prioritized design over the features offered by the Pro models, such as an additional telephoto lens and longer battery life.
Conversely, Ookla noted that the iPhone Air, which starts at $999, represents a much smaller share in countries where buyers are more price sensitive and prefer affordable phones. This is especially true in markets where phones are typically paid for upfront rather than through monthly carrier installments, as is common in the United States and parts of Europe. Brazil, Indonesia, India, and Malaysia each saw an adoption rate below 6% among iPhone 17 series models.
A modem comparison between the Apple C1 (orange), Apple C1X (light blue), and Qualcomm X80 (dark blue). The C1 is used in the iPhone 16E, the C1X in the iPhone 17E, and the Qualcomm X80 in the iPhone 17 series. This chart shows the download speeds of each modem operating in the US market.
Apple’s modems finally rival Qualcomm’s, says Ookla
Another metric measured by Ookla – matching its connectivity-focused Speedtest – compares Apple’s modem to rival chips from Qualcomm. Apple spent years developing its own in-house mobile modem, which it first introduced with the C1 in the iPhone 16E. However, the iPhone 17 series did not use Apple’s modem, but stuck to Qualcomm’s X80. The new iPhone 17E, on the other hand, uses Apple’s updated C1X modem.
Ookla’s Speedtest data comes from around the world, with each country’s unique 5G network configuration creating different conditions for download speeds. Overall, while the C1X didn’t outperform Qualcomm’s X80, it achieved parity, matching or approaching its rival’s download speeds.
More importantly, Ookla data shows that Apple’s latest modem far exceeds the speeds of its predecessor, the C1 modem. “Apple silicon has reached a critical maturity point,” the Ookla report states, and that appears to be true based on the numbers. This could mean that Apple modems will appear in the iPhone 18 lineup, although they will compete with even newer modems used in Android phones, such as the Qualcomm X85 and MediaTek M90.
The Speedtest data not only shows the iPhone’s abilities to download basic data, but also its suitability for other tasks that will require constant connectivity in the future, like access to cloud-based AI for everything from ChatGPT to AI agents. Beyond smartphones, Ookla also highlights the C1X’s potential for successor modems that could be used in future MacBooks, allowing laptops to connect to networks beyond Wi-Fi, “and in doing so, redefining basic expectations for portable computing,” the Ookla report says.
