The iPhone 17 Pro phones are far ahead of their siblings, but the iPhone Air has fans
Apple has replaced its first large model, the iPhone 16 Pluswith a very thin body iPhone Air to its lineup last September, and a new report says acquisitions tripled — suggesting the company’s bet on better design won over fans. But it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the Pro models, which make up 86% of all iPhone 17 series phones sampled.
Mobile analytics company Ookla has released a new report showing that 6.8% of iPhone 17 series owners using Speedtests in the fourth quarter of 2025 are using the iPhone Air. That compares to 2.9% who used the iPhone 16 Plus in the previous generation. That reflects the increased appeal of the slim 6.5-inch phone over the handset it replaced, which had a larger 6.7-inch display. Thin was very intrusive. (Disclosure: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as CNET, but was recently sold to Accenture.)
Ookla’s graph showing the breakdown of phone ownership between generations of the iPhone 16 series (gray) and the iPhone 17 series (blue). Note the second in the above comparison, which is between the iPhone 16 Plus and the iPhone Air.
That increase had to come from somewhere. According to Ookla data, the share of people using Apple’s smaller iPhone 17 Pro dropped to 30.6%, down from 34.9% for last year’s iPhone 16 Pro.
With 55.5% of Speedtest users using iPhone 17 Pro Max — down only slightly from last year — that means 86.1% chose Apple’s premium models over the basic ones. The standard iPhone 17 followed with 7%, up from 5.9% last year.
That’s a surprisingly large number of iPhone 17 series owners who prefer the more expensive, full-featured models, at least among those who use Ookla’s Speedtest to measure connection speeds. Whether Ookla’s sample is representative of the broader population of iPhone owners is another question.
The Galaxy S25 Edge (right) compared to, what else, a slice of thin-crust pizza (left).
More people use iPhone Air than Galaxy S25 Edge
Another finding in Ookla’s report shows that among Speedtest users, more people around the world use the iPhone Air than the Galaxy S25 Edge — an even wider gap in the US, where Apple’s smallest phone outsells Samsung’s handset 3-to-1. In countries like South Korea, where brand loyalty to Samsung is strong, the gap is smaller, but the iPhone Air still leads.
Ookla’s report measured the model only among users of its Speedtest, so it may not reflect the true sales difference between the two models — a small subset of users doing the connection test. We reached out to Ookla to clarify these numbers.
iPhone Air is very popular in South Korea, Japan and Sweden
While the US saw a limited share of 6.8% of iPhone Air users among the iPhone 17 series, the small phone seems to be more popular in other countries, although nowhere did it compete with the Pro models.
South Korea led the way, with the small handset accounting for 11.2% of iPhone 17 series users, followed by Japan (8.9%), Sweden (8.6%) and Singapore (8.4%). Those figures suggest that buyers in these countries prioritize design over features offered by the Pro models, such as an extra telephoto camera and longer battery life.
In contrast, Ookla noted that the iPhone Air, which starts at $999, accounts for the smallest share in countries where consumers are more price-sensitive and prefer affordable phones. This is especially true in markets where phones are usually prepaid rather than paying in installments to the carrier, as is common in the US and parts of Europe. Brazil, Indonesia, India and Malaysia each received less than 6% adoption among the iPhone 17 series models.
Modem comparison between Apple C1 (orange), Apple C1X (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 graph shows the download speed of each modem operating in the US market.
Apple’s modems end up competing with Qualcomm, Ookla said
Another metric Ookla measured — consistent with its Speedtest focus on connectivity — compares Apple’s modem to rival Qualcomm’s chips. Apple has spent years developing its home modem, first introduced with the C1 in the iPhone 16E. However, the iPhone 17 series did not use Apple’s modem, instead sticking to Qualcomm’s X80. The new iPhone 17E, meanwhile, uses Apple’s updated C1X modem.
Ookla’s Speedtest data comes from around the world, and each country’s unique 5G network setup creates different conditions for download speeds. In particular, while the C1X didn’t surpass Qualcomm’s X80, it did reach parity — matching or approaching the download speeds of its competitors.
More importantly, Ookla’s data shows Apple’s new modem significantly outperforms its predecessor, the C1 modem. “Apple’s silicon has reached a critical point of maturity,” says Ookla’s report, and that seems to be true based on the numbers. That could mean Apple’s modems will appear in the iPhone 18 lineup — or they’ll be competing with newer modems used in Android phones, such as the Qualcomm X85 and MediaTek M90.
Speedtest data shows not only the iPhone’s basic data retrieval capabilities, but also their capabilities for other functions that will require constant communication in the future, such as accessing cloud-based AI for everything from ChatGPT to AI agents. In addition to smartphones, Ookla also demonstrates the capabilities of the C1X modems that can be used in future MacBooks, allowing laptops to connect to networks beyond Wi-Fi, “and in doing so, redefine basic expectations of a laptop,” said Ookla’s report.
