GoKawiilApple replaced its large baseline model, the iPhone 16 Plus, with the super-thin iPhone Air in its lineup last September, and a new report says uptake 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 made up 86% of all iPhone 17 series phones sampled.
Mobile analytics firm Ookla released a new report showing that 6.8% of iPhone 17 series 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 previous generation. That shows an increase in appeal for the 6.5-inch thin phone over the handset it replaced, which had a slightly larger 6.7-inch display. Thin was slightly more in. (Disclosure: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as CNET, but was recently sold to Accenture.)
Ookla's graph showing the split in phone ownership between generations of the iPhone 16 series (in gray) and iPhone 17 lineup (in blue). Note the second from the top comparison, which is between the iPhone 16 Plus and the iPhone Air. Ookla
That increase had to come from somewhere. According to Ookla's data, the share of people running Apple's smaller iPhone 17 Pro fell to 30.6%, down from 34.9% for the iPhone 16 Pro the previous year.
With 55.5% of Speedtest users running the iPhone 17 Pro Max -- only slightly down from the year before -- that means 86.1% chose Apple's pricier models over its more basic ones. The standard iPhone 17 trailed with 7%, up from 5.9% the year before.
That's a staggering supermajority of iPhone 17 series owners favoring the more expensive, fuller-featured 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) as compared to, what else, a slice of thin-crust pizza (left). Jesse Orrall/CNET
More people use the iPhone Air than the Galaxy S25 Edge
Another finding from Ookla's report shows that among Speedtest users, more people globally use the iPhone Air than the Galaxy S25 Edge -- a gap that's even wider in the US, where Apple's slim phone outnumbers Samsung's handset 3-to-1. In countries such as South Korea, where brand loyalty to Samsung is strong, the gap is narrower, but the iPhone Air still leads.
Ookla's report measured the model split only among users of its Speedtest, so it may not reflect actual sales differences between the two models -- just the subset of users who run connectivity tests. We've reached out to Ookla for clarification on these numbers.
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