iPhone Air is twice as successful as the iPhone 16 Plus, new report finds

According to a new report from Ookla, theiPhone Airis about twice as successful as the Plus model it replaced, namely theiPhone 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%. TheiPhone 17is also more successful than theiPhone 16, with 7% of the overall pie, compared to 5.9%. Naturally then, as you'd expect, theiPhone 17 ProandiPhone 17 Pro Maxare decreasing their share of the overall iPhone 17 family sales compared to theiPhone 16 ProandiPhone 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-samplesSamsung's Galaxy S25 Edgeby 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 theiPhone 16e) that can only achieve much slower download speeds. Source