Apple 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.)

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.

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.

The 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, though nowhere did it seriously rival the Pro models.

South Korea led, 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%). Those figures suggest that buyers in these countries prioritized design over features offered by the Pro models, such as an extra telephoto camera and longer battery life.

Conversely, Ookla noted that the iPhone Air, which starts at $999, accounts for a much smaller share in countries where buyers are more price-sensitive and prefer affordable handsets. This is especially true in markets where phones are typically paid for upfront rather than through monthly carrier installments, as is common in the US and parts of Europe. Brazil, Indonesia, India and Malaysia each saw under 6% adoption among iPhone 17 series models.

Apple's modems are finally rivaling Qualcomm's, says Ookla

Another metric Ookla measured -- fitting with its Speedtest focus on connectivity -- compares Apple's modem with Qualcomm's rival chips. Apple has 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, instead sticking with Qualcomm's X80. The newer iPhone 17E, meanwhile, uses Apple's updated C1X modem.

Ookla's Speedtest data comes from around the world, with each country's unique 5G network setup creating different conditions for download speeds. By and large, while the C1X didn't outperform Qualcomm's X80, it reached parity -- matching or approaching its rival's download speeds.

More importantly, Ookla's data shows Apple's newest modem significantly surpassing the speeds of its predecessor, the C1 modem. "Apple's silicon has reached a critical maturity point," Ookla's report states, and that appears to be true based on the numbers. That could mean Apple modems will appear in the iPhone 18 lineup -- though they'll be competing against even newer modems used in Android phones, such as the Qualcomm X85 and MediaTek M90.

The Speedtest data doesn't just show iPhone capabilities for downloading basic data, but also their aptitude for other tasks that will require constant connectivity in the future, such as accessing cloud-based AI for everything from ChatGPT to AI agents. Beyond smartphones, Ookla also points to 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, redefine baseline expectations for portable computing," Ookla's report said.