Apple’s iPhone Air is taking sales away from the iPhone 17 Pro while crushing the Galaxy S25 Edge
Apple’s iPhone Air is taking sales away from the iPhone 17 Pro while crushing the Galaxy S25 Edge
Publish Date: 2026-03-24 04:02:00
Source Domain: www.phonearena.com
Was Apple right to not follow up the 2024-released iPhone 16 Plus with a Plus-branded member of the iPhone 17 family last year and instead elect to start an entirely new iPhone Air series? Would it make any sense for the iPhone 18 lineup to include a Plus model next spring?It’s not easy to definitively answer those questions without official and detailed sales data for the iPhone 16 and 17 rosters, but a fascinating new Ookla report reveals some key differences between the apparent user bases of the first-ever iPhone Air and (possibly) the last-ever iPhone Plus that suggest Apple made a wise decision in 2025.
A big hit in Asia, a moderate one in the US
Based on Speedtest samples from around the world, it looks like the iPhone Air was more than twice as successful in Q4 2025 as the iPhone 16 Plus during the same timeframe of 2024, particularly excelling in countries like South Korea and Japan while finding significantly smaller audiences in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Poland.
Those are some pretty big disparities between countries like Japan and Taiwan, for instance. | Image by Ookla
Stateside, the razor-thin 6.5-inch flagship was not tremendously popular… or terribly unpopular, accounting for nearly 7 percent of the “iPhone generation 17’s” speed tests conducted between October and December 2025.
Now, I know exactly what you’re thinking. That can’t be the best and most reliable way of measuring a handset’s success, as the number of global Speedtest visits is impossible to scientifically correlate with a product’s actual sales figures. But when the iPhone 16 Plus held a microscopic share of its family’s user-initiated speed evaluations in Q4 2024 and the iPhone Air boosted that slice of the pie from 2.9 to 6.8 percent in the final three months of last year, it became pretty clear which of the two devices…
