iPhone 17 Model Popularity
Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith.
Generally they followed the usual adoption pattern, and overall did very well ending at around 20% of total usage.
With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs the Air’s 0.3%).
This works out to about 6% of my iPhone users using the iPhone Air, or about 20x more proportionally than David's more mainstream app. Honestly, the numbers are pretty striking here, with David showing a pretty even split between the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max, slightly decreasing in that order. Meanwhile, almost half of my users are on the Pro Max, another quarter are on the Pro, and the 17 is neck and neck with the Air. Clearly, my customers lean more enthusiast and are higher end buyers on average.
The apparent unpopularity of the iPhone Air is not what caught my eye. Instead, it is the percentage of iPhone 17e users: 0.5% of Widgetsmith users, and something like 1–2% of the total iPhone 17 generation in Birchler’s.
The iPhone 17e hasn’t been on sale for as long, though.
In the entire year since the iPhone Air was announced, I’ve never seen Apple advertise it. No billboards, no commercials. It raises a chicken/egg question: did no one buy it because Apple didn’t market it, or did Apple not market it because no one wanted it?
[…]
But the shame of these low iPhone Air sales reminds me, very much, of the late great iPhone 12 and 13 Mini — also a truly great design, also terribly disappointing sales numbers.
Previously:
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Pretty sad about this and I hope Apple continues the Air anyway. The Air was my favorite iPhone in the 17 series. It really feels like a completely new kind of device, as if you are only holding the display glass.
I think Apple nerfed the launch completely. It has one camera less than the base iPhone, shorter battery life, no DP-Alt support, but then it's priced $200 above the base iPhone. So, too expensive for the base iPhone crowd, to limited to the iPhone Pro crowd.
I reckon the Air is best viewed as a step towards the Duo. The Duo introduced significantly new hardware which would mean more opportunities for things to go wrong during production and during customer usage. There are some problems that only become known once the product is produced at scale, eg the paint problems on the first white iPhone and Antenna Gate. The Air allowed Apple to mitigate some of the risk of the Duo by producing some aspects of it at scale.
Yeah, but really? It could have been handled better. Liquid Glass, iPhone Air, which by the way, isn't to iPhone 17.... And now, [pick your OS] 27.2?
There's moving to where the puck is headed, and well, there's Apple. (BTW, who should have attribution to what I just said. Hint: He's been CEO - and more - of the company when he sadly passed away.)
Nowadays, Apple seems to believe that Xcode 27.2 should be "like" 27.0 except for... the developers? Apple also believes that 27.2 should be released before 27.1, or (you know what the rest of the world has been on) something like... 27.0.1? They JUST finished making all OS versioning be the same.....
Ah, got it. They control versioning, and it 27.1 that will contain the [pick your OS] everything related to iPhone Duo. Jeez....
