iPhone 17 Model Popularity

David Smith on Mastodon:

The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption. 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%).

Matt Birchler adds:

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. (I am eyeballing the latter.)

Neither the Air nor the “E” phones are popular enough to be on the TelemetryDeck chart. Meanwhile, Counterpoint says the 17e is the seventh most popular smartphone in the world. The Air does not make Counterpoint’s top ten; neither do any folding phones. The 17 Pro Max and 17 Pro are, apparently, the second- and third-most popular smartphone models worldwide.