Apple quietly buries the plus and the air already gasps for breath
The Air was supposed to be the coup de grâce for Apple’s awkward middle child. Instead, it has become the middle child.
Ookla’s Speedtest logs for Q4 2025 show the iPhone Air crawling to 6.8 % of active iPhones in the US—double the 2.9 % the iPhone 16 Plus managed a year earlier. Double sounds juicy until you remember the Pro Max swallowed 42 % in the same window. The Air isn’t winning; it’s simply losing slower than the Plus.
The thin illusion sells, but only to the undecided
5.6 mm of anodised aluminium is a party trick, not a strategy. In Seoul’s subway and Tokyo’s Yamanote line, commuters fetishise pocketability; Apple’s marketing team Photoshops that urge into global desire. Yet once the novelty wears off, the single camera and Lilliputian battery remain. Reviewers yawn. Operators discount. The Air drifts into the same subsidy swamp that drowned the Plus.
Apple’s own data, relayed to analysts in December, tells the rest: Air buyers skew heavily toward 24-month carrier contracts and away from the unlocked, cash-upfront crowd that splurges on Pro models. Translation: the Air is a financial stretch, not a lust object. The moment Samsung’s Galaxy S25 FE lands at $649 with a telephoto lens, that stretch snaps.
Why the ghost of the plus still haunts cupertino
Inside Apple Park, the product roadmap is a game of Whac-A-Mole. Kill the mini, the Plus appears. Kill the Plus, the Air appears. Now engineers are prototyping an iPhone 18 Plus again—same chassis width as the 17 Pro Max, minus the titanium and the tetraprism zoom. The logic: a 6.9-inch screen for $899 would plug the pricing hole between the vanilla iPhone and the Pro. The problem: it would also cannibalise the Air’s only superpower, thinness, while reminding buyers that Apple once deleted the Plus for a reason.
Supply-chain chatter out of Shenzhen is blunt: Foxconn has too many 6.1-inch Air panels left over and not enough 6.7-inch Plus glass on order. If the 18 Plus revives, Apple must re-open production lines it just mothballed. Tim Cook hates idle robots, but he hates inventory even more.
Meanwhile, the rumored iPhone 17 “Slim”—a titanium-framed 6.3-inch wedge even thinner than the Air—waits in the wings. One of these models will die so the other can live. History says the cheaper one always loses.
The Air’s slim victory is a mirage. Apple swapped a limp for a crutch and called it progress. When the next quarterly numbers arrive, the Pro Max will still tower, the base iPhone will still sell in volume, and the Air will sit in that uncomfortable purgatory once occupied by the Plus—alive, but barely breathing.