Early anecdotes indicated that Apple’s iPhone Air was having a blast in China, largely due to its eSIM-only novelty in a country where eSIMs for smartphones were generally not available until just a few weeks back. A new report, however, has now raised doubts over that assumption by entirely glossing over the ultra-slim variant.
Counterpoint Research: “Apple accounted for one in every four smartphones sold in China during October, growing 37% YoY”
To wit, Counterpoint Research has just released a new report on the sales dynamics in China’s smartphone market, noting:
Smartphone sales in China rose by 8 percent year-over-year in October, largely driven by a 37 year-over-year surge in the sale of Apple’s iPhones, with 80 percent of those sales concentrated in the new iPhone 17 lineup.
Counterpoint Research’s Market Pulse Monthly Smartphone Sell-Through Tracker for October 2025 shows that the base iPhone 17 model experienced the highest sales momentum in China relative to the iPhone 16 series.
The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are also selling well in the world’s largest smartphone market.
“Xiaomi secured the No. 2 spot in October for the first time in over a decade.”
“It is the best ever start to a December quarter for Apple, with total sell-through far surpassing its previous peak in October 2021.”
“One in four smartphones sold in China during October was an iPhone – a milestone hit only once before, in 2022, when Apple had fewer rivals in the premium segment.”
Critically, the report does not mention the iPhone Air even once, raising red flags over its sales momentum.
Do note that Counterpoint Research had noted back in October that the iPhone Air constituted 3 percent of Apple’s sales mix in China and the US vs. 4 percent for the iPhone 16 Plus, which indicated a slowing sales momentum.
Now, however, the report has eschewed any mention of the ultra-slim variant, raising doubts over the iPhone Air’s sales momentum in the world’s largest smartphone market – China.
This comes as the Apple iPhone Air 2 has now been delayed until the spring of 2027. While initial reports indicated that the delay was prompted by Apple’s desire to equip its ultra-slim variant with a dual-camera setup, Bloomberg’s prolific tipster, Mark Gurman, believes it has more to do with the upcoming A20 chip that would leverage TSMC’s 2nm process, replete with Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) packaging, allowing components such as the SoC and the DRAM to be directly integrated at the wafer level.
Given the production constraints around TSMC’s 2nm node, Apple’s launch cadence changes – which would see the iPhone Air launch with the iPhone 18 and the iPhone 18e in the spring of 2027 instead of the fall of 2026 – might be an efficient way of managing limited supply for the A20 chip.
Of course, Apple always expected the iPhone Air to constitute between 6 percent and 8 percent of its annual iPhone sales. As such, the ultra-thin smartphone retains utility for Apple as an experimental platform for testing out new technology. However, for Counterpoint Research to remove any mention of the iPhone Air from its latest report raises quite a lot of concerns with respect to its sales momentum.
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