Autumn is here, and as the leaves begin to fall, so too does a new generation of Apple smartphones fall into users’ hands—and this year, the iPhone 17 Pro leads the pack.
Last year, Apple shook the tree by adding a new Camera Control button to the right-hand side, alongside the typical new Apple Silicon chip. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this year’s crop was a little more subdued after that, but instead, the entire lineup offers some intriguing innovations.
While the iPhone Air has a revolutionary space-optimizing design, the iPhone 17 Pro continues to push the technical envelope further for users with more demanding needs. This year’s iteration keeps the momentum from the iPhone 16 Pro and might just be my favourite iPhone model to date.
iPhone 17 Pro: Specs
On paper, the iPhone 17 Pro has a decent leg up on its predecessor. The display is still a 6.3″ Super Retina XDR; however, the bevels continue to shrink ever so slightly, yielding an ounce of additional display. Pulling in the opposite direction from last year’s model, which enabled the lowest brightness possible at one nit, the Pro can now peak at 3000 nits outdoors. This helps alleviate an evergreen qualm with smartphone usage: actually seeing your screen while out and about, so long as you have the battery life to keep the display tuned up that high.
And speaking of battery, once again Apple is touting its best battery life to date. I always take these promises with a pinch of salt; smartphones are always improving their battery usage, while simultaneously increasing the demand upon those batteries. Even then, power performance takes a hit over time, so a fresh new phone may do well at first, but ultimately start to wear down after about a year. It seems an unavoidable cycle.
“The iPhone 17 Pro’s camera array feels like the culmination of Apple’s photographic revolution over the last few years, fully realizing the potential of last year’s changes.”
However, the iPhone 17 Pro actually makes good on this promise. I’ve been using iPhones for over a decade, and for once I’m actually impressed with the (initial) increase in battery performance. Specifically, Apple rates the new model’s lifespan at up to 33 hours of native video playback (up from the previous generation’s 27 hours), and the figure holds up pretty well. We’re actually approaching a future where one could get through more than one day on a single charge, without much compromise to their usage habits.
…so long as you’re not leaning too heavily on intensive graphics. While I observed better battery consumption during everyday tasks—scrolling, messaging, playing music, and even taking photos, all at a moderate brightness—that gauge still declines a little faster than I’d like when playing games for extended periods.
This improvement is partly thanks to a new feature that’s not in the iPhone 17 Pro itself, but in its operating system. iOS 26 likes to gobble up battery, but luckily, it also offers a new Adaptive Power feature that adapts to usage patterns and intelligently conserves power accordingly. It takes at least a week to “learn” your patterns, and while my everyday usage varies considerably from my usage for review purposes, I’m beginning to see the effects. Should all else fail and you find yourself doing a desperate quick charge, with an appropriate charger, you can quickly top up by 50% within about 20 minutes.
Moving along to the processor, the iPhone 17 Pro’s A19 Pro chip adds Neural Accelerators to its 6-core GPU but is otherwise similar on paper to the A18 Pro. There’s a slight improvement to the performance for demanding apps, or even day-to-day apps, thanks to Apple Silicon’s ongoing endeavours to optimize the internal design and efficiency of the chips themselves. In terms of comparing raw numbers, the A19 Pro chip isn’t a lot more to write home about; in actual application, though, there’s a palpable improvement.
iPhone 17 Pro Camera
Once again, it’s the Camera where the iPhone 17 Pro reaches farthest—literally, in this case. Optical zoom options have expanded to include 4x and 8x, as well as .5x, 1x, and 2x, replacing last year’s 5x option. The Pro camera system has been upgraded, making all three lenses—Main, Ultra Wide, and Telephoto—a full 48MP, and supporting the Fusion approach to postprocessing. This array of set zoom options is a big improvement in itself, but the cherries on top are the new sensors.
For the first time, the iPhone’s camera sensors are square, which allows for some more creative application of the Fusion camera. The most notable application for this? Easier group selfies, thanks to the same Center Stage tech that improved FaceTime calls on iPads a few years ago. Open the selfie camera facing only yourself, then add more people in, and you’ll see the shot automatically adjust to fit everyone in intuitively. In theory, this means the days of rotating your phone to landscape to cram people into a selfie are effectively over… in most circumstances.
The iPhone 17 Pro’s camera array feels like the culmination of Apple’s photographic revolution over the last few years, fully realizing the potential of last year’s changes and offering a camera multitool worthy of the “Pro” moniker. That’s also an apt summary of the changes under the hood: sticking the landing of last generation’s leap, and offering demanding smartphone users a genuine powerhouse option.
iPhone 17 Pro Design
This year’s iPhone 17 Pro model also made a long stride forward in the design department. The square camera array on the back has been replaced with a new rectangular “plateau,” which runs the width of the device to covertly store the antennae and camera array. Admittedly, I balked at this approach for a moment during the announcement livestream, but once I actually picked it up for myself, I was a convert.
iPhone 17 Pro’s physical design has been subtly overhauled, enabling all of its innovations. Apple has ditched titanium in favour of a new aluminum unibody design. This not only keeps the device lighter, but also helps enable better thermal conductivity for the A19 Pro chip. In fact, keeping the device cool is so paramount that Apple has introduced a vapour chamber, effectively liquid-cooling the chip with deionized water sealing inside.
Again, in the reality of actual use, I did find the iPhone 17 Pro still does get warm when you push its applications in the right circumstances; that’s natural. But I did also find it stayed much cooler overall than the 16 Pro, or any other generation, for that matter. This is definitely worth removing the physical SIM card slot and shifting to eSIMs.
Comparing the 16 Pro and 17 Pro simultaneously, the newcomer feels a little sturdier or denser, yet sleeker at the same time. Ceramic Shield is no longer just for displays, as this year’s Pro phones have been protected front and back with Apple’s signature coating. Between this and the unibody design, the iPhone 17 Pro is incredibly slick, and it’s almost a shame to cover it with a case.
This year’s crop of finishes—silver, deep blue, and cosmic orange—emphasizes this with a dash of vibrant colour; I’ve always insisted on black or dark metal finishes in my devices, but the cosmic orange quickly won me over.
iOS 26’s big “Liquid Glass” overhaul looks better on the iPhone 17 Pro’s display, but your mileage with it may vary. So far, I’ve found the new look to be fine at best, unnoticeable at worst. But I have observed an overall improvement to the look of everything I do on my smartphone, thanks to the adaptive refresh rates of ProMotion, which adjust the screen’s refresh rates according to what’s happening on-screen. For example, the display refreshes and processes faster while scrolling through a news feed, then drops off once you stop to read something, and you aren’t actively making the phone work for a few moments.
“…the iPhone 17 Pro is incredibly slick, and it’s almost a shame to cover it with a case.”
Again, the iPhone 17 Pro is truly living up to its epithet in this department as well. It’s a luxury, pro-level experience even when holding it for basic tasks or idle scrolling.
On the accessory front, Apple has the usual form-fitting offerings for cases, like the simple clear case or the new TechWoven textured cases. For my money, the Silicone Case is the perfect complement (especially in black, on the cosmic orange body), but there’s a quality selection of options amassing.
Application
I’ve been in the Pro ecosystem for a few years now, since the 14 Pro, and the iPhone 17 Pro continues the trend I’ve praised across four generations: refining and supplementing the previous year’s experience. Some years, Apple pushes a little harder than others, and this year is one of those times when they raise the bar a little higher than usual.
Each new phone is always a little nicer than the last, in the grand scheme of things, but this step forward goes farther in reality than the stats on paper would imply. It’s not just a culmination of the philosophies and systems they started putting in place last generation, but perhaps a realization of how iPhones should have been working this entire time.
From scrolling social media to reading ebooks, to watching YouTube videos, to playing games natively or over streaming, the iPhone 17 Pro is a delight to use. In testing it over a two-week period, there was almost no point where I thought to myself, “Oh, I wish it would do this a little better,” or “too bad it can’t do that.” I’ve never had a smoother time operating a smart device. With an internet connection available, every operation on this smartphone is practically as smooth as it can be; it feels like a step toward the best high-tech “datapads” science fiction has concocted to date.
Again, the camera was a standout, particularly in capturing everyday family moments. I was able to capture a wagon ride with family from both angles with the Dual Capture feature, showing the scenery whizzing by while also capturing the passengers’ reactions, and despite the jostling of the vehicle, the landscape and the passengers are held stable and in focus. And all while capturing in 1080p, Dolby Vision sound, at 30fps, and the device stayed far cooler than the previous model would have. A few taps of the screen or the Camera Control button, and family memories can be preserved with perfect clarity, or pro-level photos immortalized.
Now, I’m still not an Apple Intelligence convert. Since it was introduced last year, it hasn’t done much to win me over, short of the new ability to take a screenshot or picture and quickly search for something in the picture, like taking a picture of furniture to identify where it was bought. Message summaries or priority notifications don’t quite get the point, and I have no desire to use anything generative like the “Genmojis” in Image Playground.
Given the state of tech today, a lot of effort has been devoted to making Intelligence more enticing, and it’s just wasted on me. I’d like to see that effort go into more passively helpful features like Adaptive Power or the Live Translation in the AirPods Pro instead.
My other qualm is the state of gaming on mobile. The iPhone 17 Pro has practically everything gamers could want in a mobile gaming platform from a hardware perspective… but the actual software on offer is still lagging behind. Destiny Rising is a perfect example of where the market could be at, and things like remote playing your next-gen console on your phone work terrifically with this powerful display, but the App Store is still lacking in heavy hitters. Essentially, the phone is all dressed up and ready to go, but needs a dance partner; the hardware is ready to transcend the bonds of “phone gaming,” but the software is still lagging behind.
In every other way, though, the iPhone 17 Pro is practically everything I could want as a creator, and as a customer with high performance expectations: a multimedia Swiss Army Knife; a DSLR with broad, yet readily accessible options; and a communications hub for all the different layers of my daily life, all rolled into one device I can easily carry wherever I go.
It’s a requisite step up in terms of power—already the 16 Pro feels noticeably different by comparison—but this year, the iPhone 17 Pro offers a lot more than just a bump up in speed. The iPhone 17 Pro is the new bar by which Apple mobile devices should be judged by, and I look forward to seeing how its innovations can be applied to other devices in its ecosystem.
