Deciding on whether to get an iPhone 17 Pro or 17 Pro Max couldn’t be easier. These two “pro” phones have no compromises. Whereas the iPhone Air is all about showing off its ridiculously thin and light design, the iPhone 17 Pros go in the opposite direction with thicker and heavier designs. Apple is basically saying, “F*ck all that skinny noise, let’s throw everything but the kitchen sink at them.”
Even better cameras on the front and back? Check. The longest battery life of any iPhone? Check. The most powerful mobile chip? Check. A custom-designed vapor chamber to make sure the iPhone 17 Pros don’t overheat? Check. How about an in-your-face Cosmic Orange colorway that’s actually fun? Check.
iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max
Apple’s very best iPhones do not compromise on anything. Battery life, cameras, performance, displays—everything is better.
Pros
- Best-in-class performance
- Incredible cameras
- Long-lasting battery life
- Even brighter screens
- Fun colors like Cosmic Orange
Cons
- Thicker and heavier
- Camera Control remains unloved
Admittedly, the iPhone 17 Pros are not as lust-worthy compared to the iPhone Air. But that’s okay, because they don’t need to be. They’re “pro” iPhones, which means they should be the best tools above everything else. And after a week of putting the iPhone 17 Pros through their paces, I’m overjoyed that Apple has now made its top-of-the-line phones actually pro-worthy. Getting everything doesn’t come cheap. The iPhone 17 Pro starts at $1,099 and the iPhone 17 Pro Max starts at $1,199. But if you want no tradeoffs for the device you’ll likely use the most, Apple really delivers.
Pro design
Holding the iPhone 17 Pros in my hands, I got nostalgic for how Apple has evolved the iPhone in the last 18 years. The iPhone 17 Pros return back to the original iPhone’s aluminum body, this time with a Ceramic Shield glass cutout for MagSafe charging. Meanwhile, the camera bump or “plateau” where the triple-lens camera system sits has extended to the far edge. There’s an antenna band that wraps around the plateau that helps boost wireless signal strength. On U.S. models, there’s a pill-shaped hole on the top for mmWave 5G. U.S. models are also eSIM-only, whereas some international versions still have the SIM card slot. eSIM models do have one upside over the eSIM versions, but I’ll get to that later.
Even with rounded-off sides, the design of the iPhone 17 Pros is practical with a capital P, and Apple has stopped trying to hide its characteristics. Instead, it’s leaning into the heftier footprints to highlight their stacked capabilities. The plateau does balance the phone a bit more than before, but there’s still some wobble on a table, unlike the Pixel phones that rest more stably.
I’m a fan of the Deep Blue and Silver; Cosmic Orange is a sharp color (though a nightmare to photograph), but a bit too eye-catching for me, even with a case on. There’s no missing the giant orange plateau peeking from a case. Speaking of cases, goddamn, these phones are even more tank-like with some protection. Apple sent over its new TechWoven case for the iPhone 17 Pro and a clear case for the 17 Pro Max, and though they’re relatively slim, third-party cases really add to the bulkiness of the phones. The TechWoven case is a sort of redemption for the flimsy and easily scuffable FineWoven cases that were released a few years ago and then quickly discontinued for their poor quality. I tried out ones from Casetify and Moft, and with them on, we’re nearly at Otterbox case-levels of thiccc. I live dangerously most of the year without cases on my personal phones, but most people do not. Generally, people need to protect their $1,100+ iPhones 17 Pros in cases and screen protectors because, well, accidents happen, but also because they may trade their device in next year toward the next iPhone. I totally get it, but just know that your hands and fingers are gonna feel like they’re hitting the gym daily.
There will be critics who hate the switch from titanium to aluminum, but just like how the phones are thicker to fit bigger batteries and a new 4x telephoto lens with up to 8x optical-quality zoom, there’s a good reason why Apple went back to a less premium metal.
Pro display
Apple didn’t increase the screens on the iPhone 17 Pros. Thank god! They’re the same 6.3 and 6.9-inch Super Retina XDR displays with 120Hz “ProMotion” refresh rates for the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max, respectively. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing new to them. The screens can now reach up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness outdoors, which is a nice plus for outdoor visibility, and there’s an anti-reflection coating that reduces reflections by 33%, according to Apple. That makes the screens brighter than Samsung’s best Galaxy S25 Ultra, and the anti-reflection actually works. It’s a small thing, but not seeing the reflection of the overhead lights in our office is a real quality-of-life booster.
Pro performance
Pro iPhones have had the best-in-industry performance for many years now, and even the very best Android phones with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chips have not yet caught up. It’s honestly felt like Apple has been doing victory laps for a few years as it continued to leave iPhone competitors in its dust. Most iPhone Pro owners never push their devices to their full chip potential. It’s really the creative professionals—photographers and video creators—and gamers who have complained about performance on iPhones. They’ve asked for better sustained performance on iPhone. So that’s exactly what Apple gave them in the iPhone 17 Pros.
The new A19 Pro chip with 6-core CPU, 6-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine is an absolute beast that further widens the gap between the iPhone 17 Pros and the closest Android flagships like Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra. (Though that may change very soon with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip that’s due to be announced in a few days, and will make their way into 2026 flagship Android phones.) I’ve been throwing every app that would have caused my iPhone 16 Pro to melt my hand and toss up a warning to let it cool down, and the iPhone 17 Pros have kept cool and carried on.
One of my favorite recording apps, Nizo, lets you record video on a sequential timeline. You can go in and shorten clips and rearrange them with ease. And when you’re recording video, you can choose from various frame rates and film-like color profiles for more cinematic-like shots. Because the app is basically a camera and a video editing app all rolled into one, the project files are huge, and exporting can take a long time. If left alone to export on my iPhone 16 Pro (and older models), sometimes big video exports would throttle after starting or simply crash because the A18 Pro chip got too hot and spread across the phone, causing it to lock up. I’m no professional video creator shooting in ProRes Apple Log, but my “prosumer” workflow for personal vlogs and family videos is something that I think an iPhone Pro should be able to handle without becoming a fire hazard. On the iPhone 17 Pros, Nizo thankfully runs not just a little better, but a lot better and faster for exports, most likely because of several iPhone 17 Pro design considerations. Even wilder is that the app isn’t even optimized for the A19 Pro chip or iOS 26, and it runs better out of the box.
First, the A19 Pro is located higher up in the iPhone 17 Pros so heat is pushed towards the top of the plateau and felt less on your fingers touching the backside. Second, the vapor cooling chamber helps spread dissipated heat from the chip and disperse it elsewhere inside the iPhone 17 Pros. And third, the thicker aluminum bodies not only allow the phones to naturally transfer heat quicker than titanium, but there’s more room for the heat to flow than getting trapped between a skinny frame glass sandwich.
Improving the thermals and, as a result, sustained performance in the iPhone 17 Pros wasn’t an afterthought; it was an intentional design decision that put function before form. It seems so un-Apple at first, but as I said in my hands-on, these iPhone 17 Pros are the mirror to the M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros (and newer) that clearly show the advantage of letting the silicon engineers drive just a little bit. If Jony Ive and his old posse of industrial designers leaving Apple means more thoughtful design that adheres to Steve Jobs’ famous “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,” philosophy then I am all for it.
For regular iPhone stuff, the iPhone 17 Pros don’t break a sweat. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time messing with new AI apps, and only time will tell how well Apple Intelligence evolves, especially with the new Siri that’s delayed until next year. But the iPhone 17 Pros do have the performance runway to keep up with these demanding compute needs for the next couple of years. The A19 Pro is really overkill unless you’re doing those professional workflows or gaming.
Pro cameras
What is a “pro” iPhone without upgrades to the cameras? On the iPhone 17 Pros, there are two major improvements for capturing photos and videos. The first is a long one in the making: a 48-megapixel 4x “Fusion Telephoto” lens that also takes 8x “optical-quality” photos. At first, this sounds like a step down from the 5x telephoto on the iPhone 16 Pros, but it’s not. Jumping from 12 megapixels for the tele to 48 megapixels is what allows that 8x “optical-quality” shot. Apple labels the 4x telephoto lens as a 100mm focal length equivalent and the 8x as a 200mm equivalent.
Unsurprisingly, the triple 48-megapixel rear camera system takes excellent photos and videos. It still has that “iPhone look,” which is a love it or hate situation depending on how much you like your photos looking all HDR-exposed and a little more flat than on Pixel or Samsung Galaxy phones. I keep hoping Apple will dial things back; the iPhone 11 Pro really nailed image colors, reversing from the watercolor effect that people complained about on the iPhone X/XS. But I don’t think Apple will, or at least not in a substantive way. It no doubt has tons of data suggesting that either iPhone users don’t care or they do, in fact, don’t mind the way photos are processed. There’s always shooting in ProRAW for a less Apple-processed look and them to exactly how you want your photos to look. I’ve been using third-party apps like Leica Lux and Halide II to get film-like photos on my iPhones.
Below are two sets of images shot from the following lenses and focal lengths: 0.5x (13mm), 1x (24mm), 2x (48mm), 4x (100mm), and 8x (200mm):
The 8x is essentially a crop-in (but with all the magic of Apple’s image processing pipeline that creates 24-megapixel photos with details from the full 48-megapixel sensor), the same way the 2x “optical-quality” telephoto lens (48mm equivalent) uses the center pixels from the main 48-megapixel 1x lens (24mm equivalent). Like the iPhone 16 Pros, you get some other virtual focal lengths from the 1x camera (a 1.2x zoom that’s equal to a 28mm lens and a 1.5x zoom that approximates 35mm). Together with the 48-megapixel 0.5x (13mm) ultrawide, you’re basically getting seven total lenses with optical-quality image resolution.
The second game-changing camera feature is the 18-megapixel Center Stage selfie camera. I talked about this in a little more detail in my iPhone Air review, but to recap, the new square image sensor lets you take horizontal selfies and video while holding your iPhone 17 Pro vertically, and vice versa for taking vertical content while holding it horizontally. Your eyes in your content no longer look like they’re staring off to the side, and instead are more center-aligned. It’s a small tweak that is, honestly, a phone-selling feature. More people would buy new iPhones for this feature alone to take selfies or create social media content than ask for higher resolution on the front-facing camera or more zoom on the back cameras. The Dual Capture mode that lets you record using the front and rear cameras is useful, too.
Real camera junkies who make movies or do studio photoshoots with iPhones will appreciate the actual pro additions like ProRes RAW, Apple Log 2, and Genlock support for video capture. If none of those terms mean anything to you, then you’re not the professionals that Apple is targeting. That’s totally okay. Not every feature is for everyone. But their inclusion shows Apple is catering the pro iPhones to more high-end production demands.
I got nothing positive to say about the Camera Control, which received no love from Apple during its Awe Dropping event. The touch-sensitive button remains perplexing. I understand what Apple was going for, but the execution of swiping and pressing into the button for camera settings has been nothing short of frustrating. Its only usefulness is to quickly launch the Camera app. I don’t know of any serious photographers who use it for more than that; most disable it because it’s so easy to accidentally press. If Apple doesn’t fix Camera Control in next year’s iPhones, it may be time to call a spade a spade and ditch it like the Touch Bar on MacBooks and the 3D touch on old iPhones. I’d gladly take a bigger battery instead of wasting space for a button that’s mostly duplicative of the Action button.
Pro battery life
With the thicker bodies comes longer battery life. Apple loves to use the completely unrealistic continuous local video playback as a benchmark for how many hours its iPhones can last. For the iPhone 17 Pro, we’re looking at up to 33 hours, and for the iPhone 17 Pro Max, up to 39 hours. That’s the longest on any iPhones, ever. Those are Apple’s battery figures for eSIM iPhone 17 Pros. In regions where the iPhone 17 Pros are sold with physical SIM card slots, you get two fewer hours because the battery cell is physically smaller to accommodate the card tray.
I’ve had very good battery life with both the iPhone 17 Pro and the 17 Pro Max, which is just a stamina monster. For the iPhone 17 Pro, I’ve only run the battery down to a single-digit percentage on one day, and that was because I used the camera to take a lot of photos and videos. For comparison, my iPhone 16 Pro frequently hits the same low battery levels earlier in the day. I only had to charge the big boy 17 Pro Max once every two to three days.
Like everything else on the iPhone 17 Pros, the battery life is the product of several Apple optimizations, too. While Android phones are fixated on stuffing in higher capacity batteries and brute-forcing their way to longer battery life, Apple is doing things its own way. A combination of the efficient A19 Pro chip and the N1 chip for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Threads connectivity both contribute to less power draw than on Android phones. And this is just the start. It’s not hard to see a few years down the line how these Apple-designed components and a more capable version of the C1X modem in the iPhone 17 and Air help make future iPhones even more power-efficient and last longer, the same way Apple’s M-series silicon has worked wonders for battery life on MacBooks.
Pro-level everything
Did you notice my subheads? That’s intentional. On all levels, the iPhone 17 Pros are really pro phones this year. Apple pulled out all the stops to make them so. Everything inside and out was engineered for pro-level functionality. Apple haters will inevitably call me a sheep for effusing about the iPhone 17 Pros, but the devices deserve the high praise. I want to go back to the comparison with the M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros. Those laptops seemed too good to be true, seemingly having everything consumers had been asking for. But Apple delivered and then kept delivering for several generations. The iPhone 17 Pros are exactly the same—they deliver on all fronts. Any faults would merely be insignificant nitpicking, like why isn’t there a black color, or why isn’t the dynamic island completely gone?
If you want the very best iPhones with the best everything, either iPhone 17 Pro or the 17 Pro Max will satisfy. Just open up your wallet, enjoy paradise, and don’t look at any new phones until next year. I wonder how Apple will make the iPhone 18 Pros even better. Or perhaps, the long-awaited iPhone foldable will arrive and make the iPhone 17 Pros’ form factor look dated, the same way the iPhone X one-upped the iPhone 8 in the same event.
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