iPhone 17 Pro review: How pro can you go? – 9to5Mac

When Apple announced the iPhone 17 Pro last week, it touted that the addition of the iPhone Air in the lineup allowed it to take the Pro models “to an entirely new level of performance and capabilities.”

I’ve been testing the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max for the last week to find out just how far Apple has pushed those limits.

Design

Apple says the iPhone 17 Pro features an aluminum unibody design that is “crafted with a lightweight aerospace-grade 7000-series aluminum alloy.” It’s not the first time Apple has described the iPhone as having an aluminum unibody design. That title belongs to the iPhone 6. On paper, the new unibody aluminum design might not sound like a big change.

In reality, however, the unibody design of the iPhone 17 Pro feels fantastic in the hand. In contrast to the iPhone 16 Pro, the iPhone 17 Pro is a seamless device that feels cohesive rather than multiple different parts held together by a titanium or stainless steel band. I didn’t expect to notice a big difference, but the curvature of the front to the back of the device is a clear improvement in how comfortable the iPhone 17 Pro is to hold.

The iPhone 17 Pro’s design, however, doesn’t play it safe. The unibody aluminum casing is stunning, yes, but there are other changes that have proven to be polarizing. I’d say it’s the most polarizing iPhone design in years. The two-tone design on the back, in particular, has been the subject of much debate. The reason for that design choice is clear: the glass cutout is what’s used for wireless charging. I’d much prefer better consistency here. The cutout feels awkward and breaks up the seamlessness of the unibody design.

The other polarizing design choice on the iPhone 17 Pro is the plateau across the back. Apple says that the plateau design created additional space for internal components, including a bigger battery.

iPhone 16 Pro vs iPhone 17 Pro: Friendship ended with camera bump, now plateau is my best friend

The plateau, I think, is mostly harmless. In some ways, I think it actually looks better than the camera bump as it creates more consistency across the back of the phone. With the camera bump, it always felt like Apple was awkwardly trying (and failing) to acknowledge its existence. The plateau is an unabashed component of the iPhone 17 Pro design.

I’d put it like this: the iPhone 17 Pro feels better to hold in the hand than the iPhone 16 Pro because of the aluminum unibody design. As a purely visual “look, don’t touch” design, however, it’s a step backwards from the iPhone 16 Pro. That goes back to what Apple said during last week’s keynote, though. Adding the iPhone Air to the lineup allowed Apple to stretch the iPhone 17 Pro to new heights.

In many ways, the iPhone 17 Pro now feels a lot like the Apple Watch Ultra. It’s proudly industrialized and prioritizes function over form. It’s a distinct design that comes with tradeoffs, yes, but it enables much of what I’ll describe later in this review.

Also, can we talk about the cosmic orange color? My goodness, it is gorgeous. Flashy, yes, but also gorgeous. It’s the first time ever Apple has made an iPhone Pro available in a flashy and bold color. I’m happy it’s unapologetically orange. It might not be for everyone, but I’d take this flavor of orange over something pastel and muted.

The other big change to the iPhone 17 Pro color lineup is that there’s no black/space gray/etc color option. You have cosmic orange, deep blue, and silver. My iPhone 17 Pro Max is deep blue, and I’d describe it as a really deep blue. It definitely looks blue in most lighting situations, but depending on what angle you catch it at, you could mistake it for black. It’s definitely bluer than the midnight MacBook Air, though … but still pretty fingerprint-y.

I understand and sympathize with people upset about the lack of a black iPhone 17 Pro, but it’s not a disaster. I love a little spice.

Thermals and performance

The iPhone 17 Pro has also been completely redesigned internally. The new internal structure is headlined by a revamped thermal management system with an Apple-designed vapor chamber.

The aluminum unibody doubles as a heat spreader, working with graphite layers and the vapor chamber to move heat like a miniature steam engine. Inside, deionized water circulates through a sealed chamber that’s laser-welded into the mid-chassis, creating a metallic bond that efficiently spreads heat. Together, these changes pull heat away from the A19 Pro chip and distribute it more evenly across the phone.

I didn’t fully understand the iPhone 17 Pro’s vapor chamber system when Apple announced it. During a demo at Apple Park, however, I got to take a vapor chamber and dip it in a cup of hot water and feel how quickly the heat is pulled to the top of the chamber.

All that to say, the “vapor chamber” isn’t just a marketing term. It really does help the iPhone 17 Pro run cooler and help sustain intense performance for longer periods of time. In all of my testing, the iPhone 17 Pro ran significantly cooler than the iPhone 16 Pro. When it does get warm, such as in sunlight or when fast charging, the dissipation of that heat is much better. No longer does it feel concentrated in one spot. The heat spreads throughout the back of the phone, ensuring that no single spot feels hot to the touch.

The A19 Pro chip inside the iPhone 17 Pro features a 6-core CPU paired with a 6-core GPU. In Geekbench testing, that CPU runs around 14% faster than the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro models. In GPU testing, the improvement is more notable. The A19 Pro benchmarks around 40% faster than the A18 Pro’s 6-core GPU.

The iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max both feature 12GB of RAM, up from 8GB in the iPhone 16 lineup. I wasn’t expecting to notice a difference here, but to my surprise, it seems like apps stay in memory longer on the iPhone 17 Pro compared to my iPhone 16 Pro. For instance, the Reminders app retained its memory across three different grocery stores, even though I used several other apps, including Apple Maps, in between each store visit.

The new iPhone lineup has Ceramic Shield 2 for 3x better scratch resistance. This test is one of many testing methods. Residue from the tip is wiped off after the test. 

iPhone undergoes thousands of random drops scenarios on different surfaces to guarantee excellent drop performance in real life usage.

Camera

iPhone 17 Pro: Main camera

Apple says the iPhone 17 Pro puts the equivalent of eight professional lenses in your pocket. That’s marketing speak that really boils down to this:

• Main (Wide, 24 mm): 48MP Fusion sensor, fuses a 48MP frame with a 12MP frame to create a 24MP image
• Custom Main (28 mm & 35 mm): 24MP images at two “prime-like” focal lengths
• 2× Telephoto (48 mm): Uses the middle 12MP of the Main sensor for “optical-quality” shots
• Telephoto (100 mm & 200 mm): New 48MP Fusion Telephoto delivers true 4× at 100mm and an 8×, 200mm in-sensor crop Apple calls “optical-quality”
• Ultra Wide (13 mm): 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide
• Ultra Wide (Macro): Uses the same lens for macro photos and videos

The iPhone 17 Pro’s Main camera and Ultra Wide camera are unchanged compared to the iPhone 16 Pro. Apple says, however, that it’s developed a brand new computational pipeline to improve the quality of 2x Telephoto images at 12MP.

The star of the show, though, is the new 48MP Fusion Telephoto camera. The last update to the Telephoto camera came two years ago, when Apple debuted a new 12MP 5x Telephoto camera on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. That same sensor expanded to the smaller iPhone 16 Pro last year.

The iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max take things up a notch. The new 48MP Fusion Telephoto camera reaches 4× at 100mm as well as to an 8×, 200mm “optical-quality” view, up from the previous 25x digital zoom limit. For an image taken at 8x, your iPhone 17 Pro is using the center portion of that same 48MP sensor.

Behind all of this is a 56% larger sensor with an upgraded tetraprism design and 3D sensor-shift OIS, so frames stay sharp when you’re zoomed in and your hands aren’t perfectly steady. Apple’s pipeline is doing more work, too. The updated Photonic Engine leans on ML-based demosaicing to pull cleaner detail and better color out of those quad-pixel sensors, especially in poor light.

iPhone 17 Pro: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x (galleries, swipe to navigate)

All of that aside, what matters is how the iPhone 17 Pro’s Telephoto camera looks in the real-world. To put it simply, I’ve been seriously impressed. I’m on record saying that I liked the 5x Telephoto camera on the iPhone 15/16 Pro, but oftentimes found the 5x length to be a bit too far in comparison to the old 3x lens. The iPhone 17 Pro’s 4x/8x setup fixes that, with the added bonus of being able to sensor crop to 8x at 200 mm.

I tested the new Telephoto camera a few different ways. I went to Lake Michigan, explored downtown Kalamazoo, and went to a Taylor Swift tribute concert. Across those situations and lighting conditions, it not only looked better than the iPhone 16 Pro’s Telephoto but also proved far more flexible with the 4x and 8x distances.

I also want to once again give a specific shoutout to the next-generation Photographic Styles feature Apple launched last year. This has completely changed my relationship with my iPhone’s cameras.

All sample pictures in this review were shot with Apple’s “Standard” style for the sake of consistency, but I usually use the “Amber” style. I actually think Apple’s “Standard” style looks quite plain and uninspired.

I’ll mostly let the sample images speak for themselves, but I do have several additional notes.

I’ll mostly let the galleries speak for themselves, but a few notes are worth calling out. As you can see, there’s clearly more (or at least different) processing being applied to Telephoto shots compared to the Main camera. This can lead to slight inconsistencies in color, particularly in images with a lot of blue sky, but nothing that looks outright wrong.

iPhone 17 Pro: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x

“We have Taylor Swift at home” edition

The Taylor Swift tribute concert was a particularly challenging environment, yet the iPhone 17 Pro still held its own. From where we were sitting in the back, it was honestly a pretty convincing Taylor Swift impersonator. Using the iPhone 17 Pro’s Telephoto camera to zoom in, however, it became clear it wasn’t Taylor herself. Bummer. Even as it got darker, I was still pleased with the results.

• Text is still clearly legible when zooming in at 8x.
• Apple still hasn’t solved the lens flare problem.

And don’t forget the new selfie camera, either. I think it alone will spur a huge wave of upgrades. As I explained in my iPhone Air review:

The iPhone Air also features a new 18MP Center Stage front-facing camera. This marks the biggest update to the iPhone’s front-facing camera in years, and it’s more than just an increase in resolution. For the first time, the iPhone’s front-facing camera sensor is square. Apple explains that traditional sensors have a 4:3 aspect ratio, which limits framing based on the orientation of the phone. This is why you’ve always had to awkwardly rotate your iPhone to landscape mode to fit multiple people into a selfie.

With the iPhone Air, this is changing. The square sensor combined with Apple’s Center Stage technology means you don’t have to rotate your iPhone to take a landscape selfie. You can tap to expand the field of view, or the iPhone will use AI to expand the field of view and rotate to landscape orientation when it detects multiple people in the shot.

In addition to those improvements, the iPhone Air’s front-facing camera is higher resolution at 18MP versus the previous generation 12MP sensor. This leads to a noticeable improvement in selfie quality.

In my testing, the new Center Stage camera works impressively well. The increase in resolution is also immediately noticeable and allows you to see a lot more detail in the images as well as more accurate colors, particularly around skin. I’ll put some of my test images below, but I also encourage you to check out Tyler Stalman’s examples.

Ultimately, the camera system on the iPhone 17 Pro is nothing short of impressive. The fact that all three lenses are now 48MP is fantastic. The combination of the improved hardware and Apple’s ever-improving image pipeline means you can get some truly excellent images from these phones.

iPhone 17 Pro: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 40x

iPhone 17 selfie camera

Battery life

Battery life on the iPhone 17 Pro has been excellent. I can make it through a day without any problems, and realistically that’s all that matters. Here’s Apple’s breakdown of battery life numbers over the years:

Other tidbits

• The antenna cutout is back, this time on the top edge of the iPhone 17 Pro. It’s a pretty big eyesore, especially on the cosmic orange colorway.
• The iPhone 17 Pro uses a modem from Qualcomm, unlike the iPhone Air. It does, however, use Apple’s new N1 networking chip for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread. As I wrote in my iPhone Air review, I haven’t noticed any differences for better or worse.
• The iPhone 17 Pro display features a new anti-reflection layering on the display to reduce glare. I’ve really struggled to notice a difference in this area, though.
• There’s also a new Ceramic Shield 2 coating on the display that Apple says is three times more scratch-resistant. I didn’t test this, but I’ll keep an eye on how well the display holds up in long-term use.

9to5Mac’s Take

The iPhone 17 Pro feels like the “2021 MacBook Pro-ification” of the iPhone. It compromises on things like weight and thickness for significantly better performance and thermals. The MacBook Pro generation before that 2021 refresh was widely plagued by poor thermals and inconsistent performance.

The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro suffered similar problems. What’s particularly interesting about the iPhone 17 Pro is Apple’s return to aluminum. One of the marketing tentpoles for the iPhone 15 Pro was titanium. Apple plastered ads across TV, social, and billboards promoting the new titanium as a flagship iPhone 15 Pro feature.

Apple would never admit it, but in retrospect, the switch to titanium feels like it was a misstep for “Pro” model iPhones. Titanium has plenty of benefits — look at the iPhone Air and the Apple Watch. For a phone that is trying to be the world’s best camera, computer, and everything in between, however, the thermal properties of titanium ended up being too big a constraint. Hence, the switch to aluminum with the iPhone 17 Pro.

For people who want and need the features of a “Pro” model iPhone, this is the correct calculus. Give me the biggest battery, the best cameras, and the fastest performance you can fit in a phone. There are obvious limits to this. An iPhone still needs to feel good in the hand and be comfortable to hold. The iPhone 17 Pro strikes that balance, thanks in large part to the unibody design.

As the iPhone begins to evolve into new shapes and sizes, starting with the iPhone Air, the consistency of the iPhone Pro becomes more important than ever. The iPhone 17 Pro is unremarkable in the best way possible. Everything it does, it does well. It’s exactly what the “best” iPhone Apple sells should be. The best cameras, the best battery life, fastest performance, best screens, best everything.

What more could you ask for?

Best iPhone 17 accessories

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