iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max
Both models feature A19 Pro, the most powerful and efficient chip for iPhone yet, enabling the advanced camera systems, next-level mobile gaming, and Apple Intelligence. Built with an Apple-designed vapor chamber that is laser-welded into a strong, light, and thermally conductive aluminum unibody, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max deliver Apple’s best-ever performance and an enormous leap in battery life. Three 48MP Fusion cameras — Main, Ultra Wide, and an all-new Telephoto — offer the equivalent of eight lenses, including the longest optical-quality zoom ever on iPhone at 8x, and the innovative 18MP Center Stage front camera takes selfies to the next level. With new industry-first video features built for pro filmmakers and content creators, including ProRes RAW, Apple Log 2, and genlock, iPhone integrates even more seamlessly into the largest and smallest of productions. Both models feature the Ceramic Shield 2 front cover with 3x better scratch resistance, and for the first time, Ceramic Shield protects the back of iPhone.
iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are available in three beautiful new finishes — deep blue, cosmic orange, and silver.
Finally, some good Pro colors.
Deionized water is sealed inside the vapor chamber, which is laser-welded into the aluminum chassis to move heat away from the powerful A19 Pro, allowing it to operate at even higher performance levels. The heat is carried into the forged aluminum unibody, where it is distributed evenly through the system, managing power and surface temperatures to deliver incredible performance while remaining comfortable to hold.
I wonder how much faster the A19 Pro will be in the Pro vs. the Air due to the better thermals.
Previously:
Update (2025-09-10): See also: Hacker News.
Apple introduced titanium to the iPhone with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max back in 2023, with the change even becoming the device’s marketing tagline. While the devices were said to be more durable, they also suffered from complaints about overheating.
The titanium frame provided excellent rigidity and durability, but aluminum is lighter and offers better heat dissipation, which Apple has prioritized alongside the introduction of the A19 Pro chip and a new vapor chamber cooling system. Aluminum’s thermal conductivity is substantially higher than titanium’s, helping to distribute heat away from critical components under heavy workloads.
Titanium’s machining complexity, slower production speeds, and higher scrap rates may have also contributed to the decision. Titanium frames require specialized tooling and precise CNC milling, while aluminum is less expensive and easier to produce at scale.
So the new iPhone 17 Pro has a 4x optical zoom at 48 MP (as opposed to the 5x / 12 MP optical on the 16 Pro), and it center-crops to achieve the touted 8x?
Center-cropping 48 MP yields 12 MP optical, so from that perspective, identical optical resolution as on the 16 Pro, yet higher zoom.
Still, the 12 MP crop is probably fundamentally noisier; I doubt the physical sensor is 4x the size of the 16 Pro sensor. Which means relying on improved cleanup of the capture.
Update (2025-10-09): Frank A. Krueger:
The iPhone 17 Pro, even with its giant plateau, still can’t be set down on a surface without rocking side to side. Would it really kill them to make the lens protrusions symmetric?
Apple needs to put USB3 in all iPhones simply for the transfer process. Just spent a miserable 90 minutes in store, with 50 other customers, to transfer my data 2 inches via the cloud. Colossally stupid.
All the hate for this [orange] color is dead wrong. Best looking iPhone color I’ve ever seen.
iFixit today disassembled the iPhone 17 Pro for one of its teardown videos, showing the device’s internal components, like the new vapor chamber cooling system that distributes heat from the A19 Pro chip throughout the aluminum frame.
On the Main camera, don’t expect huge changes. I found detail to be somewhat more natural in the Ultra Wide camera, but even here it was somewhat random-seeming if the results were truly consistently better. Overall, image processing pipelines are so complex now that it’s hard to get a great idea of the changes over just a week. The images overall felt a bit more natural to me, though — although I still prefer shooting native RAW and Process Zero shots if I have the option to.
As I mentioned in the earlier section, it is truly noticeable that the 2× mode on the Main camera is a lot better. Not only is the result sharper, it also just looks less visibly ‘processed’; a real win considering Apple claims this is actually due to more processing!
[…]
This, then, might be the first ‘workhorse SLR’ of the iPhone family, if the regular iPhone is a simple Kodak Brownie. In that, some of the simplicity that delighted in the first iPhone may have been lost — but the acknowledgement that complexity is not the enemy is a significant and good step. As a camera, it is first and foremost a tool of creative expression: gaining permission to become more fine-tuned for that purpose makes it truly powerful.
Over the last year I’ve found myself using ProRAW less because I’m constantly impressed by the power and flexibility of Photographic Styles.
[…]
This year, we got a new Undertone style called Bright. It adds contrast, brightens faces, enhances foliage, and still protects the highlights in the sky.
[…]
The biggest distinction between the 16 Pro and the 17 Pro is the improvement to the 4x Telephoto. It’s a better focal length and a big jump in resolution. The 8x is a great way to punch in even further at 12MP, and I’m sure I will use it a ton. If you find yourself constantly wishing you could get closer to your subject, this alone is worth the upgrade.
In terms of CPU, the step from A18 Pro to A19 Pro seems smaller than normal, though there may be extenuating circumstances. Single-core performance in Geekbench only increased 3% in my preliminary tests, which is the lowest gain I’ve seen in years. Multi-core performance, on the other hand, went up by 9%—much better, even if it’s a less impressive gain than any in the last four generations.
[…]
This is the biggest increase in the overall GPU Compute score in six generations, and even longer if you divide the score by the number of GPU cores available. The A19 Pro generates Geekbench GPU Compute scores 65 percent faster than the A17 Pro of just two years ago, with the same core count. It’s been an impressive couple of years on the GPU front.
The A19 Pro transcribes about 60% faster than the A18 Pro.
The scratch test results suggest that iPhone 17 Pro owners won’t have to worry about the kind of scratching seen on iPhone models in Apple retail stores, but the camera is an area of concern. It is likely to get scratched, so if you’re worried about that, you might want to use a case to prevent it. The coating on the iPhone 17 Pro models is thin, so more significant drops could cause damage in other areas.
The marks on the iPhone 17 Pro models that people have noticed at Apple retail stores are caused by the chargers that Apple uses, Apple confirmed today.
To illustrate this more closely, here’s a comparison of what the detail level is when using the 8x mode in the Camera app verses cropping to the same degree after the fact.
If you still want to crop later, that’s fine, but it’s plainly clear to me that if you need more zoom, you should do it in the Camera app because it will maximize the data you have to work with after the fact.
The first reviews of the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max have now been published by selected media outlets and YouTube channels, offering a closer look at the device ahead of Friday’s launch.
While it’s not widespread, some iPhone 17 Pro owners say that audio plays quietly and that they hear odd noises when playing music.
See also:
Update (2025-10-22): Chance Miller:
Last week on Reddit, a user posted an image of their cosmic orange iPhone 17 Pro that had apparently shifted to a pinkish, rose gold-like color.
[…]
Based on what can be gleaned from the posts on TikTok and Reddit, it seems like this discoloration is due to interaction with peroxide-based cleaning solvents. The iPhone 17 Pro’s chassis is constructed from anodized aluminum, which relies on an artificial oxide layer for both corrosion resistance and color uniformity.
11 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
"Deionized water is sealed inside the vapor chamber, which is laser-welded into the aluminum chassis to move heat away from the powerful A19 Pro"
Yawn… The hardware can be great, the price can be cheap, it would still be a no-go because of Liquid Glass.
Tim Cook explicitly mentioned that design is not only about how it looks, but ALSO about how it works. This ‘also’ explains a lot about today’s Apple.
@Dmitri Opening the show with that quote, only to cut to a montage of meaninglessly visually congruent shapes, immediately put a bad taste in my mouth. Of course Cook added "also" to emphasize just how little Apple understands it. "Design" to Apple is now just getting multiple British-tinged voice-overs to pronounce "aluminium."
The vapor chamber sounds cool, though. Hopefully it works better than the liquid-cooled G5s.
RCs are out for everything from Xcode to macOS.
@Dmitri_Zdorov... I saw that too. Maybe you didn't mean this but I also noticed that that was really about all that was mentioned about Liquid Glass. Odd. Particularly when you consider they mentioned Apple Intelligence at least 10x more.
Has anyone received their annual email about being able to upload your apps via Xcode 26 yet? I never got it.
Looking at the Apple Store (it's back up) has *aboslutely* no mention of when their OS releases are coming out, in fact, no mention of Liquid Glass at all.
@Dave in footnotes on the various iPhone pages they say iOS 26 releases on Monday Sept 15. Possibly they all do next week.
Steve Jobs is spinning in his grave. Using his iconic quote to promote a UI that doesn't work very well is shameful.
I wonder if the A19 Pro in the Air is underclocked compared to the Pros. A very effective power-saving technique is to run a big chip slow rather than a small chip fast. though maybe that only makes sense for sustained workloads and not bursty ones like on the phones. I am fascinated by the Air's potential gaming performance though, and whether it will eat through the entire battery in like an hour running at 120Hz
@someone
Exactly. I have an 11 Pro ... it drags, the battery has aged, etc. Time for an upgrade! Look at the orange phone! The plateau! Insane cameras (remember, mine is an 11 Pro ... from 2019)!
Alas, fuck Liquid Glass. Hard pass. No new devices until that garbage can be turned off without sacrificing "cool". I tried the beta and hated it instantly and deeply. I wrote a feedback with two home screen screenshots: one from iOS 18 and one from iOS 26. I use dark mode exclusively with hidden labels and widgets that have a black image in the stack. Once I'm at home, this is the focus mode. Only a few folders of essentials present, the widgets are there but with the black image, the disappear, literally faded into the background. Dark, plain, unobtrusive, simple, dare I say elegant. Except Liquid Glass adds a highlight tweak wrapping all app icons and widgets. It cannot be turned off. It is not dark enough for dark mode, and there are outlines on the widgets ... I lasted less than 48 hours before I wiped my phone and installed the back up. Almost all of the press shot and reviews deal with liquid glass in light mode. Maybe it looks cool, but it it not functional. Liquid glass makes things harder to read. It feels like cool won over accessibility, again (hello fugly Settings). If someone tried to give me a free iPhone 17 in exchange for my 11, I wouldn't do it, the OS is that bad, that frustrating to use.
@foobat I did the same on the iPad, and two days later, I reverted back. The smaller the screen, the more tolerable it is. The watch has almost no change; the phone is bad but tolerable, iPad is hilariously bad, especially the new windowing stuff; macOS is an atrocity. I’m not updating either. For my open sources, I have an old iPhone 14 Pro Max, which will serve as the dev device. I am seriously considering Android at this point.
The new iPhone 17 Pro looks amazing in orange. And it would be a nice upgrade from my 13 Pro. But the whole iOS 26 "liquid glass" saga that I have been following is putting me off from buying one. I am not a developer anymore, and I do not run beta's on my iPhone, so I have no first hand experience. I only go by what I have read everywhere about the state of the iOS 26 beta's. But if Apple cannot even spend a lot of time showing it and convincing us how it will also be great for accessibility etc., then it is a no-go for me for now. If/when they can shape it up like they did with iOS 7 after its "bleak" launch, then I might opt to buy one. But I fear that iPhone 18 will be (near) release by then.
