The iPhone 17 Pro is a superb phone with excellent cameras, but it’s also expensive, and the battery life left me wanting just a little more.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Excellent camera performance | Quite expensive |
| A smaller but still powerful phone – a true rarity these days | Camera control still isn’t great |
| Apple A19 Pro is nicely powerful | All that power comes at the cost of battery life, which has dropped since last year |
Score: 3/5
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In this review
Apple iPhone 17 Pro Specifications
Apple iPhone 17 Pro Design
Apple iPhone 17 Pro Camera
Apple iPhone 17 Pro Performance
Apple iPhone 17 Pro Battery
Apple iPhone 17 Pro Verdict
Ethical disclaimer: The Apple iPhone 17 Pro used in this review was loaned to me by Apple. Apple’s loan terms are typically a little longer than most tech companies, but this phone will be going back to Apple.
Does this change how I review a phone? Not at all; there’s no difference in review approach whether any device that comes into ART’s test labs stays or goes, and Apple has absolutely zero influence over how I write my reviews. I’d almost certainly have an easier time of it if I did go down the influencer route and simply say what marketing departments at companies wanted me to say in return for money, but that’s just not how I operate at all.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
The Apple iPhone 17 Pro is the smaller of Apple’s 2017 Pro lineup of phones, built around a 6.3 inch 2622×1206 pixel display with minimal bezels but the absolute intrustion of Apple’s “Dynamic Island” that houses the front-facing FaceID capable camera. It’s very similar in front-facing style to the iPhone 17, which I’ve been testing out simultaneously with the iPhone 17 Pro. Want an iPhone 17 review? Here you go:
Also read:
The Dynamic Island isn’t new, but it remains a very neat way to use that screen space with contextual content relevant to your activity at the time appearing next to the camera notch, somewhat obscuring it from view because it “appears” to be part of the proper screen.
The Apple iPhone 17 Pro’s display gets a brightness boost this year, with a maximum peak brightness of 3,000 nits, up from the 2,000 nit display of the prior year.
I’ve tested the iPhone 17 Pro out in direct Australian sunshine – and it sure is both bright and hot at this time of year – and this feature does work quite nicely. Apple’s displays have for the longest time had excellent colour reproduction and clarity, though there is one change you should be aware of that does somewhat tilt the value balance for iPhones this year.
Ever since it shifted into providing 120Hz capable displays (“ProMotion” in Apple-speak) on its iPhones, Apple has reserved those faster refresh rate screens for its Pro phones only. That’s no longer the case, with the Apple iPhone 17 and Apple iPhone Air both getting the ProMotion treatment.
On one hand, that’s arguably a terribly overdue step given that 120Hz displays have been in some sub-$500 AUD Android phones for some time, but it does remove one of the “Pro” benefits that you might have otherwise expected to get. The display is still good, of course – but it’s nowhere near as exclusive, and if all you wanted was ProMotion, you can get that on the similarly sized iPhone 17 as well.
Controls have remained consistent, with assistant/power button and the camera control on the right hand side and volume and action buttons on the left hand side.
That’s also where – on Australian models, but not some international variants – you’ll also find the physical SIM card slot. Apple has shifted to eSIM only for the iPhone Air, and gone that way in (for example) the US for its other models, but down under we can still choose between eSIM and physical SIM cards, which is a flexibility step that I definitely approve of.
Flip the iPhone 17 Pro over, and you’re met with Apple’s new camera plateau, a rectangular array that doesn’t go quite as far as the camera bar on Google’s Pixel phones – but it’s a close run thing. The cameras themselves are arrayed in a triangular pattern with the flash sitting off to the right. The new design means that if you are upgrading from an older iPhone Pro model, even though the screen is the same size, you’ll need a new case to protect it unless you like living dangerously.
In terms of colour choices, Apple slightly subverts the conventional “Pro phones must have boring businesslike colours” thinking with a choice of Silver, Cosmic Orange or Deep Blue finishes across both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max lineups. Apple loaned me the Deep Blue variant, and it’s a quite gorgeous and very dark hue; in a lot of lighting situations you’d likely take it for being actually black.
In terms of durability, the iPhone 17 Pro has Apple’s “Ceramic Shield 2” glass – and it’s worthwhile noting that the iPhone 17 just gets the slightly less durable Ceramic Shield 1 variant – and an IP rating of IP68, which means that in theory you can immerse the iPhone 17 Pro and expect it to survive – but I wouldn’t push that too far if I were you. If you’re not sure about how water resistance works, I’ve got a full guide to phone water resistance you can read here – or you can watch the video below.
Camera
The biggest differentiator for Apple’s iPhone Pro lineups has long been in the camera array and choices that Apple makes in the premium camera space for each of its models. The iPhone 17 Pro features a trio of 48MP lenses covering wide, ultra-wide and telephoto 4x, while the front-facing selfie is a square 18MP sensor.
The front-facing camera isn’t just square for the sake of it. It’s to allow the iPhone 17 Pro to take portrait, horizontal or vertical shots without requiring you to actually change the orientation of the phone.
Oh look, it’s a portrait selfie of me. So far, so ordinary.
The same shot, taken without portrait mode. The camera hasn’t moved, but you wouldn’t expect it to.
I haven’t moved the phone at all from its selfie position; it’s simply adjusted its framing to give me a wider shot.
Telephoto is the obvious winner in this department, as it’s the sensor that’s seen the biggest hardware upgrade year-on-year, and the results do show this.
While Apple doesn’t go as far as its competition in terms of pushing the boat out for ever-increasing zooms, topping out at just 40x zoom, the practical results show why less in this case is in fact more – because the more in this scenario is more pleasing photographs for you to enjoy at the end of the day.
As an example, here’s a wide shot taken at a nearby public park.
The wide shot gives us a nice view of the park, but let’s get a little closer to the slide.
2x zoom – which is basically hybrid sensor crop, there’s no native 2x optical here – works well
Native 4x zoom is solid, as you’d expect, because that’s the native optical telephoto lens distance.
The next default step is at 8x, and that presents nicely.
Push it to 40x, and the cracks do start to show, however.
That zoom doesn’t follow for every shot, however.
4x optical zoom is fine, though the birds are clearly melting today.
40x zoom suggests that the melting is worse than anticipated.
The Apple iPhone 17 Pro incorporates Apple’s left hand side “Camera Control” button as a shutter button and contextual selection element. It functions, but even in the smaller size of the iPhone 17 Pro, I’m left thinking it’s not a great solution because it still sits relatively high up on the phone side. Perhaps, in classic Apple fashion, I’m holding it wrong, and just need to get longer fingers installed?
Still, overall, the iPhone 17 Pro’s camera array is an impressive one in all conditions for both photo and video shooting, and one of the clear highlights of the phone.
Apple iPhone 17 Pro Sample Photos
The back of this cabinet is somewhat dark, but this isn’t an issue for the iPhone 17 Pro. Here be dragons.
Not a realistic looking hound, but the iPhone 17 Pro captures the reality of its colour tones well.
Nice macro effects are easy to capture.
The wombat isn’t real, and the iPhone 17 Pro captures its plastic nature nicely.
Somehow, the iPhone 17 Pro makes Neko look far more innocent than he actually is.
Performance
Apple updates the internal hardware of its phones year on year with a new generation of its own inhouse processors; for 2025 that’s the Apple A19 Pro. The iPhone 17 Pro sells in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB variants at $1999 / $2399 / $2799; if you really need lots of storage it is worth noting that the iPhone 17 Pro Max also offers a 2TB variant, though that’ll sting your wallet for an eye-watering $3,799. Apple didn’t send me the iPhone 17 Pro Max to compare, but to give that some context, you can literally get a 2TB 14 inch MacBook Pro M5 for less than that! But I digress…
For a very long time, Apple absolutely led the market in terms of processor performance, and its claims around the A19 Pro are (as you’d expect) typically boisterous. However, what I observed earlier in the year was that this year’s crop of premium Android phones had finally leapfrogged Apple in straight line benchmark performance terms.
Whether or not that matters to you depends on a couple of factors. It’s undeniable that a lot of iPhone buyers aren’t even looking towards the Android side of the market; they’re firmly and comfortably embedded in the Apple ecosystem. For that group of consumers, what really matter is whether or not a given iPhone model is a decent enough upgrade from what they’ve already got.
To give that some CPU comparison, I ran Geekbench 6’s CPU Test against the iPhone 17 Pro and compared it to the iPhone 17 and then its ancestors. Here’s how the iPhone 17 Pro’s A19 Pro compares:
As you’d expect, the iPhone 17 Pro is the fastest, though the gap between it and the iPhone 17 is not considerable for multi-tasking applications, and the cheaper iPhone actually outpaced the faster one for single-core operations.
Has Apple reclaimed the performance crown from the likes of Samsung, Oppo and Google? Let’s see how the iPhone 17 Pro compares against its Android flagship counterparts:
That’s a less flattering picture for Apple’s flagship phone, especially as we’re only a matter of months until Samsung replaces the Galaxy S25 Ultra with (presumably) the Galaxy S26 Ultra, which should be faster again.
What about at a graphics level? Here’s how the iPhone 17 Pro compares against its predecessors using 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme test:
And here’s how it compares against the same Android flagships:
Apple is being bested here, which is a new state of affairs, though the reality here is that the benchmarks don’t tell the entire story.
The practical reality here is that for the vast majority of applications, flagship and even mid-range phones have more than enough power for most consumer uses. Apple’s strong control over every aspect of the iPhone experience, from hardware to software does give it something of an edge in optimisation, and the huge array of iOS apps also gives Apple some advantages over Android, especially if you’re also the iPad and Mac using space; less so if the rest of your computer usage is more Windows or Linux-centric.
On the network side, the iPhone 17 Pro offers most of the best-of-breed connection technologies, with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and NFC as well as 5G compatibility, though here again Apple’s not doing everything it could for Australian consumers.
The iPhone 17 Pro is 5G Sub-6Ghz only, even though Apple does have models with mmWave 5G compatibility. We’re just stuck in a backwater where – while mmWave 5G is admittedly scant on the ground in the real world – Apple and every other flagship maker is content to offer us slightly lesser phones for the same price. I’m never not going to say that’s a bad deal.
Also, Apple AI exists. I think people know my broad views on AI by now, right?
Battery
The iPhone 17 Pro is the smaller Pro phone which does limit the size of battery that Apple can cram into its frame. As always, Apple doesn’t officially state battery sizes for any of its devices, preferring instead to provide an “up to” battery life figure of 31 hours of local video playback for the iPhone 17 Pro and “up to” 37 hours for the iPhone 17 Pro Max; comparably last year’s iPhone 16 Pro could (as per Apple) manage 27 and the iPhone 16 Pro Max claimed up to 33 hours.
For what it’s worth, third party tear downs of the iPhone 17 Pro suggest that there’s a 4252 mAh battery inside, a jump up from the iPhone 16 Pro’s 3582mAh power pack.
The use of “up to” of course gives Apple a lot of wriggle room when it comes to real world battery life, and to test that out I first ran the iPhone 17 Pro (and iPhone 17) through my standard 3 hour YouTube battery playback test. You can read about how I test phone batteries here.
This is a test that I’ve been using for a very long while now. Don’t believe me? This is one that I can expand out to a whole lot more iPhones. Here’s how the iPhone 17 Pro compares historically on battery life with that test:
For Android comparison purposes, here’s how it stacks up against current flagship phones:
94% in the first hour does point towards a phone that should last a full day for all but the heaviest phone users, but it is concerning that Apple’s power consumption has so clearly gone upwards.
It doesn’t compare well historically, it drops below what last year’s iPhones did on the same test, and competing Android flagships also seem to be sipping more conservatively at their batteries. This isn’t the iPhone battery problem of old, where pretty much every iPhone owner would be reaching for a charger before lunchtime – but it’s not exactly good news for a premium-priced phone like this.
As with all recent model iPhones, the iPhone 17 Pro does not ship with a charger in the box; you’ll have to provide one yourself for wired charging at up to 36 watts, or wireless Qi2 charging at up to 25 watts.
Apple iPhone 17 Pro: Alex’s Verdict
The Apple iPhone 17 Pro is a genuinely nice phone, and I do love the fact that Apple makes a more powerful phone in a smaller form factor without compromising on most other features.
The battery in the iPhone 17 Pro Max is bigger, for sure, as is the display and storage variants available, but those are the only differences between the Pro and Pro Max phones. If you want a more pocket-friendly premium iPhone with excellent cameras, this is the one to buy… but I’d think about that.
Why? Simply because what Apple’s done in improving the base model Apple iPhone 17 does make the difference between the Pro and regular models a lot slimmer. The iPhone 17 has the same size display at the same brightness and critically at the full 1-120Hz “ProMotion” level of smoothness.
It benchmarks closely to the iPhone 17 Pro to. Its battery performance was slightly down on the iPhone 17 Pro, but it’s still a solution that should last most users a day – and it’s a lot cheaper than the iPhone 17 Pro is as well. The Pro is a lovely bit of kit, very much the luxury buy, but the big difference here are the cameras, and not a whole lot else.
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Apple iPhone 17 Pro: Pricing and availability
The Apple iPhone 17 Pro retails in Australia for $1,999 (256GB), $2399 (512GB) or $2799 (1TB). The model loaned to me by Apple was the 1TB variant, which means if I do drop it, I’ll have to declare bankruptcy.
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