Apple iPhone 17 Pro Review: The Best iPhone in Years

Heavier, thicker and — in Cosmic Orange — considerably louder than its predecessors, the iPhone 17 Pro looked at first like the awkward member of this year's line-up. It is not. Apple has taken its most ambitious formula and reworked it inside and out, and the result is one of the most accomplished iPhones in years.

One structural change is worth knowing before anything else: this year the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max are technically identical in every respect apart from screen size. You no longer have to buy the XXL phone to get the best camera module, which gives buyers the maximum amount of choice.

The numbers first. This is 206 grams on the scales against 199 for the iPhone 16 Pro, and 8.75 mm thick against 8.25 mm last year, with a camera module that is more imposing than ever. Against the featherweight iPhone Air, that looks like Apple heading in the opposite direction.

It is not carelessness. The extra bulk is entirely deliberate, and it buys the phone things it could not otherwise have. The most visible change is the plateau that now houses the camera hardware across the back, part of a unibody chassis that makes the phone heavier but also better balanced in the hand. Build quality is what it always is on a Pro iPhone: immaculate.

The screens on the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max are among the best you can buy. Brightness is at the top of the field, reaching a maximum around 3,000 cd/m², but it is the calibration that really separates them from rivals.

Excellent is not the same as perfect — there are still two areas where a future generation could improve — but as it stands this is the most accomplished display on the market, full stop.

The headline change is a 4x telephoto with a 48-megapixel sensor, which means the phone can crop into that sensor for lossless zoom out to 8x. The results are clean and live up to expectations: the difference in sharpness between the 4x optical and the 8x digitally cropped shot is imperceptible, and both hold a good dynamic range with consistent colour and exposure across the same scene.

Set against a Galaxy S25 Ultra and a Pixel 10 Pro XL at matched focal lengths, the subject separates from the background far better on the iPhone. It is better exposed than on the S25 Ultra, and the separation between subject and background is cleaner than on the Pixel, which handles its dynamic range less well. The consistent caveat is colour: the iPhone leans noticeably warm, which does not always match the scene in front of you. On close-ups the S25 Ultra looks drab by comparison, while the iPhone and the Pixel match each other on sharpness with different colour choices.

On the wide-angle, the interface suggests switching to 2x, particularly for portrait mode, and the result is attractive and fully competitive. All three flagships struggle equally with fine flyaway hairs; the background blur is slightly less pronounced on the iPhone, and faces look a touch more radiant because of that warmer treatment.

The new telephoto also works with the super-stabilised video mode all the way out to the 8x equivalent, and the iPhone is the only one of the three that can produce a result this clean at that focal length. The one problem is that the processing happens after the take, so you cannot see what it will look like while you are filming.

The A19 Pro is built on a 3 nm process by TSMC and comes with 12 GB of RAM, 256 GB of storage in the base configuration, and up to 1 TB on the Pro and 2 TB on the Pro Max.

The more significant change is thermal. Apple has switched to an aluminium frame, which dissipates heat better than the titanium or stainless steel used previously, and added the first vapour chamber in an iPhone. It works: peak temperature measured 36.2 °C, where only the 17 Pro Max and the OnePlus Pad Lite did better at 34.6 °C and 34.9 °C. Against its own predecessor, which topped out at 43.5 °C on the same exercise, that is nearly 7 °C removed — which lets the processor deliver its full potential and helps battery life at the same time.

Day to day it swallows everything with essentially flawless fluidity and stability. In benchmarks the picture is more nuanced. On Geekbench 6 it crushes the competition on both single-core CPU — the figure that matters most — and GPU. On AnTuTu 10 it dominates the CPU section but is overtaken on graphics by phones running last year's top-end Snapdragon 8 Elite. That slight deficit shows again in GFXBench and 3DMark Wild Life, where it underperforms: in Wild Life it has clearly chosen stability over raw power, recording a modest score but holding its performance across all 20 loops.

Apple said little about battery life at launch, which is telling. The cell holds 4,252 mAh — substantial, but well short of the best on the market, which comfortably exceed 5,000 mAh.

In practice it does well: 19 hours 10 minutes to go from 100% to 5%. That is an hour longer than the Samsung Galaxy S25, though a long way from the category benchmark, the OnePlus 13R at 22 hours 31 minutes. If battery life is your deciding factor, Apple has a sharper weapon in the 17 Pro Max, whose 21 hours 14 minutes puts it among the ten best phones on the market for endurance.

Apple Intelligence was conspicuously absent from the launch keynote, and it is now one of the iPhone's weaknesses. It remains well integrated and sometimes useful, but the comparison with what Gemini does on a Pixel 10 Pro or on Samsung's flagships is clearly in Android's favour.

If you already own an iPhone 15 Pro or 16 Pro — the models that run Apple Intelligence — moving to the 17 Pro is not urgent. From an iPhone 13 Pro or 14 Pro the gain in performance and especially in photo quality is more noticeable, though not necessarily enough to justify the spend on its own. It is from older models, an iPhone 12 Pro for instance, that the change makes the most sense.

The arrival of the iPhone Air had one major consequence: it freed the 17 Pro from its constraints. Apple's most powerful and most ambitious phone no longer has to win you over on design alone, and the new dimensions are a deliberate gain in mass so it can take on more responsibility as the company's technology showcase.

Design and finish have not been sacrificed for it. The unibody chassis and the new plateau produce a phone that is heavier but better balanced, and crucially Apple can now fit a larger battery and a vapour chamber to support a genuinely fast processor. The display is simply the most accomplished on the market.

The iPhone has carried most of these strengths before, but they were always offset by weaknesses that dulled the overall picture — battery life behind the field and a camera less ambitious than the competition. The 17 Pro genuinely improves on both, and now offers versatility and performance in line with what it costs. Even with the Air taking the limelight and the standard iPhone 17 better equipped than ever, the Pro and Pro Max are an excellent vintage — the kind that makes an upgrade worth thinking about.

It was £989.00 on Amazon UK for the 256 GB model when we checked on 2 August 2026. Renewed listings were cheaper but have been excluded. Check the price on Amazon UK or search on Amazon US