Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple seems determined to leave a persistent gap between the cameras of its Pro iPhones and the regular ones, but most other features—the edge-to-edge-screen design with FaceID, the Dynamic Island, OLED display panels, Apple Intelligence compatibility—eventually trickle down to the regular-old iPhone after a generation or two of timed exclusivity.

One feature that Apple has been particularly slow to move down the chain is ProMotion, the branding the company uses to refer to a screen that can refresh up to 120 times per second rather than the more typical 60 times per second. ProMotion isn't a necessary feature, but since Apple added it to the iPhone 13 Pro in 2021, the extra fluidity and smoothness, plus the always-on display feature, have been big selling points for the Pro phones.

This year, ProMotion finally comes to the regular-old iPhone 17, years after midrange and even lower-end Android phones made the swap to 90 or 120 Hz display panels. And it sounds like a small thing, but the screen upgrade—together with a doubling of base storage from 128GB to 256GB—makes the gap between this year's iPhone and iPhone Pro feel narrower than it's been in a long time. If you jumped on the Pro train a few years back and don't want to spend that much again, this might be a good year to switch back. If you've ever been tempted by the Pro but never made the upgrade, you can continue not doing that and miss out on relatively little.

The iPhone 17 has very little that we haven't seen in an iPhone before, compared to the redesigned Pro or the all-new Air. But it's this year's best upgrade, and it's not particularly close.

You’ve seen this one before

Externally, the iPhone 17 is near-identical to the iPhone 16, which itself used the same basic design Apple had been using since the iPhone 12. The most significant update in that five-year span was probably the iPhone 15, which switched from the display notch to the Dynamic Island and from the Lightning port to USB-C.

The iPhone 12 generation was also probably the last time the regular iPhone and the Pro were this similar. Those phones used the same basic design, the same basic chip, and the same basic screen, leaving mostly camera-related improvements and the Max model as the main points of differentiation. That's all broadly true of the split between the iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro, as well.

The iPhone Air and Pro both depart from the last half-decade of iPhone designs in different ways, but the iPhone 17 sticks with the tried-and-true.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone 17's design has changed just enough since last year that you'll need to find a new iPhone 17-compatible case and screen protector for your phone rather than buying something that fits a previous-generation model (it's imperceptibly taller than the iPhone 16). The screen size has been increased from 6.1 inches to 6.3, the same as the iPhone Pro. But the aluminum-framed-glass-sandwich design is much less of a departure from recent precedent than either the iPhone Air or the Pro.

The screen is the real star of the show in the iPhone 17, bringing 120 Hz ProMotion technology and the Pro's always-on display feature to the regular iPhone for the first time. According to Apple's spec sheets (and my eyes, admittedly not a scientific measurement), the 17 and the Pro appear to be using identical display panels, with the same functionally infinite contrast, resolution (2622 x 1206), and brightness specs (1,000 nits typical, 1,600 nits for HDR, 3,000 nits peak in outdoor light).

It's easy to think of the basic iPhone as "the cheap one" because it is the least expensive of the four new phones Apple puts out every year, but $799 is still well into premium-phone range, and even middle-of-the-road phones from the likes of Google and Samsung have been shipping high-refresh-rate OLED panels in cheaper phones than this for a few years now. By that metric, it's faintly ridiculous that Apple isn't shipping something like this in its $600 iPhone 16e, but in Apple's ecosystem, we'll take it as a win that the iPhone 17 doesn't cost more than the 16 did last year.

Holding an iPhone 17 feels like holding any other regular-sized iPhone made within the last five years, with the exceptions of the new iPhone Air and some of the heavier iPhone Pros. It doesn't have the exceptionally good screen-size-to-weight ratio or the slim profile of the Air, and it doesn't have the added bulk or huge camera plateau of the iPhone 17 Pro. It feels about like it looks: unremarkable.

Camera

The iPhone Air's single camera has the same specs and uses the same sensor as the iPhone 17's main camera, so we've already written a bit about how well it does relative to the iPhone Pro and to an iPhone 15 Pro from a couple of years ago.

Like the last few iPhone generations, the iPhone 17's main camera uses a 48 MP sensor that saves 24 MP images, using a process called "pixel binning" to decide which pixels are saved and which are discarded when shrinking the images down. To enable an "optical quality" 2x telephoto mode, Apple crops a 12 MP image out of the center of that sensor without doing any resizing or pixel binning. The results are a small step down in quality from the regular 1x mode, but they're still native resolution images with no digital zoom, and the 2x mode on the iPhone Air or iPhone 17 can actually capture fine detail better than an older iPhone Pro in situations where you're shooting an object that's close by and the actual telephoto lens isn't used.

One improvement to the iPhone 17's camera sensor this year is that the ultrawide camera is also upgraded to a 48 MP sensor so it can benefit from the same shrinking-and-pixel-binning strategy Apple uses for the main camera. In the iPhone 16, this secondary sensor was still just 12 MP.

Compared to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 we have here, wide shots on the iPhone 17 benefit mainly from the added detail you capture in higher-resolution 24 or 48 MP images. The difference is slightly more noticeable with details in the background of an image than details in the foreground, as visible in the Lego castle surrounding Lego Mario.

The older the phone you're using is, the more you'll benefit from sensor and image signal processing improvements. Bits of dust and battle damage on Mario are most distinct on the iPhone 17 than the iPhone 15 Pro, for example, but aside from the resolution, I don't notice much of a difference between the iPhone 16 and 17.

A true telephoto lens is probably the biggest feature the iPhone 17 Pro has going for it relative to the basic iPhone 17, and Apple has amped it up with its own 48 MP sensor this year. We'll reuse the 4x and 8x photos from our iPhone Air review to show you what you're missing—the telephoto camera captures considerably more fine detail on faraway objects, but even as someone who uses the telephoto on the iPhone 15 Pro constantly, I would have to think pretty hard about whether that camera is worth $300, even once you add in the larger battery, ProRAW support, and other things Apple still holds back for the Pro phones.

Specs and speeds and battery

Our iPhone Air review showed that the main difference between the iPhone 17's Apple A19 chip and the A19 Pro used in the iPhone Air and iPhone Pro is RAM. The iPhone 17 sticks with 8GB of memory, whereas both Air and Pro are bumped up to 12GB.

There are other things that the A19 Pro can enable, including ProRes video support and 10Gbps USB 3 file transfer speeds. But many of those iPhone Pro features, including the sixth GPU core, are mostly switched off for the iPhone Air, suggesting that we could actually be looking at the exact same silicon with a different amount of RAM packaged on top.

Regardless, 8GB of RAM is currently the floor for Apple Intelligence, so there's no difference in features between the iPhone 17 and the Air or the 17 Pro. Browser tabs and apps may be ejected from memory slightly less frequently, and the 12GB phones may age better as the years wear on. But right now, 8GB of memory puts you above the amount that most iOS 26-compatible phones are using—Apple is still optimizing for plenty of phones with 6GB, 4GB, or even 3GB of memory. 8GB should be more than enough for the foreseeable future, and I noticed zero differences in day-to-day performance between the iPhone 17 and the iPhone Air.

The iPhone 17 is often actually faster than the iPhone Air, despite both phones using five-core A19-class GPUs. Apple's thinnest phone has less room to dissipate heat, which leads to more aggressive thermal throttling, especially for 3D apps like games. The iPhone 17 will often outperform Apple's $999 phone, despite costing $200 less.

All of this also ignores one of the iPhone 17's best internal upgrades: a bump from 128GB of storage to 256GB of storage at the same $799 starting price as the iPhone 16. Apple's obnoxious $100-or-$200-per-tier upgrade pricing for storage and RAM is usually the worst part about any of its products, so any upgrade that eliminates that upcharge for anyone is worth calling out.

On the battery front, we didn't run specific tests, but the iPhone 17 did reliably make it from my typical 7:30 or 7:45 am wakeup to my typical 1:00 or 1:30 am bedtime with 15 or 20 percent leftover. Even a day with Personal Hotspot use and a few dips into Pokémon Go didn't push the battery hard enough to require a midday top-up. (Like the other new iPhones this year, the iPhone 17 ships with Adaptive Power enabled, which can selectively reduce performance or dim the screen and automatically enables Low Power Mode at 20 percent, all in the name of stretching the battery out a bit and preventing rapid drops.)

Better battery life out of the box is already a good thing, but it also means more wiggle room for the battery to lose capacity over time without seriously inconveniencing you. This is a line that the iPhone Air can't quite cross, and it will become more and more relevant as your phone approaches two or three years in service.

The one to beat

Apple's iPhone 17.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The screen is one of the iPhone Pro's best features, and the iPhone 17 gets it this year. That plus the 256GB storage bump is pretty much all you need to know; this will be a more noticeable upgrade for anyone with, say, the iPhones 12-to-14 than the iPhone 15 or 16 was. And for $799—$200 more than the 128GB version of the iPhone 16e and $100 more than the 128GB version of the iPhone 16—it's by far the iPhone lineup's best value for money right now.

This is also happening at the same time as the iPhone Pro is getting a much chonkier new design, one I don't particularly love the look of even though I do appreciate the functional camera and battery upgrades it enables. This year's Pro feels like a phone targeted toward people who are actually using it in a professional photography or videography context, where in other years, it's felt more like "the regular iPhone plus a bunch of nice, broadly appealing quality-of-life stuff that may or may not trickle down to the regular iPhone over time."

In this year's lineup, you get the iPhone Air, which feels like it's trying to do something new at the expense of basics like camera and battery life. You get the iPhone 17 Pro, which feels like it was specifically built for anyone who looks at the iPhone Air and thinks, "I just want a phone with a bigger battery and a better camera and I don't care what it looks like or how light it is" (hello, median Ars Technica readers and employees). And the iPhone 17 is there quietly undercutting them both, as if to say, "Would anyone just like a really good version of the regular iPhone?"

Next and last on our iPhone review list this year: the iPhone 17 Pro. Maybe spending a few days up close with it will help me appreciate the design more?

The good

• The exact same screen as this year's iPhone Pro for $300 less, including 120 Hz ProMotion, variable refresh rates, and an always-on screen.
• Same good main camera as the iPhone Air, plus the added flexibility of an improved wide-angle camera.
• Good battery life.
• A19 is often faster than iPhone Air's A19 Pro thanks to better heat dissipation.
• Jumps from 128GB to 256GB of storage without increasing the starting price.

The bad

• 8GB of RAM instead of 12GB. 8GB is fine but more is also good!
• I slightly prefer last year's versions of most of these color options.
• No two-column layout for apps in landscape mode.
• The telephoto lens seems like it will be restricted to the iPhone Pro forever.

The ugly

• People probably won't be able to tell you have a new iPhone?