iPhone 17 review: Boringly extraordinary

Best Prices Today: Apple iPhone 17

There’s a gulf between the things Apple loves to talk about and the things its customers actually choose to buy. At the Awe Dropping event this September, the company focused heavily on the iPhone Air, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max, a trio of glamorous, top-spec show ponies. But far more people will buy the simple, standard iPhone 17.

The question is not whether the 17 is a weaker phone than the Air and 17 Pro. The three phones start at $799, $999, and $1,099, respectively; of course, it’s a weaker phone. The question is whether the 17’s sum total of benefits and compromises represents better value than its siblings—and I would argue that it absolutely does. “Simple” and “standard” are relative terms that shouldn’t disguise this phone’s impressive array of specs and features.

In our in-depth iPhone 17 review, we put the phone through a rigorous battery of speed, battery, and camera tests. And whether you’re upgrading from an iPhone 16, an older Apple handset, or switching from something else entirely, we’ll help you decide if this is the right phone for you.

Design and build: Same looks, new toughness

At first glance, it’s not easy to see what’s changed from the iPhone 16. The exterior designs are virtually identical.

The edge remains smart brushed metal, contrasting attractively with the glossy front glass and milky matte rear glass. The camera module sticks out the same amount as before, and as before, it matches the color on the rest of the phone, except in a darker tone and a more translucent material. The buttons are the same: separate volume up and volume down on the left, with the customizable Action button slightly above them, along with power and Camera Control on the opposite edge. There’s still a USB-C port at the bottom with mildly asymmetrical speaker grills on either side.

A lack of change isn’t always a negative. The iPhone 17 is visually the same as the iPhone 16, and really quite similar, barring little tweaks each year, to models going back as far as the iPhone 12. But Apple’s square-edged iPhone design is popular for a reason, and I view it as more of a timeless classic than a tired repetition. (If you’re looking for radical change, consider the iPhone Air.)

In any case, while the phone looks the same, there are some durability upgrades to the design that are less obvious. The screen has been reinforced with Ceramic Shield 2, a new version of the Ceramic Shield protective finish that we’ve had since the iPhone 12, and Apple claims this delivers 3x better scratch resistance. That’s difficult to test scientifically, and I certainly didn’t intend to subject my sample to the screwdrivers and scissors wielded by more destructive testers. But I didn’t use a screen protector and wasn’t especially careful, and can confirm that my iPhone 17’s screen didn’t pick up any scratches during a week or so of testing.

Note, however, that the iPhone 17 doesn’t get the Ceramic Shield upgrade to the rear glass that Apple has given to the iPhone 17 Pro and Air. I didn’t notice any problems from that absence, but I mostly used the 17 in a silicone case, which protects the rear far more effectively than the front. The iPhone 17 is clearly a robust bit of hardware, but I would advise you to keep it in a case anyway; read our reviews of the best cases for iPhone 17.

Returning to the buttons for a moment, I will say that one comparatively recent innovation, the Camera Control brought in for the iPhone 16 last year, doesn’t strike me as a beneficial change. It isn’t useful as a quick-access button, because the camera can already be activated via a single swipe from the Lock Screen. It isn’t great as a one-handed shutter control in portrait orientation, because pressing it makes the phone move slightly; in landscape orientation, it’s positioned too far along the edge to be convenient to use. And numerous times while testing the iPhone 17, just as I experienced with the iPhone 16 Plus last year, I pressed it by accident and brought up the camera when I didn’t want it.

Your mileage may vary, to wheel out the review cliche; try out the Camera Control on a friend’s phone if they’ll let you, and see what you think. But that part of the design gets a thumbs down from me.

Finally, the color options have changed, as they always do. I don’t especially care for this year’s choices, which are more understated and less fun than the ones offered for the iPhone 16. Sage green, which I took a fancy to and requested specifically, is rather lovely as you can see in the photos, but nothing quite compares to the bold teal and pink options last year.

Display: A pro experience

The eagle-eyed may notice one small but significant design change from the previous generation: the screen has got a touch bigger. Specifically, the 6.1-inch screen on the iPhone 16 has been bumped up to 6.3 inches. (This brings the standard iPhone in line with the Pro model, which got a bump to 6.3 inches last year. This equalising process will be something of a theme in this review.) The phone hasn’t become noticeably bigger to accommodate that larger screen, only gaining a millimeter or two here and there; instead, Apple has made the bezels around the edge significantly slimmer, so it’s able to squeeze more real estate into essentially the same chassis.

To be honest, the extra screen space isn’t a lot more noticeable than those extra millimeters on the chassis; it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a little more space, but it doesn’t make a vast difference in usability. Fortunately, Apple has blessed the iPhone 17 with some more significant screen upgrades that absolutely make a difference.

Firstly, it gets an always-on screen, once again acquiring a feature which until this year was confined to the Pro line. Those who haven’t owned an always-on phone may not see what the big deal is, but it’s enormously helpful: it’s astonishing how often I find myself glancing over at a dormant phone to check the time or a lock-screen widget, and how much more convenient it is to be able to do this without also tapping the screen to wake it up.

Secondly, the screen now supports ProMotion, and is therefore capable of increasing its refresh rate to 120Hz (rather than the previous limit of 60Hz) when tasks demand it, and of lowering the rate to 1Hz when they don’t to preserve battery life. This is another significant upgrade. Any kind of animated effect is delivered smoothly and flawlessly, while battery life, as we’ll discuss later, is stronger than ever despite the always-on display.

Finally, the iPhone 17’s maximum screen brightness has been upgraded to 3,000 nits, compared to 2,000 on the iPhone 16. Yet again, this brings the standard iPhone in line with the Pro models and makes the phone easier to use in outdoor settings, although I still found some difficulties with reflections in bright sunshine, even with the new anti-reflective coating.

Camera performance: Selfie improvement

A glance at the specs for the rear-facing camera suggests less-than-dramatic improvements compared to the iPhone 16. The main lens remains 48MP and f/1.6, the zoom options are all the same (.5x, 1x, and 2x) and the phone is even equipped with the same version of Smart HDR.

The main upgrade is the ultra-wide lens being bumped from 12MP to 48MP, so in theory you can expect significantly sharper zoomed-out images, but I didn’t notice much difference. The fact is that 12MP is perfectly good enough most of the time, and the main benefit of the main lens being 48MP is that it lets the phone crop in digitally while maintaining optical quality. The ultra-wide lens doesn’t benefit from this in the same way.

Don’t get me wrong: the iPhone 17 has a seriously good rear-facing camera. I took test shots in a wide variety of shooting and lighting conditions, and it delivered sharp, colorful, vibrant images. Macro photography produced some pleasing results, and while the quality fell off a bit at maximum zoom (pictured below), the results were overall very impressive. Even in the most challenging mixed lighting, I was able to get tolerably good photos; I’m not going to say they were brilliant, but Smart HDR 5 made a valiant effort to salvage something when I made deliberately bonkers compositional choices.

It’s just that previous generations of iPhone have been able to achieve these things too. And the main weakness, shooting in very low light, hasn’t really been solved yet, with Night Mode producing an oddly unreal vibe and blurriness if there’s any wobble at all.

But the iPhone 17 does get some significant camera improvements. They’re just focused around the front camera.

First, the megapixel rating has gone up from 12MP to 18MP. Only a small increase, and certainly not enough to offer an “optical-quality” 2x zoom, but this gives the phone a certain amount of wiggle room when it comes to panning and zooming within the frame. Which becomes important when you add the key upgrade, which is the Center Stage feature which had previously been a hit in the FaceTime app.

Set up a selfie, then ask a couple of friends to wander into the frame. You’ll see that the iPhone recognises them as human subjects, and automatically adjusts to fit them neatly into the shot. In practice, I found this mildly frustrating to test, because it doesn’t perform on demand: a lot of the time it simply accepted my framing and didn’t do anything. But in real-world use, you want a feature that only meddles with your manual choices when it’s genuinely needed. And this is a thoughtful inclusion that, perhaps with a few software tweaks to the algorithm down the road, will make life easier for sociable selfie-takers.

A related upgrade is having, for the first time, the ability to take both portrait and landscape selfies from a single orientation. Hold the iPhone 17 vertically, for example, and it will default to portrait, but with a single tap, it will switch to landscape within the same interface and without having to rotate the phone. Again, this is the sort of small and non-obvious change that makes a real difference: the optimal way to take selfies is still by holding your phone in the “correct” orientation, but when you just want to grab a selfie with one hand and everyone is smiling and posing, having the one-tap option is useful.

One last change affects both front and back cameras. You can now shoot Dual Capture video, which is mainly taken up with whatever the rear lens can see, but has the front camera’s viewpoint in a small cutout box in the top corner. This sort of feature is slightly niche and may principally be of interest to content creators who want to shoot their reaction to something. But if you frequent sports matches, fireworks displays, or other spectacular visual events, it might be fun to shoot simultaneously both the thing you’re watching and your family’s reaction to it.

Performance: Speed to spare

With an A19 processor and 8GB of RAM, the iPhone 17 is more than capable of handling anything you or the App Store can throw at it. Subjectively, it performed smoothly and effortlessly throughout testing, never fazed by even the most demanding apps and games I ran. But that’s to be expected for a new iPhone with a new processor, and the real question is how far into the future it will be able to maintain this performance, as new and even more demanding software is rolled out to take advantage of ever more powerful hardware.

One way to evaluate its power beyond what is currently necessary is to compare its scores in speed benchmarking suites to those of other phones that can also handle current apps with aplomb. And the iPhone 17 delivered in spades, showcasing potential power that’s almost overkill right now. From a future-proofing point of view, that’s good news.

In the multi-core section of the Geekbench 6 benchmarking test the iPhone 17 scored an excellent 9,277, 15 percent ahead of last year’s iPhone 16 (8,044) and comfortably ahead of the iPhone 16 Pro (8,736). It stands comparison with the best Android flagships, too, sitting alongside the Honor Magic 7 Pro (9,180), Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (9,413) and OnePlus 13 (9,482), and far surpassing the much more expensive Google Pixel 10 Pro XL (5,123).

Graphically, the iPhone 17 has plenty to offer too. It produced frame rates in the 3DMark testing suite which comfortably surpassed even the Pro models from the last generation, while remaining in touch with the iPhone 17 Pro. Combine this speed with the ProMotion display tech and you can expect a top-notch gaming experience.

Battery performance: Inexplicably excellent

Battery life is one of those areas where Apple inexplicably manages to squeeze out better and better performance with each passing generation. The batteries themselves aren’t getting noticeably bigger, but whether it’s through improvements to the battery tech itself, or software optimizations elsewhere, they’re lasting longer than ever.

Officially, Apple claims the iPhone 17’s battery will last for up to 30 hours of video playback, a massive 36 percent increase on the iPhone 16’s 22 hours. Our tests suggest that might be a touch optimistic. (Which isn’t to say Apple has exaggerated the 17’s battery life; it’s historically been known for under-estimating battery life, so it may have simply been more realistic this year.) In the Geekbench 4 battery test, the iPhone 17 lasted for 1,053 minutes, a 21 percent improvement on the iPhone 16’s 867 minutes, despite the addition of an always-on screen.

That’s a superb result, also thrashing the iPhone 16e (818 minutes) and iPhone Air (880 minutes), and falling only 5 percent behind the iPhone 16 Pro Max, which has a far larger battery. The iPhone 17 Pro Max (1,560 minutes) is on another level, but don’t let that deceive you: the iPhone 17 delivers excellent battery performance.

Now, if you’ve just done the math and found that 1,053 minutes is quite a bit less than 30 hours, don’t worry. The Geekbench 4 test is an extremely demanding one and is useful only for accurate phone-to-phone comparisons. It doesn’t reflect the battery life you’ll experience on the average day.

For light or moderate use, the iPhone 17 will comfortably last a day with battery to spare. I found it tended to make it to bedtime with 20 to 30 percent remaining while using it fairly intensively as my primary phone. Even in the first two days of testing, when I was hammering the phone with processing speed benchmarks throughout the day, it lasted until bedtime before giving up the ghost around 10.30 pm. And unless you’re also writing a review, that’s very unlikely to be your experience.

Once the battery is drained, you can top it up quickly thanks to various fast-charging options. Apple claims that 20 minutes with a 40W or higher wired charger will get the iPhone 17 from empty to 50 percent, whereas the iPhone 16 needed 30 minutes. I saw some inconsistency when testing this: on one occasion, the phone reached 50 percent within the claimed 20 minutes, while another time it took 27. But it’s certainly speedy, particularly at lower battery levels, and a quick blast on the charger will get you enough power for several hours of use.

Wireless charging is a little slower. Apple reckons 30 minutes on a compatible MagSafe charger at 30W or higher will get you from empty to 50 percent, but if speed is an issue, just plug it in.

Price: Suddenly quite reasonable-looking

No news is good news. Despite pre-launch rumors of a price hike, the iPhone 17 starts at $799, the same as the iPhone 16 when that came out last year. (The iPhone 16 has now got a reduction and starts at $699.)

With the iPhone Air starting at $999 and the 17 Pro at $1,099, the 17’s pricing looks increasingly like a bargain, especially when you factor in the fact that Apple has doubled its starting storage capacity. Whereas $799 got you just 128GB last year, it now gets you a much more palatable 256GB.

• iPhone 17 (256GB): $799
• iPhone 17 (512GB): $999

Should you buy an iPhone 17?

It might seem boring compared to the groundbreaking iPhone Air, but the iPhone 17 does everything that’s asked of it to an exceptionally high standard. The design is smart and robust. The screen is big and bright and equipped with pro features. The camera takes great pictures, as usual, but is now particularly capable for selfies. It comes with twice as much storage as standard. And battery life is superb. With the iPhone Air requiring compromises on the battery and camera fronts, and the iPhone 17 Pro costing an extra $300, this is the best of the new phones for most people.

Of course, that assumes you’re in a position of needing a new phone. If you currently own an iPhone 16 or equivalent, I wouldn’t recommend buying the 17, because the upgrades to the screen, the selfie camera, and battery performance aren’t enough to justify the cost. iPhone 15 owners, on the other hand, should give this serious consideration if they can afford it, because they’ll be gaining the Action button, macro photography, faster wireless charging, a significantly faster processor, and Apple Intelligence, as well as the upgrades listed in this review.

The iPhone 17 isn’t cheap by any means, and for those on a tighter budget, there are other handsets (such as the iPhone 16e, iPhone 16, or a refurbished model) that would make a better choice. But if you’re looking for a high-class blend of performance and value, this is the one to go for.

Best Prices Today: Apple iPhone 17