The iPhone 17 design shows Apple has finally woken up

The iPhone 17 is coming, and it's caught the attention of both the internet at large and the Creative Bloq team for one primary reason: its design.

Years of near-imperceptible, almost impossibly minute changes to the design of each respective generation of iPhone have led many, both among the tech press (me included) and the public at large, to bemoan Apple's apparent lack of ambition and aversion to risk when it came to product design.

It felt like about 15 years ago, Apple's immense success with its then-innovative product design and visual approach led to an increasingly stringent adherence to the principle of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', even as more and more voices emerged pointing out that in more and more ways, Apple was getting left behind on the innovation front.

So when the iPhone 17 design leaked, it was a bit of a shock to those people (again, me included). It looked different. Immediately, noticeably different. The camera array on the 17 Pro looks bigger, bolder and thicker than before, and on the 'junior' models, the camera setup protrudes more, making it an immediately 'shoutier' phone than for the last 1 billion years.

According to Lance Ulanoff on TechRadar, there are also marked changes on the inside affecting the external design, such as rearranging the internal components to battle the persistent overheating issues we've noticed in the past, and hints at a bigger battery (as the new model looks altogether chonkier than previous ones), addressing an issue that was becoming a real handicap for Apple in the Great Smartphone Wars.

And on the flip side, the iPhone 17 Air offers a first glimpse of a super-thin iPhone, a real departure from the samey design elements of the iPhone for years.

And as reliably as the sun rises in the east, as predictably as the eventual heat death of the universe, people emerged from all corners of the web to say they hated it.

As someone who has never been the biggest personal Apple fanatic, I just have one thing to say to all of yous: make up your mind.

You don't get to complain that Apple never takes any risks and then immediately complain when they do. Does the new design, especially for the 17, look a little jarring at first sight? Maybe, but the more I look at it, the more I like it.

And best of all, for me at least, it tells me that finally, someone in the Apple product design department is awake. Instead of merely inventing new brand terms around two-year-old Android features or taking an established feature or function and gently smoothing the interface or user experience (something Apple does better than just about anyone, I will happily admit).

They've seen that A. people want just a little bit of newness sensation, B. people want more battery life, and C. they don't want to scald themselves on their handset, and they've taken action. In fact, I raised all these points in last year's iPhone 16 reviews so of course I'm going to take sole credit for Apple making these changes now...

Jesting aside, the iPhone 17 launch tells us one thing above others: this time, Apple is listening to user feedback and that they realise you can't please everyone all the time so taking a little bit of risk is fine, and that alone has made me more intrigued by the iPhone 17 than any iPhone in a long, long time.