The iPhone 17 Pro is tempting this Android user to the dark side

The coming of September heralds three inevitable things: summer comes to an end, the kids go back to school (suckers), and Apple brings out a new batch of iPhones.

This year, it’s the iPhone 17 series, and I’ve been out testing the iPhone 17 Pro. It’s been a long time since a proper iPhone wheel reinvention, and the 17 Pro is not that. It’s an iterative update, adding a beefed-up telephoto camera and the improved A19 chipset for, supposedly, faster-than-ever performance. Look, it’s the new iPhone. If you’re reading this, you likely know what you’re in for.

I’ve used plenty of iPhones before in a professional capacity for reviews, group tests and buying guides, though in my personal life I’m a committed Android user, having owned a selection of Samsung Galaxies and, for my sins, Fairphones. Whenever a new iPhone arrives, I’m always curious to see whether this will be the one that’ll tempt me to fully make the switch (I recently kicked in a Windows desktop PC for an M4 Mac Mini, so I’m nothing if not persuadable). Will the iPhone 17 Pro be the one? I spent a few days with it to find out.

Apple iPhone 17 Pro: Specs

Design & screen

I’ve long felt that the Pro iPhones are perfectly sized – the Pro Max models I find to be too big for my hands and pockets – and at 150mm length and 204g weight, the iPhone 17 Pro feels just right. The protruding camera module draws attention to itself, but that’s pretty much a given for smartphone cameras these days, and is the price we pay for all those sophisticated camera modes we refuse to do without.

The body, newly constructed from aluminium rather than titanium, feels lightweight and strong. The screen is protected by Apple’s scratch-resistant Ceramic Shield 2, and in a first for the series, there’s now also Ceramic Shield protection on the rear of the handset too. I wasn’t allowed to take a corkscrew to the loaner to test this, but I did accidentally leave it in a bag with my keys several times, and it came away scratch-free. It’s IP68 weatherproof rated, which means it should survive a hosing, but not a submerging.

The screen is of course a delight; it’s the same 6.3-inch Super Retina XDR we saw in the iPhone 16 Pro. Once again you’ve got those rounded corners that take off a bit of effective real estate, meaning it’s a 6.27-inch screen in real effective terms, but I frankly don’t want to meet the person who’s bothered by that. It’s buttery-smooth for gaming, TV watching, reading, whatever you like to do.

Once again, we have assignable buttons on either side, including the action button that can be assigned to various functions, such as the torch or an AI-powered translation service.

On the other side is the camera control button, which I love as a physical shutter button, but find a bit underbaked otherwise. Maybe it’s because I use so many proper cameras in my day-to-day, but I don’t find holding it down to activate video to be intuitive at all. The half-press to open zoom modes and double half-press to open camera modes is still as fiddly as it was on the iPhone 16 Pro, and resulted in many accidental photo captures on my part. And once the menus do open, I don’t find them particularly well-placed or easy to use at the top of the screen (I guess I’m supposed to use my thumb? Don’t care for that).

Ultimately, the button just doesn’t really do what it’s clearly trying to do – make the camera experience more immersive and fluid. Love the idea, but I hope Apple takes another swing at it.

Features & performance

As mentioned, we have a new A19 chipset, upgraded from the A18 Pro on the iPhone 16 Pro, and it delivers the kind of solid, incremental improvements you’d expect. Take a look at the benchmark scores below.

iPhone 17 Pro: Benchmark scores

The CPU scores are solid, with the multi-core score of 9,325 showing nearly a 15% increase over the performance of the iPhone 16 Pro (Apple generally promises improvements of around 10-20% every time, so this is right in line). The single-core performance score shows a slightly less impressive 11% bump over the iPhone 16 Pro, at 3,691, but hey, a bump is a bump.

The Metal GPU test gave a beefy score of 45,701, which is a healthy 38% increase over the iPhone 16 Pro, and is nipping at the heels of the iPad Air M3. If you want a phone specifically for gaming, the iPhone 17 Pro is going to be a demonstrably better experience than any other iPhone save the 17 Pro Max.

Battery life is very good. I spent an evening playing Civilization VI (‘Yes, of course it’s for work, stop asking that.’) after a day of photography, video and benchmark testing, and it was well past my bedtime when the phone finally died. Apple claims it’ll last up to 33 hours of video playback, and from my anecdotal experience, I believe it.

AI

The A19 pro chipset is supposed to be Apple’s best in-phone architecture yet for powering AI, as tech companies are all legally obligated to claim with their new releases. With that said, Apple has been a little more circumspect than some other companies with regard to its own AI infrastructure, preferring to let others do the heavy lifting. Case in point – you can integrate Apple Intelligence with ChatGPT if so desired, and you don’t even need your own ChatGPT account.

I took it for a spin with the Visual Intelligence feature, which lets you point the camera at your environment and ask questions about it. The results: patchy, with some kinks that need ironing out and some problems that are just baked in. For instance, I theoretically liked the way I could point it at various plants and have ChatGPT tell me what kind of plant they were. But, it has the problem that all such generative AI functions have – it’s just guessing based on its dataset, and I have no way of knowing if it’s actually correct, so every answer comes with a big honking disclaimer that it might not be accurate and I shouldn’t use it for anything important. Truly the future is a magical place.

The system doesn’t have a standard recourse when it doesn’t know an answer. It repeatedly failed to identify an image of the extremely obscure and very rarely photographed political figure Nelson Mandela, but rather than giving me an ‘I don’t know’, it kept just re-asking ‘What do you want to know?’, occasionally spicing things up with a ‘Something went wrong’.

I also tried out the Apple Intelligence Live Translation feature, which supposedly makes it possible to fluidly communicate across language barriers. When confined to text, it’s brilliant, allowing you to quickly translate screenshots and messages from one language to another (even if it’s not always perfect, you’ll definitely get the gist). I tried the voice-translation feature, going from French to English and back, and… it sort of works if you speak very slowly and don’t use any unusual words that sound like common ones. The idea that it could facilitate a fluid, real-time conversation between two people speaking different languages – well, I’m sceptical, to put it mildly.

Camera

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The big new feature is that the telephoto camera has been upgraded, going from 12MP to a 48MP Fusion module, the same resolution as the Main and Ultrawide. In practice, this means you have a lot more zoom power, with a high-quality 4x zoom mode, a 12MP 8x zoom mode, and even the option to go up to a digital 16x zoom, an equivalent focal length of 200mm (on a real camera, that would be a whacking long lens).

The zoom modes hold up really well when viewed on a monitor. I’m generally not a fan of digital zoom, but honestly the 16x isn’t bad! There’s clearly a bit of interpolation helping things along, but while the resulting image is grainy, it’s still usable. The camera array also does well in low light – I took the phone to a concert, and found that the 4x zoom gave me the best balance between quality and closeness to the subject (though the 8x was no slouch).

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The close-up and macro mode uses the ultra-wide camera to give you a shallow depth of field. I’m not a fan of the auto-activation feature – supposedly it kicks in smoothly when you move your camera close to a subject, but in practice I found it kept turning itself on and off while I was trying to adjust my composition, and soon I lost patience and locked it on.

Video has also received a hefty upgrade, aimed squarely at the pro market. The iPhone 17 Pro boasts features like: the ProRes RAW video codec; the Log2 flat colour profile for maximising dynamic range, thereby preserving detail for the color grade; and genlock for synchronising multiple video devices. Ninety-five per cent of people who use the phone won’t know what those things are, and don’t need to know, but if you’re someone who uses an iPhone for professional video content creation, I’d say the iPhone 17 Pro seriously merits consideration as an upgrade. There’s a lot here.

Price

The iPhone 17 Pro starts at $1,099 / £1,099 for the 256GB model, rising to $1,299 / £1,299 for the 512GB model, and topping out at $1,499 / £1,499 for the 1TB model. You can further increase this price with the Pro Max model if you’d like to.

Who’s it for?

So, did the iPhone 17 Pro do enough to tempt this hoary old Android user? Well, I’m not sure if I want to spend that much on a phone right now, but I really enjoyed my time with it, and will be loath to give it up. Casual users get more than they need to pay for, particularly in terms of pro video features, but the iPhone 17 Pro features camera upgrades and performance enhancements that will have content creators and gamers swooning.

Ultimately, the Android/iPhone dynamic is the same as it ever was. If you hone in on a specific feature, you’ll almost always find an Android phone that’ll do it better (the Xiaomi phones with 1-inch sensors are better for photography, the Infinix phones are better for gaming, etc). But, the iPhone 17 Pro provides a smoother and more polished all-around package than any single Android phone, and given how many tasks we give our phones these days, there’s a lot to be said for that.

Buy it if

• You want the best iPhone camera system
• You want a phone with pro video features
• You want a polished, premium all-rounder

Don’t buy it if

• You own an iPhone 16 Pro (or a 15 Pro, to be honest)
• You want to spend less than four figures
• You don’t need a top-tier camera system