I get a new iPhone as a work phone bi-yearly, and get to pick the model, with co-pay for anything above the most basic one (currently 16E). In a month or so, it'll be that time again.
Last time I went with the non-Pro option was 6 years ago with the 11. Back then I regretted it, it was a clear downgrade from my previous iPhone X (which I consider the first "Pro" iPhone) - largely because of the screen, 11's LCD really wasn'g great after the X's AMOLED. Since then, I've had the 13 Pro and 15 Pro, both have been great, even though both are a bit weak in the battery department. Now I'm again considering the base 17.
Not interested in the Air or the 17 Pro Max, and the 17 Pro doesn't really seem like it's worth the extra cost to me, since the base model seems really good this time around. At a glance, the things you get with the 17 Pro for extra 350€ (German pricing) are:
- Unibody, but same aluminum material
- Same size, same _exact_ screen (all specs match)
- A19 Pro chip vs A19 - relevant for gaming (I don't) or other highly intensive applications (video editing I guess? again, not something I do a lot of)
- Better camera system - arguably the only relevant thing for a daily driver here
- LiDAR - very limited usefulness, in my experience having it on the 15 Pro
- USB 3 with 10 Gbit speeds vs USB 2 speeds on the USB-C port - relevant if you transfer large files like ProRes video, for me it's basically only when doing local backups to the Mac to install iOS betas, so largely irrelevant
- 31 hours battery life vs 30 - marginal difference
- Same charging, connectivity, everything else really
Will likely end up visiting an Apple Store to fiddle with both options, and look at the co-pay prices that our company will offer, then decide. But so far, it's much less of a clear Pro choice than it was in the previous years.
It's not because your work gives you the opportunity to get a new iPhone that you *need* to get one... you can also downscale the consumerism, the planet is better that way
It's not because the site gives you a reply button that you need to press it... you can also downscale the server & energy usage, the "planet" is better that way
The year of the 11 lineup was the one year where the standard iPhone <LATEST_NUMBER> was a clear downgrade from last year's. It was a refresh of the iPhone XR from the previous year, which was the budget option compared to the flagship XS.
Yes, and the XS was the follow-up to the previous X and thus also the "Pro" model, before they were explicitly named as such. So my move that year was indeed a downgrade. Now I'm kind of worried of doing the same thing again - but spec-wise, the base 17 is really not at all a downgrade from my current 15 Pro, apart from the camera department.
Base iPhone 17 is the first year since the Pros existed where I think most people are not missing out by getting the non-pro.
I'm certainly not a photographer but I got the 16 Pro because of ProMotion. If I were upgrading this year, I'd probably go for the standard 17 because it finally has practically everything a standard user could expect.
Phones default tonusing Through the Lens autofocus. This is closed-loop and pretty fastthese days.
Only when it's too dark work effectively do they switch to lidar/tof open loop autofocus systems.
Surprising there’s no matte-black iPhone 17 Pro - dark, low-reflectance finishes are standard in pro video kit because they minimise specular reflections and stray highlights; keeping a shiny silver finish and skipping a subdued matte black feels like a strange choice and undercuts the “Pro” claim.
The lack of a black iPhone 17 Pro... has me dumbfounded. I might skip this year.
I'm really happy with the camera features, but there's less differentiation between base iPhone 17 and 17 Pro this go-round. Probably enough for me to still get the Pro, but the iPhone 17 is looking like a pretty cool option this year.
They're removing black to force people to either upgrade, or make it painfully obvious to their peers that they're using an old phone. That's what you do when there is nothing new in your phone this year. Status signaling and fashion.
Or it could be like the white iPhone 4... delayed because of problems with the finish.
It's obvious to anyone given the radical new design that you have an iPhone 16 Pro or not. That's not the reason for removing black. They'd have removed silver for the same reason if it was.
I think that for each variation of treatments and finishes they do, the white models tend to look dated the quickest. But I'm a case guy, and I like black carbon cases, so the contrast between white phones and carbon cases is too stark.
If you are just putting it in a case, white will more visibly show the accumulated grime. But the color doesn't matter as much in that scenario anyway.
I've always preferred clear cases, and I notice when I get the white iPhone it definitely stays cooler (especially when used as navigation in the car).
Looks like “8x” zoom on the new Pro model is actually 4x optical plus extra 2x by pixel binning on the 48MP sensor, compared with 5x optical on the last year’s model.
I currently have a 14 Pro, and I use 3x zoom a lot. It is usually enough for my regular daily pictures, but when taking the shots during hiking trips I often find myself wishing for a greater zoom. When taking a picture of a distant mountain, or a skittish animal you don’t want to spook by coming closer
It is, but I don’t think this a bad offering - up until recently all iPhone cameras were 12mp, so you still get “good enough to print” quality. I guess it’s a bit of marketing speak but I don’t mind - to me it seems they made good choices on the lenses this year. 5x always seemed a bit too much without something in between but hopefully 4x is a decent compromise while still enabling “8x” (which I suspect is important for marketing and honestly will be quite fun)
I thought of upgrading my 3 year old pro, but seeing this there is no reason to. Apple Intelligence is nowhere to be found, extra camera is nice but this design... Oh my god, I know this is subjective, but this is really ugly.
Subjective indeed. I don't mind the broad camera bump -- it's a good trade-off for getting the increased zoom, honestly. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the differently-colored ceramic bit on the back, though. But, on the plus side, not like that's the bit of the phone I look at.
Plus, the orange looks great. (In their promo shots. We've occasionally seen these look a lot less vivid once you see them in real life.)
>for getting the increased zoom
you're getting 4x optical zoom (going down from 5x on 16 pro) and then 2x software zoom. Not bad, but not more optical zoom...
and that bump has again lens bumps, uneven, and the cases are really fugly and large
It's not software zoom -- it's them doing binned pixels at 4x and then unbinning them and cropping down at 8x. Same thing they were doing on previous models for the 2x zoom, and now unlocked on the telephoto lens because of the resolution increase this year.
It's a quality drop for sure, but it's never extrapolating pixels that weren't optically there as software zoom does.
99% of the time phones are on a case and used from the front screen so from where I stand I don’t care what it looks like from the back.
And there is so few people using it caseless that it won’t really matter.
Horses for courses. Better camera (for those special moments while the kids are young) and better battery life are two big ones for me, so I'll likely upgrade. (Kind of digging the orange color too).
It's not the dullest refresh, and they always sell plenty. I'm sure this will be no exception.
The looks are what they are, but if that wide shelf will mean the phone doesn't wobble when placed on a table, that is a good usability improvement. One of the small things I missed when moving from a Pixel 6 to an iPhone was the ability to not feel compelled to pick it up in order to use it.
> if that wide shelf will mean the phone doesn't wobble when placed on a table, that is a good usability improvement.
That's what I had hoped too, but from the images I've seen it looks like the cameras themselves bump out past the shelf far enough that it will still wobble.
Boo, hiss. No more physical SIM support in Canada. I tried to go eSim only, but moving an eSim from one phone to another is a huge PITA and something I do regularly for travel.
This is especially surprising to me given several providers still only support physical SIM or weird half-support (e.g. Fizz, that I'm with, allows you to open a new line with eSIM but not transfer an existing line from physical to eSIM).
Looks like the esim only version has a bigger battery. I can’t tell if that’s an option in Australia because I’d absolutely opt for the bigger battery version.
Canadian carriers generally suck. Mine limits the ability to move an eSim between phones. The fact that this is even possible tells me that eSims are not as consumer friendly as traditional SIM cards.
With the iPhone 17 Air, which has many of the Pro features that typically accompany the Pro model to differentiate it from the base model, in addition to the base model getting the marquee features of the Pro models such as the 120Hz/Always On Display, the Pro is very poorly differentiated unless you really make use of the three cameras.
I'm one of those people who really likes the camera features, so there's no question about which one interests me. The Pro also has a battery life estimate that's 45% longer than the Air's, which is pretty important to me. Those two things combine to be a pretty big differentiator.
EDIT: actually, base Pro is only 22% more battery life. I was accidentally comparing it to the Pro Max. Still, important.
It’s a phone, who or what are those pros that use this in a pro way? And I’m saying this as a pro owner who only got it for the camera, which I use to take casual photos
I'm the same, thousands and thousands of casual photos of people, animals, flowers, landscapes with a 15 Pro Max. My DSLR sits unused in a case. It has to be the 17 Pro but I'm debating regular or Max.
I'm personally totally fine with incremental upgrades. It already does everything I want and it lasts for like 5+ years. I'll get a new one when this one dies and then I had 5 iterations worth of new stuff.
Most of the people in my family and friends have iPhone X, 11, 12, or 13s and run at varying degrees of "dead any day now" and "completely fine" (from old to new, generally).
>The march of incremental upgrades year over year from Apple is impressive.
It is not just Apple. I can’t think of any phone maker that is releasing exciting new things.
For me, foldable and curved screen phones _could_ be that, but no implementations are.
Supposedly Apple is working on both of those, so maybe they can do it right.
I know that's /s, but I'm seriously astounded by how many great-at-video cameras come out from Sony, Canon, Nikon, et all that still don't have rudimentary features like genlock or easy timecode integration. Much less the ability to upload video clips and still frames somewhere automatically, in full resolution.
Sometimes I use my iPhone instead of my $3000 camera rig just because I can get the clip somewhere within seconds instead of the 2-3 minute rigamarole of SD card ingestion.
IIRC, iPhones (and every other smartphone) records variable frame rate videos (VFR), whereas professional cameras can record constant frame rate videos (CFR).
I think that VFR videos need to be re-encoded into CFR videos in order to be able to work with all the footage shot by different devices. It sounds to me like with the Genlock feature, it could actually be possible to record CFR videos on an iPhone and also synchronize the iPhone with other devices so that both video and audio does not drift relative to other devices. But that's just my speculation as I couldn't find any details about the Genlock feature.
I would love to know how the team working on 28 years later handled synchronization of the multiple iPhones they were using to shoot some scenes of the movie and if they got a helping hand from Apple, which perhaps allowed them to use some internal APIs to access hidden features of the camera stack...
One of the big use cases for Genlock these days is when you're doing virtual production with LED walls; you want to make sure the screen refresh of the wall is locked to the shutter of the camera. It's almost like 'vsync' in video game video settings, without it you risk seeing tearing in the backdrops.
The focus was naturally scenes and "vibes" that couldn't be achieved with traditional films cameras. Boyle and Mantle weren't afraid to use whatever was best for the job, which included drones and other camera systems as well. More on their iPhone camera rigs for anyone who's interested:
I never liked titanium very much, but it's better than aluminum for sure. Now back when they did stainless, that I thought was awesome and looked and felt way more premium.
Kind of surprised by how ugly the pro looks. I can deal with wide the "plateau", but that cutout looks bad. If I were to buy one it'd be the first phone I keep in a case.
Fine with the orange color 'flavour of the month' scheme on this page but what's with that mega PRO logo text in your face at the top? Take it easy pickup truck. Off brand.
I regret “upgrading” from iPhone 12 to 16. Ended up spending over $1k on a separate camera because the iPhone 16’s is so much worse it ruined my favorite hobby of taking scenery photos while cycling.
My iPhone 11 Pro is the green one from that year. Still a great phone, although I can feel that it's seriously memory constrained. I'm finally ready to upgrade.
Oh man lucky! I know they made a 13 Pro Max in green, but it was released off cycle (something like March) and I had already got the 13 Pro Max the previous October. :sob:
Liquid Glass design + This lineup is a middle-finger to ergonomics and accessibility.
I just want a non distractive phone with good battery life. E-Paper screen, compact format, yet still great cameras - maybe LoRa capability for Meshtastic / Meshcore, embedded swiss army knife.
Last time I went with the non-Pro option was 6 years ago with the 11. Back then I regretted it, it was a clear downgrade from my previous iPhone X (which I consider the first "Pro" iPhone) - largely because of the screen, 11's LCD really wasn'g great after the X's AMOLED. Since then, I've had the 13 Pro and 15 Pro, both have been great, even though both are a bit weak in the battery department. Now I'm again considering the base 17.
Not interested in the Air or the 17 Pro Max, and the 17 Pro doesn't really seem like it's worth the extra cost to me, since the base model seems really good this time around. At a glance, the things you get with the 17 Pro for extra 350€ (German pricing) are:
- Unibody, but same aluminum material
- Same size, same _exact_ screen (all specs match)
- A19 Pro chip vs A19 - relevant for gaming (I don't) or other highly intensive applications (video editing I guess? again, not something I do a lot of)
- Better camera system - arguably the only relevant thing for a daily driver here
- LiDAR - very limited usefulness, in my experience having it on the 15 Pro
- USB 3 with 10 Gbit speeds vs USB 2 speeds on the USB-C port - relevant if you transfer large files like ProRes video, for me it's basically only when doing local backups to the Mac to install iOS betas, so largely irrelevant
- 31 hours battery life vs 30 - marginal difference
- Same charging, connectivity, everything else really
Will likely end up visiting an Apple Store to fiddle with both options, and look at the co-pay prices that our company will offer, then decide. But so far, it's much less of a clear Pro choice than it was in the previous years.