iPhone 17 Pro review: A small-screen star with few compromises

As someone who usually chafes at the constraints of Apple’s walled garden, the iPhone 17 Pro made an incredibly positive first impression on me.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't my first rodeo. I’ve reviewed plenty of iPhones in my time covering tech. Still, the last one that landed this well with me right off the bat was likely the iPhone 11 Pro. The longer I spend with the iPhone 17 Pro, the more I suspect that it might be a matter of sizing more than anything.

Where other smartphone brands have fully shifted their chips towards the notion that bigger is better, the fact that the biggest name in the game still offers a pint-sized pro model stands out. The iPhone 17 Pro packs in plenty of thrills but won’t weigh you down. What's not to like about that?

The front of the iPhone 17 Pro is light on surprises. To most, what's here looks like every other iPhone released in the past few years. The rest of the story is a little more complicated, but that off-the-cuff assessment isn't far from the mark. While the standard iPhone 17 has a few key improvements over its predecessor, the list of differences between this year's iPhone 17 Pro and last year's iPhone 16 Pro is a smaller one. Like the latter device, Apple's latest comes armed with a 6.3-inch Super XDR OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. That screen also comes with Ceramic Shield 2, which offers three times as much scratch protection as its predecessor, plus a new anti-reflective coating.

The inherited features doesn't stop there. As with the iPhone 16 Pro, the iPhone 17 Pro boasts a Dynamic Island, an action button, a dedicated camera control button and the ability to charge via USB-C. This ensemble of bells and whistles does sometimes make the edges of the device feel a little more crowded than I'd like. Still, Apple have sidestepped the usual pitfall by making things easy enough to customise (or disable) as you please. 

One area where the iPhone 17 Pro does offer an obvious improvement on its predecessor is wireless charging, with the new device offering faster speeds of up to 25W via MagSafe. Another is superior selfies via a new 18MP Center Stage camera. This front-facing camera offers up a wider field of view and the ability to take photos in either landscape or portrait, irrespective of the orientation you're holding the device. It's definitely nice-to-have, though it can be found in the cheaper iPhone 17 as well.

Flip the iPhone 17 Pro over and you’ll find a full-width camera bump similar to the latest Google Pixel smartphones. Apple refers to this setup as the camera "plateau" and, like last year's model, it incorporates a 48MP main lens and 48MP ultrawide lens. Then, picking up where the 12MP telephoto lens on last year's iPhone 16 Pro left off, the iPhone 17 Pro ups the ante with a 48MP telephoto lens that promises to offer up to 8x zoom.

Throw in the usual improvements to image processing that come with the upgrade to the new A19 Pro processor, and the setup is one that promises to hit the highs that Apple's flagships are known for when it comes to smartphone photography and then some. 

Those who keep score already likely know what's going on under the hood with the iPhone 17 Pro. This year's pint-sized and pro-grade iPhone comes equipped with Apple's new A19 Pro processor. That's the same silicon found in the iPhone 17 Pro Max and the new iPhone Air, which promises to offer significant gains in GPU performance over the A18 Pro found in last year's iPhone 16 Pro. 

As usual, the device comes in several different storage configurations. The cheapest ships with 256GB while the most expensive tops out at 1TB. This is one of my biggest bugbears about Apple’s devices and the iPhone 17 Pro isn’t much of an improvement in that regard.

Even in its cheapest incarnation, the additional cost of kitting it out with a more reasonable allocation of onboard storage adds up quickly. Fortunately, there’s not nearly so much to complain about when it comes to the everyday performance of the A19 processor inside the iPhone 17 Pro. The hardware here didn’t sweat too much when it came to multitasking or everyday usage and the promises performance gains when it comes to gaming aren't too difficult to find. 

Apple silicon remains undefeated when it comes to mobile gaming performance and the iPhone 17 Pro delivered high and consistent frames per second when it came to more visually involved titles like League of Legends: Wild Rift, Diablo Immortal and Zenless Zone Zero. I was especially impressed by how much of an improvement it offered when it came to Destiny: Rising. In practice, the mobile looter shooter ran at almost double the frame rate I was able to get from the Pixel 10 Pro XL. 

The battery life offered by the iPhone 17 Pro was similarly impressive. I found myself regularly getting about a full two days of usage off a single charge with as much as 6 or 7 hours of screen time, though your mileage may vary depending on your own usage patterns.

Burned down via streaming video from YouTube over Wi-Fi, the iPhone 17 Pro took 24 hours and 40 minutes to go from a full charge to zero. That's a decent result, but narrowly short of where some of the competition sits. For instance, the Galaxy S25 Edge lasted 25 hours and 2 minutes in the same conditions.