This results in a longer battery life for the iPhone 17 Pro according to our battery drain test, reaching a time of 15 hours and 32 minutes. That's a marked improvement over the iPhone 16 Pro’s average run of 14 hours and 7 minutes. I'm also seeing solid all-day battery life with my real world use. Most of my time on the phone has been spent surfing the web, taking tons of photos with all its cameras, watching videos on YouTube, and getting in a few sessions with Diablo Immortal and Age of Origins throughout my day. I've made a point to not top off its battery during the day, only to find it at about 20% battery life by the end of the night.
I thought I'd notice the difference between 4x and 5x, but unless I had the phones side-by-side, I was unaware. The 17 Pro Max's telephoto images are brighter and have better details and resolution than ones from the 16 Pro, which is likely the result of the larger sensor. And similar to the wizardry Apple uses to make 2x photos look good, the telephoto camera is able to achieve 8x images. Telephoto images at 4x taken under good lighting (like a nice sunny day) can stand toe-to-toe with images from the main camera. But when I took telephoto images in less than ideal lighting, the 4x images held up OK, whereas the 8x images had more noise and softness.
I played one of the most demanding games on the iPhone right now—Assassin's Creed Mirage—and performance was significantly smoother than when I played it on the iPhone 16 Pro last year. The iPhone 17 Pro still got hot, but the heat was spread out over the entire back of the phone, so it didn't feel as uncomfortable to hold while gaming (unlike the iPhone 17 and Air). I maxed out the graphical settings, and the frames per second were noticeably more stable, and I rarely saw stutters at all.
I do want to commend Apple for the improved performance in Image Playground and Genmoji. It used to take ages for AI-generated pictures or emoji to appear (especially those based on a picture of someone in my photo album), but on the iPhone 17 Pro I was able to get several options in succession before things slowed down. Pictures where I opted to use ChatGPT’s more realistic styles took a lot longer, but by and large I saw a marked improvement in speed here. Those neural accelerators in the A19 Pro’s six-core GPU are certainly pulling their weight.
In size, resolution, and specs, the iPhone 17's display is the same as what you’ll find on this year's Pro. And the most notable thing about the change is that the iPhone 17 finally has an always-on display. The feature works exactly the same as it does on the Pro phones, too. When you set the iPhone 17 down, the screen dims, showing a faint version of your wallpaper, widgets, clock, and notifications. Being able to quickly glance at your phone for information is extremely handy and instantly makes the device a whole lot more useful.
Yes, the iPhone 17's 6.3-inch Super Retina XDR OLED display now supports ProMotion, meaning it delivers a buttery-smooth experience for scrolling, swiping, gaming, streaming, and even general navigation, as it will adjust on the fly from 1Hz all the way up to 120Hz depending on what you're doing. The iPhone 16, 15, and 14 before it were all locked at 60Hz, which wasn't a big deal if you weren’t coming from a 120Hz device, but this is a really nice upgrade. The iPhone 17's display story is really about the sum of its parts. ProMotion, Always-On, and a slightly larger screen make for a great experience, and there's a serious amount of value to be found through this display alone. Oh, and it's also coated in Ceramic Shield 2, which makes it three times as scratch-resistant as the screen on the iPhone 16 – that's a win, especially if you're prone to dropping your iPhone.
It's interesting to have more photo-taking flexibility on a less expensive iPhone model, since the iPhone Air can't take 0.5x photos or Cinematic mode videos. It's another way this baseline device makes a case for itself. Like the iPhone Air, the iPhone 17 takes 12-megapixel 2x telephoto images, which maintain a solid level of detail as you punch in. Photos default to 24 megapixels, but you can switch to 48 megapixels to capture a bit more detail.
I ran the phone through the typical battery of benchmark tests to see how it fares against the competition. Surprisingly, it runs a bit faster than the iPhone Air, which becomes much hotter than the 17 under load. Meanwhile, the Pro iPhones are about 10% faster, which isn't as big a difference as I expected. The iPhone 17 buries the Pixel 10's Tensor G5 processor in testing, though Google tells us it designs its chips to run AI calculations, not perform well on benchmarks. The iPhone 17's A19 also bested the Galaxy S25's Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip in CPU performance, though it fell behind in GPU calculations. Ultimately, the iPhone 17 and its combination of memory and A19 power are more than enough to handle all your apps, daily tasks, and Apple Intelligence requests. In my tests, the phone had no trouble generating AI images, conjuring up new Genmoji, and powering Apple Photos' editing tools.
Our battery drain test reveals an improvement, albeit a small one. It reaches a time of 12 hours and 47 minutes, an improvement of 34 minutes over the iPhone 16. That might not sound like a whole lot, but it's worth remembering that the iPhone 17 has a larger 6.3-inch display this time. I can affirm that I'm getting all-day battery life with a full charge. Roughly speaking, I'm seeing 15% battery life right before bed time. Most of my time was spent on checking emails, watching a few videos on my break at work, and looking through all of my social feeds. It's undoubtedly nowhere as close to offering the endurance I’ve been having with my iPhone 16 Pro Max for just about the last year, but most people will suffice getting through a work day. I'm excited to report that Apple also upgrades the iPhone 17's charging speeds, with its 35W wired charging getting its battery to 39% in 15 minutes — and then to 71% in 30 minutes. That's a marked improvement over the iPhone 16, but Apple didn't stop there as it also adds 25W Qi 2.2 charging support.
Now for the less-good news: battery life is just okay. And honestly, that's a pretty good outcome for the Air; the situation could have been worse. If you're a light user and you spend most of your time on Wi-Fi, you might never have a problem with the battery. Personally, it makes me a little too anxious to see that battery indicator drop into the 20s before dinnertime, though in fairness I was going pretty hard on the battery with around five hours of screen-on time. On a much lighter day on my home Wi-Fi, three hours of screen-on time took the battery down to around 40 percent by bedtime. I'd call that within the bounds of acceptable, if a little on the low end for a $1,000 phone.
The battery life of the iPhone Air is better than I expected. The Air was generally able to last a full day with average use for me. I hit around five hours of screen-on time with around 18 percent left by 10:30 pm. This worked for me, but my expectations were also very low. I had to baby the battery so much on the last ultrathin phone I tested, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, and I was surprised to find that this was not the case with the Air. Heavy users will undoubtedly need to top up this phone during the day. On one travel day, I took the phone off the charger at 5:30 am and used it extensively for navigation, music streaming, phone calls, and Instagram Reeling, and I hit 2 percent by 4:30 pm. If that sounds like a very normal day for you, you'll most certainly feel the limits of this phone's battery life. For the most part, I didn't feel as battery anxious as with Samsung's thin phone.
How about sustained performance? To test that, we used the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress Test, which simulates gaming for about 20 minutes. We ran it once and recorded the results, then did a second run right after that to really stress test these phones. The iPhone Air performed quite well, with stability scores that beat the Galaxy S25 Edge by a fair margin in both rounds. More surprisingly, the iPhone Air turned in cooler temperatures than the Pro Max when we measured the back of the phones using a laser thermometer in 5 locations and averaged the results. Though the S25 Edge was even cooler.
It felt surprisingly limiting to not have an ultrawide camera, especially when I wanted to capture more sweeping landscapes. Not to turn this into a thin phone showdown, but I couldn't help but think of how the Galaxy S25 Edge does have a 12-megapixel ultrawide-angle camera, alongside a 200-megapixel wide-angle camera, which makes it feel like less of a compromise in that regard. Otherwise, the rear camera on the iPhone Air consistently delivered. In the many pictures I took of waterfalls, tea times and urban landscapes, shadows and highlights are well balanced, colors are true to life, and there's an overall sharpness and clarity. Portrait shots (my go-to camera mode) capably blur backgrounds to help subjects -- whether it's a decadent tea tray, an art installation or CNET's talented Jesse Orrall -- stand out.