iPhone 17 Review: The Best iPhone Value in Years

Next to the ultra-thin iPhone Air and the packed-to-gills iPhone 17 Pro/17 Pro Max, the iPhone 17 looks unremarkable—boring, even. The three new colors other than black and white are less vibrant than the shades the iPhone 16 came in. But peel back a few layers and things become clear: the iPhone 17, starting at $799, is in fact a remarkable value, providing a ton of bang for your buck.

Besides the slight growth of the screen from 6.1 inches to 6.3 inches, the iPhone 17 is cosmetically similar to the iPhone 16. If the iPhone Air is the new premium model and the iPhone 17 Pros are the most powerful, then the iPhone 17 is the everyman’s iPhone. It has more than enough solid upgrades over last year’s model, but not as many as the iPhone 17 Pros.

The iPhone 17 is not going to wow anyone with its industrial design, but underneath it all, it’s a trooper that goes the distance. It’s the iPhone you get if you want the Goldilocks experience.

Basic design

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Take the iPhone 16 design, stretch it a teensy bit up, and you get the iPhone 17. That may sound harsh, but it’s true: the iPhone 17 is 5.89 inches tall versus the 5.81-inch iPhone 16. Somehow it’s 0.01 inches narrower, though. It’s unlikely you’ll feel that it’s 0.24 ounces heavier, either; I didn’t.

If you were hoping for more material change, you’re gonna be disappointed. I don’t think it’s worth fretting over since the iPhone 17 feels great in the hand. Not that most people will care since they’ll slap a case over it.

Apple has stuck with an aluminum frame and gently curved sides that melt into the cover and back glass. The back has a vertically aligned pill-shaped bump for the dual cameras. What you can’t see with the naked eye is the improved scratch resistance for the screen. Apple is using Ceramic Shield 2, its second-gen cover material with increased durability, which Apple claims is 3x more scratch resistant than the iPhone 16’s first-gen Ceramic Shield screen. Apple also says Ceramic Shield 2 cuts down on glare. It doesn’t eliminate reflections from what I could see, and any reduction in glare is minimal at best. Still, I’ll take the increased scratch resistance. I asked Apple if Ceramic Shield 2 now means that keys or sand or pocket lint won’t easily scratch it, but the company clarified that its durability claims are not for a single instance where there’s unfortunate contact with some scratchy objects; it’s over time. Take that for what you will.

Colors are subjective, but if you ask me, I think the iPhone 17 colors are dull. Besides black and white, there’s lavender, sage, and mist blue. Sage looks the best to me, but it’s still a muted green. I think it’s time for Apple to bring back red or coral or pacific blue. Give the regular iPhone some soul to stand out between the iPhone Air and iPhone Pros.

A more “pro” display

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That 0.08 inches of extra height means Apple was able to squeeze in a slightly larger 6.3-inch screen versus the 6.1-inch display on the iPhone 16. This is the same screen as the iPhone 17 Pro, with the same resolution, same 3,000 nits of peak outdoor brightness, the same 120 Hz “ProMotion” refresh rate, and the same always-on display. At last, Apple’s regular iPhone series isn’t saddled with a 60Hz refresh rate.

To my eyes, there’s no visible difference between the screen on the iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro. Both Super Retina XDR displays look crisp, have excellent and wide viewing angles, and get more than bright enough indoors and outdoors. I neglected to mention this in my iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pros review, but I really wish Apple would include something akin to the “Aqua Touch 2.0 technology” in the OnePlus 13 that makes the touchscreen more responsive when there’s liquid on it or your fingers are wet. The slightest droplet of water on the iPhone 17 still confuses the screen into thinking you’re touching it when you’re not.

Nearly pro performance

Unlike Android phones, where performance can take a major downturn if the chipset maker (Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek, etc.) has architecture or production problems, Apple’s A-series silicon just steadily gets better year after year.

I’ve long stopped putting too much emphasis on synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench 6, but just to see how much less powerful the iPhone 17’s A19 chip is compared to the A19 Pro in the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pros, I ran the CPU test. The results truly shocked me. Using the average of three tests taken on the iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17 Pro, the iPhone 17 was 1.6% more powerful than the Air and 1.3% less powerful than the 17 Pro for single-core tasks.

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The A19 Pro chip pulls ahead of the A19 for multicore applications, but not by much: the Air is 5% more powerful and 17 Pro is 9.48% more powerful than the iPhone 17. I thought for sure with one less GPU core (five instead of six) that the iPhone 17 Pros would be more powerful by a larger margin, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

That’s great news if you’re worried about getting FOMO from not having the A19 Pro chip in the iPhone 17. But there’s another thing to consider: thermals and sustained performance. Compared to the iPhone 17 Pros, which have a vapor chamber that keeps temperatures down and spreads heat across the phone more uniformly when apps push the GPU hard, the iPhone 17 gets warmer a lot quicker. And if it gets too hot, it takes a little longer to cool down. Generally, my iPhone 17 review unit never got toasty, but if you’re planning to play 3D games like Genshin Impact or shoot a lot of 4K video with the phone or do either under the sun in hot environments, you may run into the infamous “”iPhone needs to cool down” sooner.

The Center Stage camera is legit

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The iPhone 17 has some solid camera upgrades, too. The dual rear camera is now a “Fusion” camera consisting of a 48-megapixel main camera and now a higher-resolution 48-megapixel ultrawide (up from 12 megapixels on the iPhone 16). Photos look about the same to me compared to the same shots taken with my iPhone 16 Pro. Even the ultrawide shots look nearly identical; okay, they’re slightly brighter, but that’s nothing dialing up the brightness slider in the Photos app couldn’t easily handle. There’s no telephoto lens on the iPhone 17; if you want that, you’ll need to step up to the iPhone 17 Pros, which have a 4x telephoto lens that’s also capable of 8x “optical-quality” shots. You do get the 2x “optical-quality” lens from the main 48-megapixel image sensor, but that was already a feature on the iPhone 16.

As I said in my iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pros review, the Center Stage camera is the biggest upgrade for photography and video since Apple first added a front-facing camera on the iPhone 4. The 18-megapixel Center Stage camera is a square image sensor, which can capture horizontal selfies even if you’re holding the phone vertically. You can also take vertical photos if you hold the iPhone 17 horizontally. The feature also works for video recording. It’s a very cool feature that everyone is going to appreciate, not just Gen Z TikTokers. The Dual Capture mode that records from the front and rear cameras is also very fun, especially for reaction-type videos.

Since the iPhone 17 is not a “pro” iPhone, it doesn’t have the more advanced recording features found in the iPhone 17 Pros, like ProRAW for stills, ProRes for video, Apple Log 2, or genlock. Slow-motion video recording is also limited to 1080p at 240 fps compared to 4K at 120 fps on the 17 Pros. Lastly, you don’t get the “studio-quality” microphones found in the 17 Pros. I don’t think any of these “missing” features makes the iPhone 17 a dealbreaker, but it does feel like Apple could have included them if it wanted to, other than to feature-lock them to the higher-end iPhones.

And just like I said in my iPhone 17 Pros review, I think Camera Control is still largely wasted. It’s there, but not more useful than as a shortcut to launching the Camera app. I much prefer the camera shortcut on Android, which has been a thing for over a decade: double-clicking the power button.

More battery to doomscroll

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No amount of battery life is ever going to be enough, but I’ll gladly take more hours gen-over-gen. In the iPhone 17’s case, battery life has increased by 8 hours compared to the iPhone 16—up to 30 hours versus 22 hours (for local video playback, which is how Apple measures battery life). It’s 3 fewer hours than the iPhone 17 Pro, which gets up to 33 hours.

Using the iPhone 17 like a normal human being (because who is insane enough to watch local video for 30 hours straight), I found the iPhone 17 lasted about as long as my iPhone 16 Pro, which Apple says gets up to 27 hours for video playback. Give or take, I was able to go from off the charger at 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on a single charge with around 20 to 25% left in the tank. That’s great battery life and you can easily go two days with light usage.

More for the same money

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If all of that doesn’t sound like a good enough value, how about double the storage (256GB versus 128GB) versus the iPhone 16—for the same $799? That’s a good deal. Yeah, inflation and all that, but that’s still a damn good deal for everything that you get.

There’s a $300 difference between the iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro this year, which is $100 more than last year. For most people, the iPhone 17 has more than enough, and the extra $300 can be pocketed or put towards an accessory like the new $250 AirPods Pro 3.

I truly couldn’t find much to complain about on the iPhone 17. iOS is iOS. If you don’t like the “walled” Apple garden, there’s nothing new to report here, since it’s the same deal. Apple Intelligence, unfortunately, is still underwhelming and we’ll have to wait until next year to see the new AI-powered Siri. If there’s anything to really gripe about, I wish the USB 2 transfer speeds for the USB-C port were the faster USB 3 on the iPhone 16 and 17 Pros.

If you’ve reached this far and you’ve been nodding your head at all the new stuff and don’t feel an urge to jump up to the 17 Pros, congrats, maybe the iPhone 17 is for you. If you still have an iPhone from recent years and it’s not having any issues, just update to iOS 26 (unless you really hate Liquid Glass). The best thing about iPhones is that they last a long time and Apple supports them with annual software updates for at least five years, and security updates for a few years after. You get a lot with the new iPhone 17, but you also may not need one if yours works just fine. For people switching from Android—you’re either gonna love Apple’s ecosystem or hate it and crawl back.