Finally, the iPhone 17 PRO and the iPhone 17 Pro Max are official, Apple having unveiled the two devices during its “AWE Dropping” launch event.
The two new phones are undoubtedly the best iPhones in Apple’s iPhone 17 range (which also has the standard iPhone 17 and the iPhone 17 -thin air of the brochure), but what, in particular, makes them so special?
In this guide, we have gathered some of the key upgrades introduced for the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max – from their new chipsets to their refreshing conceptions.
This story is breaking and will be updated as more information is revealed …
New design
The most immediately obvious upgrade – or at least change – for iPhones at Apple is their new conceptions. The iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max wear a large camera block which passes horizontally on their respective rear panels.
This is a marked change compared to the Apple square camera block block, which is a functionality of each iPhone of pro level from the iPhone 11 Pro.
It is therefore clear that the iPhone 17 Pro needed a facelift, but this new larger camera block also has a practical objective: it houses larger sensors and more advanced imaging technology (more on this subject later).
In addition, the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max have an aluminum frame in part, while the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro use a titanium frame.
Apple has made this change to reduce weight and improve heat dissipation, incorporating a rectangular glass area under the new telephone camera module to facilitate wireless charging capacities.
48MP telephoto
The iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max include a 48 Mp telephoto lens with an 8x optical zoom. Yes, you read correctly: an 8x optical zoom.
This is a big problem for two reasons. First of all, it represents a major upgrade on the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro, which sport 12MP telephoto lens cameras with 3x and 5x optical zoom capacities, respectively.
Second, this new telephoto lens camera brings the iPhone 17 Pro closer to (and in some respects before) its biggest competitor, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which has a 50 MP telephoto sensor with a 5x optical zoom.
The optical zoom produces better quality images than digital zoom because it physically moves the elements of the objective to enlarge the subject (rather than cropping it and widening it). The iPhone 17 pro telephotto camera, with its 8X optical zoom, can physically move to enlarge a subject up to eight times its original size.
In other words, the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max are a shoo-in for a place on our list of the best photo phones.
Steaming chamber cooling
The first upgrade under the hood for the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max is a steam room, which the best Android phones (including the Galaxy S25 Ultra and Google Pixel 10 Pro) have for some time.
A steam bedroom is essentially a metal room filled with liquid which turns into steam when it becomes hot. This vapor then dissipates on the surface of the room, moving the heat from the internal components like the chipset.
When a phone becomes too hot, performance is generally reduced to help it cool, but with the cooling of the trailer room, the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max should be able to stay fresher longer than their respective predecessors.
A19 Pro Chipset
As sure as the sun rises, Apple has equipped its new pro iPhones with its new mobile silicon slice: the A19 Pro.
The company’s latest iPhone brain offers a six -core processor, a GPU of six hearts, and is “even faster and more efficient” than the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro.
You will get supposedly “MacBook Pro-Levels of Compute in an iPhone” thanks to this new A19 Pro chipset, and the iPhone 17 Pro also presents the first Apple WiFi 7 chip 7, Apple N1 and its second generation C1 chip, Apple C1X.
These last chipsets should facilitate faster speeds, lower latency and more reliable Wi-Fi and 5G connections, which could be more tangible improvements than the increase in power on paper caused by the A19 Pro chipset itself.
