it's only a hair behind iPhone 17 and like less than an hour behind 17 Pro (if you trust their testing, I guess would have to see in person myself to verify).
That's not a meaningful difference
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iPhone 17 iPhone 17* Reviews [MERGED]
- Thread starter tim1000
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
it's only a hair behind iPhone 17 and like less than an hour behind 17 Pro (if you trust their testing, I guess would have to see in person myself to verify).
That's not a meaningful difference
“Maximalist” was the term I heard that sticks out most re: pro.
13% less than the smaller 17 Pro and 19% less than the 17 Pro Max isn't a meaningful difference? I guess you are very forgiving.
Confirmed. Ultrawide now supports 24 MP. The 16 Pro Max did not support 24 MP for the ultrawide.
And the tele on the 17 Pro Max is noticeably better.
EDIT:
The 16 Pro Max can now support 24 MP too for the ultrawide in iOS 26.
Last edited:
^^^ As mentioned, the 17 Pro Max tele is way better than the 16 Pro Max tele. Even 8X is very good with good lighting.
Last edited:
I was wrong - Nilay seems to have retired from iPhone reviews! 😭
Considering the massive weight reduction, I’d be quite forgiving of the Air, too. Granted, I was never a fan of Plus/Pro Max phones to begin with.
With that said, the Air is too wide for my small hands so I’m actually going for the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro.
What makes me less forgiving of the Air is the fact that it only has one camera lens and one speaker, in addition to the significantly smaller battery. The weight of the 17 Pro doesn't bother me at all, considering I have the heavier 12 Pro Max.
Agreed, battery tests so far are incredibly promising
Im so confused by all the battery test, I have read and watched some reviews now where numbers where shown and idk what to make of them. In some it seems like the 17 has way worse battery life than the Pro, in this one right here it dont looks like that much of a difference. Just thinking if I can get through a day with the base 17 or if I should have got the Pro lol...
That is very true. I too am seeing really varied things.
It also makes me wonder what their use case is: if its just messages, safari, and utility apps.
If it's like games, Pokemon Go, navigation, social media with all location stuff on all the time, etc. then that's gonna make a substantial difference.
The only one having a big battery is the Max, the 17 and Pro have about the same size battery.
What I dont understand is, yeah vapor cooling will help for sustained workloads but how does A19 Pro fare on Air without that for non sustained workloads? or even Pro for non sustained, do they perform comparably?
Is the Air clocked down significantly? Is the vapor cooling like on the MBP's where the fan rarely engages unless it's a heavy workload and for most intents and purposes a 'fanless' computer?
I would like a deeper dive on this. Maybe it's already out there but at a cursory glance I'm not seeing reviewers get super in the weeds.
I think the problem is also depending on where the person lives where the review is from it may be esim only version, which can lead to very different battery results... I didnt see it mentioned anywhere if its a esim only version or not that was tested. 🤔
Pretty sure lots of (but not all) YouTube reviewers are CA/US based though. CA is all eSIM now this year afaik.
I'm also not sure if the telephoto is substantially better on pros being 48mp sensor but it seems like the cameras over the Pro's last year are incredibly incremental / almost nothing.
The selfie front facing camera, yes. but the cameras on the back - eh? That's not great imo
China's GeekerWan Review on the 17 series (exclude Air, because Air is not yet officially approved for Friday release in China).
All in Chinese but here are some takeaways.
www.bilibili.com
Performance Wise
A19 standard is better than A18Pro
A19Pro is the fastest single core chip on Geekbench.
The GPU's performance boost may come from random cache, rather than an overhaul of microarchitecture.
The new VC cooling on the Pros works great, however, on the 17 Pro the temp control scheme is very conservative, resulting in a close gaming test results as the regular 17.
Battery Life Wise
Using GeekerWan's new benchmark method, the 17 is close to 16 Pro Max, the 17 Pro beats the 16 Pro Max by 1 hour (2.5 hours up from 16 Pro) , and the 17 Pro Max beats the 16 Pro Max by almost 2 hours.
EDIT: What's even better for those countries/regions with dual esim models, your battery life will be longer than the tested Chinese variants in this test. Cheers!
Attachment 1
Mobile Phone Battery Life Test Model 3.5
All components are ran in random sequence. And all sequences consist of 1 test cycle, the test will continously execute those cycles until the battery is fully drained.
Instant Messaging --- 5 mins WeChat text, 5 min WeChat video, in background always.
Online Shopping --- 5 mins Taobao, 5 mins PDD, scrolling through the home page while audio call via WeChat for 5 mins, and via WeChat Video for 5 mins (both in background).
Internet Browsering: 8 mins Weibo (Chinese Twitter), 8 mins Xiaohongshu(Chinese Instagram), playing Netease Music in background.
Video Playback: 4 mins Douyin (Chinese Tiktok), 5 mins Bilibili, random scrolling in Douyin, full screen mode in Bilibili.
Gaming: 9 mins Genshin Impact (Sumeru, rotating camera).
Navigation: 5 min of Amap (Chinese Google Map)
Verification App: For each cycle, a random task is assigned to verify the condition of the phone, volume, brightness and resolution, etc.
Brightness for the test: Calibrated to 400 nits, turned off auto brightness.
Volume: Off
Bluetooth: On
Network: 5G
Performance: Balanced
Attachment 2, Battery test results under Model 3.5 for the iPhones
All in Chinese but here are some takeaways.
iPhone 17系列深度评测：挤爆牙膏！_哔哩哔哩_bilibili
我们测到了iPhone 17、iPhone 17 Pro和iPhone 17 Pro Max！这次的iPhone相当惊喜，不仅A19系列芯片进步明显，Pro的散热也有大幅改进，续航更是补足了短板！到底有多强？一起来看吧！, 视频播放量 480846、弹幕量 6890、点赞数 33595、投硬币枚数 20063、收藏人数 7532、转发人数 9642, 视频作者 极客湾Geekerwan, 作者简介 爱折腾、超硬核的科技数码频道！商务合作请联系：bd@geekerwan.com，相关视频：iPhone 17 Pro 系列评测：成为 Pro！，iPhone 17 Pro Max...
Performance Wise
A19 standard is better than A18Pro
A19Pro is the fastest single core chip on Geekbench.
The GPU's performance boost may come from random cache, rather than an overhaul of microarchitecture.
The new VC cooling on the Pros works great, however, on the 17 Pro the temp control scheme is very conservative, resulting in a close gaming test results as the regular 17.
Battery Life Wise
Using GeekerWan's new benchmark method, the 17 is close to 16 Pro Max, the 17 Pro beats the 16 Pro Max by 1 hour (2.5 hours up from 16 Pro) , and the 17 Pro Max beats the 16 Pro Max by almost 2 hours.
EDIT: What's even better for those countries/regions with dual esim models, your battery life will be longer than the tested Chinese variants in this test. Cheers!
Attachment 1
Mobile Phone Battery Life Test Model 3.5
All components are ran in random sequence. And all sequences consist of 1 test cycle, the test will continously execute those cycles until the battery is fully drained.
Instant Messaging --- 5 mins WeChat text, 5 min WeChat video, in background always.
Online Shopping --- 5 mins Taobao, 5 mins PDD, scrolling through the home page while audio call via WeChat for 5 mins, and via WeChat Video for 5 mins (both in background).
Internet Browsering: 8 mins Weibo (Chinese Twitter), 8 mins Xiaohongshu(Chinese Instagram), playing Netease Music in background.
Video Playback: 4 mins Douyin (Chinese Tiktok), 5 mins Bilibili, random scrolling in Douyin, full screen mode in Bilibili.
Gaming: 9 mins Genshin Impact (Sumeru, rotating camera).
Navigation: 5 min of Amap (Chinese Google Map)
Verification App: For each cycle, a random task is assigned to verify the condition of the phone, volume, brightness and resolution, etc.
Brightness for the test: Calibrated to 400 nits, turned off auto brightness.
Volume: Off
Bluetooth: On
Network: 5G
Performance: Balanced
Attachment 2, Battery test results under Model 3.5 for the iPhones
Last edited:
The highest Geekbench 6.5 iOS score is from Geekerwan. The 4019 / 11054 score posted last week is from them.
Yes in this test they used external cooling to capture the maximum achievable score on all test devices.
Do you have a link that describes what cooling was used? I suspected it was a cooled result, but I wasn't sure to what extent they went to achieve that >4000 / >11000 score. In the past they've resorted to liquid nitrogen. I only skimmed the video but I didn't see any pictures of the cooling used for the A19 Pro.
They have not provided it, but had joked about in their streams once that they just put the phones on top of the Air Purifier (where air flows out) with its output set to 100%. Lol.
Oh actually it IS close to the real case they used to test the limits of those devices. See the below photo for reference.
So the base is a full blown air purifier (air blowing out upward at the bottom of the test device at 100% throttle), and used liquid nitrogen as coolant with a custom made heatsink on top of the device (photo is when they tested a M4 iPad Pro). （Note This is the extreme setup and should not be the regular test setup for best results).
This might be the regular setup for testing:
Subtitle says: all tested devices, Apple and Android, are equiped with high power phone coolers.
mrwhosetheboss video confused me.
Air is a ‘flop’ (dramatic sad face) because it has a lower performance in a stress test vs the 17. Which is probably expected honestly. but then the pro/pro max have barely any different performance stability vs the 16 pro max despite specific engineering with aluminium and vapour chamber and Apple pushing that point - and its hand waved away as no biggie.
Air is a ‘flop’ (dramatic sad face) because it has a lower performance in a stress test vs the 17. Which is probably expected honestly. but then the pro/pro max have barely any different performance stability vs the 16 pro max despite specific engineering with aluminium and vapour chamber and Apple pushing that point - and its hand waved away as no biggie.
Most of the reviews seem to have tested Apple's 40W charger for the charging speed tests. Did anyone come across a review that explicitly tested a 3rd party charger (which are all currently non-AVS) and presented proof whether the 17s can or cannot charge more quickly? I'm disappointed by how much noise came from that poorly evidenced 9to5 article.
I think this is one of the better reviews. Less specs, benchmarks, more real-world world thoughtful analysis. I also liked Mrwhosetheboss's.