At long last, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are official, with Apple having unveiled both devices at its hardware-heavy ‘Awe Dropping’ launch event.
The two new phones are undoubtedly the best iPhones in Apple’s iPhone 17 lineup (which also features the standard iPhone 17 and the wafer-thin iPhone 17 Air), but what, specifically, makes them so special?
In this guide, we’ve rounded up some of the key upgrades introduced for the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max – from their new chipsets to their refreshingly different designs.
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 Apple’s Pro-level iPhones is their new designs. Both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max sport a large camera block that runs horizontally across their respective rear panels, which Apple is calling a “full-width camera plateau.”
This is a marked change from Apple’s square-shaped, corner-positioned camera block, which has been a feature of every Pro-level iPhone since the iPhone 11 Pro.
It’s clear, then, that the iPhone 17 Pro needed a facelift, but this new, larger camera block also has a practical purpose: it houses bigger sensors and more advanced imaging technology (more on this later).
Additionally, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max have a brushed aluminum unibody design, whereas the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro use a titanium frame.
Apple has made this change to deliver “the best-ever thermal performance in an iPhone,” and the company’s Ceramic Shield technology now protects both the front and back sides of its flagship iPhone.
48MP telephoto camera
Both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max feature a 48MP telephoto camera with 8x optical zoom. Yes, you read that right: an 8x optical zoom.
This is a big deal for two reasons. First, it represents a major upgrade on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro, which sport 12MP telephoto cameras with 3x and 5x optical zoom capabilities, respectively.
Second, this new telephoto camera brings the iPhone 17 Pro closer to (and in some ways ahead of) its biggest competitor, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which boasts a 50MP telephoto sensor with 5x optical zoom.
Optical zoom produces higher quality images than digital zoom because it physically moves the lens elements to magnify the subject (rather than cropping in and enlarging it). The iPhone 17 Pro’s telephoto camera, with its 8x optical zoom, can physically move to magnify a subject by up to eight times its original size.
In other words, both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are a shoo-in for a spot on our list of the best camera phones.
Vapor chamber cooling
The first under-the-hood upgrade for the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max is a vapor chamber, which is something that the best Android phones (including the Galaxy S25 Ultra and Google Pixel 10 Pro) have had for some time.
A vapor chamber is essentially a metal chamber filled with liquid that converts into vapor when it gets hot. This vapor then dissipates across the chamber’s surface area, drawing heat away from internal components like the chipset.
When a phone gets too hot, performance is typically reduced to help it cool down, but with vapor chamber cooling in tow, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max should be able to stay cooler for longer than their respective predecessors.
A19 Pro chipset
As sure as the sun comes up, Apple has equipped its newest Pro-level iPhones with its newest slice of mobile silicon: the A19 Pro.
The company’s latest iPhone brain features a six-core CPU, a six-core GPU, and is “even faster and more efficient” than the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro.
You’ll supposedly get “MacBook Pro-levels of compute in an iPhone” thanks to this new A19 Pro chipset, and the iPhone 17 Pro also introduces Apple’s first in-house WiFi 7 chip, the Apple N1, and its second-generation C1 chip, the Apple C1X.
The latter chipsets should facilitate faster speeds, lower latency, and more reliable Wi-Fi and 5G connections, which, for our money, will be more noticeable improvements than the on-paper power increase brought about by the A19 Pro chipset itself.
