iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max were both launched at yesterday’s Apple event. These handsets give the unibody design a whole new meaning. Each phone has a horizontal camera bar, and for the first time in years, they score a high-res 48MP telephoto lens. Here’s everything you need to know about the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max.
These devices are cut from the same cloth, except one has a bigger screen and a slightly larger battery than the other. Apple has completely remodeled these phones, not only to enhance their looks but also to harden their shells. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max’s bodies are cast from Series 7000 Aluminum.
These metal shells are anodized on the outside and then painted in Refined Silver, Deep Blue, and Cosmic Orange colors. This unibody metal frame not only keeps the phone safe from the sides but also saves the rear glass from cracks.
The aluminum frame wraps around the screen and the camera island. The Ceramic rear glass only makes up a small portion of their bodies, beneath the horizontal camera plate. As mentioned, this is the first time a 48MP telephoto camera has graced the latest iPhone Pro models.
They had to reduce the optical zoom to 4x (100mm), but the higher 48MP sensor allows for a higher digital zoom (up to 8x) when needed. The other two lenses have a 48MP sensor each, one for 26mm standard shots and the other capturing 13mm ultrawide photos and videos.
The upgraded 18MP selfie unit on the Pros now has the Center Stage feature, which frames the camera to a person’s face on its own. The video and image processing is done on Apple’s A9 Pro silicon, with 6 CPU and 6 GPU cores. It runs all the Apple Intelligence tools on a 16-core neural engine.
That new design allowed for a bigger cooling chamber inside the Pro devices, which achieved 40% better sustained performance in lab tests. The screen on the Pro is still 6.3”, and the Pro Max scores a 6.9” panel. These are both XDR Super Retina XDR OLEDs with 1-120Hz dynamic refresh rate. The only upgrade on the display is 3000 nits of brightness, which is almost twice as bright as before. That effect is doubled by the 7-layer Ceramic Glass 2 anti-reflective coating.
Apple played it close to the vest when it came to battery, but it did promise two extra hours of screen runtime over the past generation. The charging stats seem to remain unchanged. Their base storage is 256GB, going all the way up to 1TB. The base iPhone 17 Pro costs $1099 (~PKR 313,000) and jumps $200 with each storage upgrade. The iPhone 17 Pro Max starts directly at $1199 (~PKR 342,000) and follows the same upgrade path.
Their pre-orders start September 12th. This schedule is the same for all four devices, by the way. The sales open on September 9th, and a wider launch for the remaining markets could happen by September 26.
