Apple iPhone 17 Pro review

Superb OLED display, as usual

The iPhone 17 Pro is equipped with a 6.3-inch Super Retina XDR OLED display with ProMotion tech (Apple's branding for a variable 120Hz refresh rate). The panel isn't much different from the one on iPhone 16 Pro.

It's now protected by a new Ceramic Shield Glass 2 with anti-reflective properties - not only do we get sturdier glass, but the overall legibility under bright light has improved. Even though it's not a night-and-day difference, it's still readily observable when you have the new phone next to the old one.

Apple advertises the display as capable of going as low as 1nit or as high as 1,000nits of maximum brightness manually, reaching up to 1,600nits in HDR playback, and up to 3,000nits of maximum automatic (outdoor) brightness, though it's not inconceivable that these values come with asterisks.

In our testing, we got 818nits when setting brightness manually and 1,012nits when exposing the phone to bright ambient light under our standardized testing conditions. We also measured a peak brightness of a 15% white patch (that is to say 15% of the screen is lit up) at 2,755nits, so the 3,000nits may very well be attainable for a smaller area. When we went from the small patch to 75% while keeping the bright ambient light, we saw the display maintain over 1,600 nits for a couple of seconds before going down to the 1,000-ish nits that it could sustain.

While the chart may look like the 17 Pro marks a downgrade, it's more of a change in approach than an actually dimmer screen. In summary, the display is very much capable of reaching very high brightness when the conditions call for it, it's just not as happy to comply with you if you want to get there on your own. That may be a bit of a departure from previous generations, when you could force the high brightness mode on a larger area under certain conditions. Regardless, sunlight legibility remains excellent, in part thanks to the new antireflective coating and in part to the adaptive brightness pumping up those nits as needed.

With ProMotion you get no manual control over the refresh rate other than the option to actually disable the high refresh rate from the Accessibility settings and cap things at 60Hz. Either way, the phone drops down to 1Hz for static images and always-on/standby modes and will choose the best refresh rate depending on the use case.

The iPhone 17 Pro supports HDR10 and Dolby Vision and apps will serve the appropriate streams as needed. Apple's HDR also works in windowed modes too - no need for the content to be displayed fullscreen for HDR to work.

True Tone adjustments for the color temperature depending on the light around the phone are also supported.

As always, the iPhone 17 Pro deserves high praise for its haptics - the Taptic engine provides accurate and pleasant feedback.

Apple iPhone 17 Pro battery life

The entire iPhone 17 lineup received battery capacity bumps, and the 17 Pro is where the increase is the most notable - last year's model had a 3,582mAh battery, this one comes in at 3,998mAh on our version with a physical SIM slot (nearly 12% more) or even 4,252mAh on the eSIM only variant (19% more). It's a most welcome development, of course.

In our experience, the new model showed a meaningful increase in video playback runtime as well as in our gaming test, though we did observe a bit of a drop in web browsing, and the call time is in the so-so region. Still, the 17 Pro's overall Active Use Score is a very respectable 15:23h - far ahead of both the Pixel 10 Pro and the Galaxy S25.

Our new Active Use Score is an estimate of how long the battery will last if you use the device with a mix of all four test activities. You can adjust the calculation based on your usage pattern using the sliders below. You can read about our current battery life testing procedure here. For a comprehensive list of all tested devices so far, head this way.

Charging speed

The iPhone 17 series models are adopting the AVS charging standard - a fairly recent addition to the USB Power Delivery spec. Apple makes one adapter that explicitly adheres to that specific part of the protocol, the brand new and '40W Dynamic Power Adapter with 60W Max', which is only available in North America for the time being, so we couldn't get one. Google's pretty recent 'Pixel Flex Dual Port 67W USB-C Fast Charger' does support AVS so we tested with that one, as well as with a handful of other non-AVS (but properly PPS-capable) bricks.

Apple promises the 17 Pro should get to 50% in 20 minutes when using their new adapter, and it could be able to do it with other adapters too as per the official specs - "Up to 50% charge in 20 minutes with 40W adapter or higher (available separately) paired with USB-C charging cable", Apple says.

Charging the 17 Pro using the Pixel AVS adapter, we got to 100% in 1:18h and we were looking at 70% at the half-hour mark, and we got the exact same numbers with a Samsung 45W adapter, too. Our power meter showed momentary peaks up to 35W and sustained power at just under 30W in the earlier stages of the charging with the phone negotiating a 15V/3A 45W Power Delivery protocol with either charger. Other aftermarket chargers also happily negotiated the same protocol, so you can expect to max out the iPhone 17 Pro's charging capability with any reasonably modern 45W+ USB Power Delivery adapter.

There is also support for fast wireless charging for up to 25W via MagSafe and this year there's apparently third-party Qi2-compliant chargers that can also reach such values. We had one of those for testing and, just as on the 17 Pro Max, we were able to confirm the promised 50% top up from flat in 30 minutes, with the charger drawing 29W from the wall at most.

Naturally, there's a Battery Health option, which should help prolong the cell's lifespan - you can set the charge limit between 80% and 100%. Also, the Optimized Charging feature will learn your charging habits and minimize the time the battery spends at 100%. You can see the cycle count and battery health in the battery settings, too.

Speakers

The iPhone 17 Pro adopts a familiar hybrid stereo speaker setup with one bottom-firing unit and a top speaker directed towards the front that also works as an earpiece.

Bottom speaker • Top speaker/Earpiece

The speakers scored an Average mark in our loudness test, a notch below the 16 Pro - we observed the same development on the Pro Max, where the downgrade is from 'Very Good' to 'Good'. Detailed teardowns have shown changed dimensions and reduced size of the drivers on this year's Pros so it makes sense for loudness to take a bit of hit.

Sound quality on the 17 Pro isn't half bad, however - not that you'd expect to see an iPhone with bad speakers (the Air doesn't count). In fact, it's almost like the 17 Pro is more composed and cleaner than the 16 Pro without sacrificing low-end response. Things are overall significantly better here than on the Pixel 10 Pro and the Galaxy S25 (though the S25 Ultra might have an edge over the 17 Pro).

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.