Apple iPhone 17 Pro review

Apple iOS 26

All iPhone 17 models, including the 17 Pro here, boot Apple iOS 26 out of the box. The unusual version jump - from iOS 18 to 26 - is done so that the company's OS versions for all of its products match the respective product year.

The biggest change to iOS 26 is Liquid Glass - Apple's new design language. It's clearly inspired by visionOS and Apple says it "makes something purely digital feel natural and alive." The entire UI features crystal-like (or liquified) design elements and a more dynamic touch response.

You can head over to our iPhone 17 Pro Max review's software section for a more in-depth look at iOS 26.

Performance and benchmarks

The iPhone 17 Pro is powered by the new 3nm Apple A19 Pro chipset - the most capable version of the current generation, which it shares with the 17 Pro Max. It's a step above the A19 (non-Pro) in the base model iPhone 17, and, confusingly, above the A19 Pro inside the iPhone Air (yes, the same name for two slightly different items).

On the iPhone 17 Pro models, the A19 Pro SoC packs a 6-core CPU (2 performance cores clocked at up to 4.26GHz and 4 efficiency cores ticking at up to 2.6GHz) and a 6-core GPU - one extra GPU core compared to the Air's A19 Pro.

A 16-core Neural Engine boosts performance of Apple Intelligence tasks. The iPhone 17 Pros got a new vapor chamber that, alongside the new aluminum unibody, should finally improve cooling and, in turn, sustained performance. Apple says the proprietary alloy it uses is a big improvement over the Titanium of the previous generation iPhone Pros, and the overall cooling enables 40% better performance under prolonged stress.

Both the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max use the N1 Apple-designed networking chip, with support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread.

The new iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max pack 12 GB of LPDDR5X 8533 RAM, up from 8 GB LPDDR5X 7500 RAM on the outgoing Pros. The base storage is 256 GB NVMe, and you can opt for 512 GB and 1 TB on both Pro models. If you want a 2TB version, this small Pro won't do - you need to go Pro Max.

The iPhone 17 Pro models offer tri-band Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, support Bluetooth 6.0, and Ultra Wideband via Gen 2 chip. Also worth noting is the USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, which supports up to 10Gbps transfer speeds, DisplayPort and USB Host mode.

In benchmarks, our small Pro showed a 14% improvement in single-core CPU performance and 20% in the multi-core test compared to the 16 Pro. There's a more substantial improvement if you're coming from the 15 Pro (32%/38% in our testing).

In Antutu, the 17 Pro was a bit below the 17 Pro Max, but it's still a significant overall improvement over the previous generation (30%) and an even more notable jump compared to the two-year-old iPhone 15 Pro (55%).

In 3DMark, the iPhone 17 Pro was on par with the best-performing current Androids in the ray-tracing Solar Bay test and a notch below them in the Wild Life Extreme test.

Under prolonged load, the iPhone 17 Pro returned pretty good results. Just like on previous generations, the CPU throttles relatively fast, but not too dramatically - down to about 84% of its initial score in our benchmark of choice. That's only slightly better than on the 16 Pro and can hardly be reason enough for a major body redesign, all in itself.

The 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test returned a 64% stability rating - not outstanding, but not too bad either.

APSI Bench CPU test • 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test

For what it's worth, the iPhone 17 Pro's surface temperatures remain relatively low under long-term load, barely exceeding 45 degrees at the hottest spot.