Finally, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are official, with Apple revealing both devices on its hardware-heavy ‘AWE-TAB’ launch event.
The two new phones are undoubtedly the best iPhones in Apple’s iPhone 17 setup (which also contains the Standard iPhone 17 and Wafer-Thin iPhone 17 Air), but what does it specifically make them so special?
In this guide we have rounded off some of the most important upgrades introduced to the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max – from their new chipset to their refreshingly different designs.
This story breaks and will be updated as more information is revealed …
New design
The most immediate upgrade or at least changes-to Apple’s Pro-level iPhones is their new design. Both the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max Sport are a large camera block that runs horizontally over their respective back panels.
This is a significant change from Apple’s square, corner-positioned camera blocks, which has been a feature of each Pro-level iPhone since the iPhone 11 Pro.
It is so clear that the iPhone 17 Pro needed a facelift, but this new, larger camera block also has a practical purpose: it houses larger sensors and more advanced imaging technology (more on this later).
In addition, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max have a part aluminum, part glass frame, whereas iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro use a titanium frame.
Apple has made this change to reduce weight and improve the heat drain, which contains a rectangular glass area under the phone’s new camera module to facilitate wireless charging ability.
48MP Telefoto Camera
Both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max have a 48MP telo photo camera with 8x optical zoom. Yes, you read it right: an 8x optical zoom.
This is a major deal for two reasons. First, it represents a major upgrade on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro, Sport 12MP Tele cameras with 3x and 5x optical zoom features respectively.
Secondly, this new telephoto camera is bringing the iPhone 17 Pro closer to (and in some ways ahead) its biggest competitor, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which boasts a 50MP telotos sensor with 5x optical zoom.
Optical zoom produces higher quality images than digital zoom because it physically moves the lens elements to enlarge the item (rather than cropping and enlarging it). The iPhone 17 Pro’s Tele camera with its 8x optical zoom can physically move to enlarge a topic of up to eight times its original size.
In other words, both the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max are a shoo-in for a place on our list of the best camera phones.
Steam chamber cooling
The first upgrade under the hood for the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max is a steam 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 steam chamber is essentially a metal chamber filled with liquid that is converted into steam when it gets hot. This steam then spreads over the surface area of the chamber and pulls heat away from internal components such as the chipset.
When a phone gets too hot, the performance is typically reduced to help it cool down, but with steam chamber cooling on 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
So sure the sun is coming up, Apple has equipped its latest pro-level iPhones with its latest slice of mobile silicon: A19 Pro.
The company’s latest iPhone brain has 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 will reportedly get the “MacBook Pro-Levels of Compute in a iPhone” thanks to this new A19 Pro chipset, and the iPhone 17 Pro also introduces Apple’s first internal WiFi 7-Chip, Apple N1 and its second generation of C1 chip, Apple C1X.
The latter chipset should facilitate faster speeds, lower latency and more reliable Wi-Fi and 5G connections, which for our money will be more noticeable improvements than increased power increase created by the A19 Pro Chipset itself.
