Aluminum-clad iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max bring bigger batteries, 48MP telephoto cameras

Apple just unveiled the iPhone 17 Pro series, and these may very well be the most exciting new iPhones in quite some time. It all starts with an impressive new redesign that centers on a move away from titanium and back towards aluminum.

Apple forged a unibody from Series 7000 aluminum for the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max that is then anodized on the outside. The aluminum comes in three colors: a refined silver, a deep blue, and a new striking cosmic orange.

There's Ceramic Shield glass on both sides - a smaller portion on the back, just below the cameras, and the new Ceramic Shield 2 atop the display, which is 3 times harder to scratch and 4 times harder to crack per Apple's tests. The screen glass has a 7-layer anti-reflective coating, similar to what Samsung's been doing with its recent Ultra phones.

The iPhone 17 Pro is built around a 6.3" Super Retina XDR display, while the iPhone 17 Pro Max has a 6.9" panel. Both are ProMotion with an adaptive 120Hz panel that can drop to 1Hz for its Always-On mode. The screens can ramp up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness.

The camera system sits on top of a new camera plateau, which is a part of the aluminum forged and machined unibody.

The biggest upgrade is to the 5x telephoto camera, which now also has a high-res 48MP Fusion sensor (up from 12MP) to match the other two. It's not a simple bump in pixels, however, the zoom is an entirely new camera. It features a 100mm f/2.8 lens, so the optical magnification is 4x and not a 5x as on the outgoing model. It does up to 8x or 200mm digital zoom thanks to its higher resolution.

The telephoto camera shares the tetraprism optical design and sensor shift stabilization of the one it replaces.

The other two 48MP Fusion cameras on the back have 26mm wide and 13mm ultrawide lenses. Upfront, the iPhone 17 Pro units get the new 1:1 square 18MP Center Stage front camera. It eliminates the need to flip your phone to get landscape selfies of your friends. What's more, the selfie will automatically adjust its field of view when it senses the need for a wider shot, and will keep its subject centered during selfie videos.

Speaking of video, the iPhone 17 Pro series brings ProRes RAW, Log 2, and genlock (used to sync video across multiple cameras and inputs). with support for Final Cut Camera 2.0 and Blackmagic Camera. That's in addition to the already solid video specs of the previous models - ProRes Log, Dolby Vision HDR, and 4K up to 120fps.

The iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max gain the new 3nm Apple A19 Pro chipset - a step above the A19 in the base model iPhone 17, and even above the A19 Pro inside the iPhone Air.

On the iPhone 17 Pro models, the A19 Pro SoC packs a 6-core CPU (2 performance, 4 efficiency cores) and a 6-core GPU with one more core than the Air and support for hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing. A 16-core Neural Engine boosts Apple Intelligence performance. The Pros get a new Apple-designed vapor chamber, finally, to improve cooling.

Apple says the proprietary alloy it uses is a big improvement over the Titanium of the previous generation iPhone Pros, and the 17 Pro has 40% better sustained performance.

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 design enabled bigger batteries on both Pro models. Apple doesn't share numbers, only ambiguous claims like "best battery life ever in an iPhone", but did share that the new generation gets 2 hours more in video playback compared to the previous model for a total of 39 hours.

The number of markets to get eSIM-only models increases with Bahrain, Canada, Guam, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE joining the US. That version will also get a slightly bigger battery, but again Apple shared no specifics.

The iPhone 17 Pro series launches with iOS 26, emphasized by Liquid Glass, which Apple says makes the OS and its apps more expressive and delightful.

The iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max come in deep blue, cosmic orange, and silver. Both models start from 256 GB storage and also come in 512 GB and 1 TB versions, while the Pro Max even gets a 2 TB option. The 17 Pro starts from $1,099 and asks $200 for each storage doubling - $1,299 and $1,499. The 17 Pro Max asks $1,199/$1,399/$1,599/$1,999.

Pre-orders in the first 63 markets open on Friday, September 12, and shipments will launch a week later, on September 19. Another 22 countries and territories will get the new Pros on September 26.