Apple’s iPhone 17 lineup doesn’t deviate from the established family of sub-models that it’s maintained for the past few years. But every year, the differences between them change just a bit as the new generations of iPhone evolve.
Not sure which one is for you? I break down the major differences between them below.
Apple
iPhone 17 (opens in a new window)
Available at Apple
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
iPhone 17 vanilla
This is the base on which all other iPhone 17s are compared. Apple’s vanilla ice cream. But I’ve always argued that vanilla ice cream gets a bad rap. It’s not plain. If I have a hill to die on, it’s that you can always judge an ice cream shop by its vanilla ice cream.
Apple’s vanilla iPhone offers a lot of bang for the buck in its latest generation. Its Apple-designed A19 chip has a six-core CPU and five-core GPU. The 6.3″ OLED screen boasts a 2622-by-1206-pixel resolution at 460 ppi, with a 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio and P3 color for a wide range of shades of color it can display.
For bright, outdoor days, it can reach a respectable 3,000 nits of brightness. There’s Apple Intelligence, an 18-megapixel front-facing camera, and two rear-facing cameras: a main and an ultra-wide, both 48 megapixels. Battery life is 30 hours on a full charge.
Few use the words “affordable” and “Apple” in the same sentence, but for $799, it’s a solid bang for your buck.
Apple
iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max (opens in a new window)
Available at Apple
Buy Now (opens in a new window)
iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max
The most notable upgrade when you jump from the iPhone 17 to the iPhone 17 Pro isn’t the A19 Pro chip, which adds one more core to the GPU. It’s the added telephoto zoom lens. The three camera lenses on the back of the phone are a dead giveaway for a Pro or Pro Max.
Photographers who use their phones should go for this model. It maintains the plain Jane iPhone 17’s 48-megapixel standard and ultra-wide-angle lenses, but you can use the 48-megapixel 8x zoom lens to zoom in without having to resort to a digital zoom that degrades your image quality.
You can even save images in Pro RAW format and record 4K video up to 120 fps (frames per second). The regular iPhone 17 tops out in 4K at 60 fps and doesn’t offer the option of saving in ProRes video format. The front-facing camera is unchanged between them.
The USB-C connector also supports USB 3 charging, rather than the regular iPhone 17’s USB 2, meaning faster data transfers.
The Pro and Pro Max are the same phone, except for the Pro Max’s 6.9″ screen compared to the Pro’s 6.3″ screen. Its correspondingly larger overall size allows for a bigger battery, too. The Pro already bests the regular iPhone’s 30 hours of battery life with 33 hours. The Pro Max ups that to 39 hours.
The iPhone 17 Pro starts at $1,099, and the iPhone 17 Pro Max starts at $1,199+. You can order up to a 2TB Pro Max for $1,999 if you desire, which is more storage than you can get on any other variant. But other than that, you’re simply paying a premium for the Pro Max’s larger screen and larger battery.
The post Comparing Apples to Apples: Which iPhone 17 Should You Get? appeared first on VICE.
