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Surprising absolutely no one, Apple has unveiled the new iPhone 17 series, including the iPhone Air, which CEO Tim Cook said freed the company up to make the Pro handsets the most Pro ever. Here at Apple Park, I was able to take a high speed hands-on demo of the iPhone 17 Pro, and made a beeline for the new Cosmic Orange model. I'm already very taken with the way it looks and feels, and don't even mind the new camera plateau, but maybe that's just because I'm a sucker for change.
This isn't a shiny new thing, to be clear. Far from it. The iPhone 17 Pro that I played with was the orange version and it has a sort of matte finish and a vague "soft touch" feel compared to the iPhone 16 Pro I've been using for about a year. In spite of the new unibody design, I found the camera control button on the right still reasonably easy to press, although I think I'm more used to the one on the iPhone 16 Pro and find it a bit easier to click at the moment.
More importantly, and this is something I'll have to spend more than an hour with an iPhone 17 Pro to verify, the redesign should help with battery life. The camera plateau now houses many components, freeing up space in the rest of the iPhone's body for the battery. That, together with the A19 Pro processor's improved power efficiency, is supposed to make the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max last longer than before.
Only the lighter orange rounded rectangle part on the back of the iPhone 17 Pro is covered with Ceramic Shield, by the way. The rest of the more metallic orange bits are the aluminum unibody housing. That means the camera plateau is also uncovered. It contains the three 48-megapixel Fusion cameras that Apple described during the keynote, and I can verify that I saw camera zoom options that went up to 8x in the viewfinder.
Cherlynn Low for Engadget
I also had a chance to quickly check out the new Centerstage selfie camera, and I have to say it now makes sense why Apple had to redesign the camera app with iOS 26. To enable new features like the auto-rotating aspect ratio or the dual-camera video capture, you'll have to dive deeper into menus. I didn't immediately know where to find the switches for these but I'm sure I'll learn over time. For now, a helpful Apple representative standing next to the phone showed me where everything was.
I didn't spend much time playing with the 4x telephoto zoom or the 8x "optical quality" options, so we'll have to wait till we can review them to see if the claims Apple makes hold up.
Though I'm quite taken by the new look and color of the iPhone 17 Pros, I have to admit I'm a little envious of my colleague Sam Rutherford, who got to spend some hands on time with the new iPhone Air. While the colors aren't as appealing in that line, the extreme thinness is certainly very seductive. Based on my limited experience, the iPhone Air has slightly more rounded edges compared to Samsung's super thin Galaxy S25 Edge, but you should definitely check out Sam's impressions for more details.
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