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So, the iPhone lineup got a massive overhaul this year. We're seeing big jumps in performance, in battery life, in camera capabilities. This is a very stacked year for Apple's iPhones. So, these are the review units I got in 17 and Air and both Pros. This year, the Pros have boxes that showcase the backs of the devices. And because it's a full metal unibody back, the boxes are printed with this shiny metallic ink. And inside, because there are mostly eSIM devices around the world, there's no more SIM tool. You just get the charging cable as well as a single piece of paper that says that you no longer need SIM tools. Welcome to the world of ESIMS, even up here in Canada. Okay, so
these are the four devices I have. The regular iPhone 17 is pretty much the same aesthetic as last year. It's probably the sleeper phone from Apple's lineup this year. This is a very awesome device. It just doesn't look all that special. Uh, the iPhone Air is super thin. This will get its own video in the near future because this deserves a entire different kind of conversation, but the Pro devices are a very different and unexpected shape this year. These, right, when I first saw them, I was like, these are so big and bulbous. And a week later, I still think they're large, but they've definitely grown on me. These do not look or feel anything like previous generations of iPhones.
The biggest shift is just that uni-body design. This bottom panel here is now rounded. And because it's just one piece of metal that is the entire chassis, it just sits in your hand very differently. The orange color is super orange. When I saw this at the event, I was like, "This is way too loud." Getting it in studio. It's even louder. The blue has grown on me. This is like Yeah, this is a really nice blue. It just looks better with the nice studio lighting than it did at the event. All of the iPhone 17 devices have ceramic shield 2 on the front glass.
This is less reflective and more scratch resistant than last year's glass. But if you want to fully protect your phone, you still need a case and screen protector. This is the new ghost case from Dbrand, but they have a new one this year called Tank with customizable buttons. So, about the displays, the iPhone 17 finally gets the 120 Hz promotion panel. I'd love to believe that Apple did this in response to like us tech nerds begging for it, but I don't think that's the case. I think Apple's just like, "Ah, it's finally the right time. We're done milking our customers with their 60 Hz panels. Uh the other displays are also very nice.
These are all finally like 120 Hz, prootion, OLED. They've basically caught up to the rest of the Android world. It's a very exciting time for uh iPhone users because we finally have good screens across the entire lineup. Uh they also get brighter at the top end this year. It can go to 3,000 nits at the top outdoors and it's a lot brighter in terms of numbers than the 2,000 of the previous gen. But keep in mind that even though these are a thousand more nits than the previous generation at the top end, how we perceive light is logarithmic. So it's not as big of a jump as you might think. Now, in terms of battery life, these two devices, the Pro and the Pro Max, have very impressive battery life, but it does
drain quite fast in heavy games. If you don't slam the GPU, though, I think that Pro Max is a two-day battery for many people. And if you're someone that takes advantage of the optimized battery charging, like the thing that caps it up to 80% to preserve the kind of longevity of your battery life, because this is so big, it's still going to be like a day and a half battery at an 80% charge. Uh charging is faster on some of the iPhone 17s. They can hit 40 watt charging if the battery is depleted enough and it'll sustain it for a little bit of time, but then it'll drop down quite quickly. The pack on the iPhone Air, like the battery here is way better performing than I thought it would be just because of how
thin it is. It's actually quite impressive. The only thing that bums me out is that the pack is just it's so unique to this thing. Like nothing else can hold this pack properly. Even the big iPhone 17 Pro Max. I demoed this at the event, but like I thought maybe at home I can just finangle it enough to get it to fit. It doesn't. It's just it's so frustrating. It'll charge because like the coils are somewhat aligned, but for proper like magnettomagnet contact, it only works on the iPhone air. So unfortunate. Okay. performance. Every year we get a new chip and it's faster like you'd expect. Last year was an unusually large jump in performance for both CPU and GPU. This year is actually an even larger step up
in performance. The A19 Pro chips are very powerful. Now, I'm sure the chip and the architecture and all the engineering around it is fantastic, but I think a big part of why they're performing so well is because of that new vapor chamber. So, they showed this thing at the event. It seems like a very interesting piece of technology. We actually got to demo it at Apple. We got to like hold it and put them in hot water just to see how they work. The thing that Okay, just to be clear what a vapor chamber even does. All it's really simple. It just takes heat and then spreads it out evenly across the surface very quickly. Now on these phones, they're just doing it to pull off heat from the chips and all that super hot
dense area and pull it away onto the outer aluminum shell or the bodies to radiate heat. There's no vent. There's no like active air flow here. It's just passive dissipation of heat. But because that vapor chamber is so effective, it allows Apple to crank these devices a little bit harder knowing that they can dump off that heat a little bit more effectively. And these Pro phones are able to sustain a high level of performance for a surprisingly long time. And I also think that if they took that vapor chamber and just stuck it into this chassis, like the existing iPhone 16 Pro chassis, it wouldn't be nearly as effective. Like the glass and titanium isn't nearly as thermally
conductive, and that vapor chamber would have been wasted in this device. Now, you get 12 gigs of RAM on the Pro models. Same with the iPhone Air. The regular iPhone 17 just gets 8 gigs of RAM. It's not immediately clear as to what that extra RAM is really for. And if you think about last year, like Apple was selling these devices, their flagship devices with just 8 gigs of RAM. And they were touting the whole like, you know, these devices are future forward. It's going to be Apple intelligence ready and all that stuff. Maybe they ran into some kind of like technical obstacle where they realized the only way to deliver the things that they promised they would deliver last year is just like stock these things
with 12 gigs of RAM. Who knows? Uh but I do think it's going to be something that's forward-looking. It maybe will be revealed at WWDC as to why that extra RAM is necessary or beneficial. A couple things that do come to mind though. I do think that right now when you use Apple intelligence and you're trying to use the ondevice language models it's there's a little bit of a delay like I think there's some swapping of memory like as it's loading the model in and out of memory. I do think that if you have more RAM you can keep the model in memory just ready to go at all times so that Siri is a little bit more responsive maybe. I don't think it's camera related though because the Air with its single camera still gets 12
gigs. Okay, speaking of cameras, on the Pro models, we have a camera system where all three cameras are finally running 48 megapixel sensors. This is something I think a lot of the camera enthusiasts were hoping would eventually happen. The biggest change comes for that telephoto with its 4x optical zoom, which is technically a step down from the 5x that we saw on last year's device, but the sensor is way bigger this year, which allows Apple to do that cropped sensor thing that they like to do, which technically gives them an optical like 8x zoom. So now on the Pro iPhones, you get a camera system with high resolution and more importantly, large sensors to go with it. And you
just get way better image quality when you combine the two like that. The 4x optical is sharper than last year's 5x. And then when you do use that 8x crop in, you lose some of that sharpness because you're using a smaller portion of that sensor, but it still looks good. I think this is the most complete camera package that Apple's ever put on any of the phones where all of the lenses just feel sharp and very usable. The main camera and the ultrawide deliver really good pictures. But even on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, I still think Pixel and Samsung flagships deliver something a little better in the stills department, especially in low light conditions. Now, for video, iPhones are typically better
in this space. It's definitely better than the Pixels video output. I do think that Samsung's S25 Ultra, like their flagship, can be quite competitive. The Samsung handles colors a little bit better, but iPhone handles imperfect lighting a little bit more reliably. If you're interested in 4K 120 frames per second video, the Pro models can do it. The iPhone Air cannot do it despite having the same kind of chip. Well, it's got a bend down GPU, so it's got one core less, but this cannot do that uh high frame rate video or like that super high frame rate video that these two can. The front-facing camera is also so much better. The old one was a 12 megapixel sensor. The new one's 18 megapixels and it's a much larger
sensor. You can do landscape selfies without actually rotating the device. And everything about this new front-facing camera is better. The way it handles color, the way it handles lighting is just an awesome improvement. And this is on all of the new iPhone 7 devices, including the regular base model. So, if you take a look at pricing, the regular iPhone 17 is a pretty decent value this year. You get 256 gigs of storage. You get the new prootion display. You get a really improved front-facing camera. Like, this is a very solid package. I think that Apple typically doesn't offer something so good for $799, at least not in the past. the iPhone Air product. This is a separate conversation. This will have a separate video. I'm trying to make this
work, but it's it's a whole conversation. Uh the Pro devices. So, the value proposition when it comes to the Pro devices is always a little bit tricky. But this year, I feel like all the feature updates and kind of upgrades they've provided on this thing. Awesome battery life, really good triple camera system that's just like very complete, plus all the thermal improvements that give it just awesome overall performance. If you're into technology and you look at this and you can't appreciate like the what's happening on this device, I don't know what to say. This is a really solid offering from Apple. I think that when it comes to like Apple's Pro devices, as much as they like to like blow smoke and hype
things up, I really think that this is amazing year for the Pro devices. I really do. Okay. Uh that's my take on these. Hope you guys enjoyed this video.
