Apple introduced the Pro moniker for iPhones six years ago with the iPhone 11 lineup. However, with the iPhone 17 lineup in particular – it feels like Apple truly developed a professional iPhone for the first time. I’ll explain.
‘Pro’ is no longer just flashy
First things first, this year’s iPhone 17 Pro is no longer the flashy model, unlike previous Pro iPhones.
With this years switch from Titanium to Aluminum, the iPhone 17 Pro simply uses the same material as the standard iPhone 17 model. Obviously, this comes with numerous thermal benefits, but nonetheless – the Pro is no longer the phone you go to if you’d like a premium build.
Now, the iPhone Air takes that position. With its polished titanium frame, it now serves as Apples flashy and premium model, something that the ‘Pro’ used to be.
Furthermore, the iPhone Air also has very ‘Pro’ like colors, with it offering gold, silver, white, and black. Not even iPhone 17 Pro comes in black, and instead it just comes in cosmic orange, blue, and silver. They’re certainly more fun, but they feel less premium than usual.
Focus on thermals
This year, Apple switched back to aluminum for better thermal performance. Previously, while Titanium looked cool, it compromised significantly on how the chipset could perform. Now, that isn’t a concern. No matter how hard you push your chipset, it shouldn’t thermally throttle immediately.
Thermals are incredibly important, especially with this year’s focus on using your iPhone for videography. You can record for even longer without needing to worry about it overheating.
Display tech
Last but not least, the base model now has the same display as the iPhone 17 Pro: a 6.3″ Super Retina XDR display with ProMotion. That means features like Always-On Display and ProMotion are no longer exclusive to the iPhone Pro, giving average users even less of a reason to consider the Pro than they would’ve before.
iPhone 17 even offers thin bezels, just like iPhone Pro models.
Wrap up
Top comment by Berk Fisher
As someone who has been at the forefront of video production for 25 years I have to tell you that genlock is a use case that 95 percent of video focused iPhone users will never need. Maybe even 98%. It’s mainly used by broadcast / news for teleproduction and live events on multi-camera productions who are doing live cuts. Most iPhone filming is just not used for these purposes - there’s significantly better tools available to a pro than an iPhone for those purposes. I get why Apple included it, they invented it for themselves, so they could broadcast their own live events (which are filmed on iPhone) but that is such a weird and specific use case that most pros will never ever encounter. Them touting it as one of the premiere features of the phone shows how iterative this update is to me…. They’re reaching hard to come up with features that distinguish this one from the prior iPhones.
All in all, it truly feels like this years iPhone Pro is truly for people who use their iPhone for work. Whether you’re a videographer that’ll take advantage of the new features like Genlock, or someone who’s a serious mobile gamer who wants to milk the most performance out of the A19 Pro chipset – this year’s iPhone Pro is built for you.
With iPhone 17 getting so good and iPhone Air becoming the attractive device, it truly feels like iPhone Pro is no longer the device you just go to for aesthetics or display tech.
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