Apple fans who normally gravitate to the Pro-level iPhones need to rethink their buying habits. The upcoming $1,100 iPhone 17 Pro isn’t better than the regular 17 for any obvious reason you can glean from staring at the pleasing orange surface. You have to look below the aluminum and beyond the giant camera bump to see what’s really going on. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are finally stepping out of the amateur league and are going “pro,” as their names suggest.
The regular iPhone 17 sounds like too good of a deal. As detailed during the company’s showcase, the base smartphone has the same 6.3-inch, 120Hz AMOLED display as the iPhone 17 Pro. The higher refresh rate was once exclusive to Apple’s premium phones. It carries the same high brightness spec for use outdoors and Ceramic Shield 2 to protect the screen from scratches. The iPhone 17 contains everything from the iPhone 16 lineup, including the Camera Control button, plus new features like the 18-megapixel Center Stage front camera. It now comes with a base 256GB of internal storage, twice as much as the base iPhone 16’s 128GB, all for the same cost as last year’s $800 iPhone.
The A19 Pro chip has serious juice
So why are we even talking about the iPhone 17 Pro at all? Because it’s what’s inside that matters. The iPhone 17 Pro is shaping up to be an actual “pro”-level device. It starts with performance. New Geekbench 6 synthetic benchmark scores published over the past two days show the iPhone 17 Pro Max hitting high scores in both CPU and GPU tests. The iPhone 17 Pro Max scored around 45,995 on the Metal GPU test. That’s about as high as Apple’s M2 chip in a 6th-gen iPad Pro.
As for CPU scores, the iPhone 17 Pro Max shows that it hits a little under 4,000 in single-thread tests and a little over 9,700 in multi-core settings. Single-core tests determine how fast a CPU can handle a single task at a time. It’s about 15% better than what we saw with the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro/16 Pro Max. Apple already suggested its A19 Pro would be better in single-thread performance, so that claim may check out. A Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chip—currently one of the best CPUs for Android available—in the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra scores around 2,800 in single-core and 9,400 in multi-core tests. We don’t know how the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 (or whatever it’s called) will shake out, but for now the A19 Pro is beating the competition on Android.
What does ‘pro’ mean anymore?
As a PC guy, I have to resist the urge to start comparing the A19 and A19 Pro to laptop or desktop-level chips. Apple’s ARM-based chips for mobile are designed for entirely different operating systems. A laptop chip needs to handle more intensive and sustained processes for longer. But that’s where things get interesting. Apple said in its announcement post that the iPhone 17 Pro is built for “sustained performance.” Apple seems to be suggesting it wants its Pro-level users to use its new phone for video editing, gaming, or anything that pushes the graphics processing capabilities more than ever before.
That’s why Apple stressed the new vapor chamber cooling in the iPhone 17 Pro models. This helps move heat away from the CPU by spreading that energy across a wider surface. The addition should cool the phone at a faster rate than previous Pro models, which are notorious for getting hot along the battery. Apple also went with aluminum instead of titanium, likely because it’s better for thermals. While Apple still hasn’t revealed battery capacity specs for any of its iPhone 17 lineup, Apple has suggested the iPhone 17 Pro Max model will have one of its largest batteries to date.
The iPhone Air is the most controversial—and therefore interesting—mobile device of Apple’s new smartphone slate. It even has the same A19 Pro chip as the iPhone 17 Pro, though with one less GPU core. And we don’t expect it to match the iPhone 17 Pro while using intensive apps. Of course, we all know the real reason you want the iPhone 17 Pro is for the Cosmic Orange colorway. But if you’re spending $1,100 on any device, you should make sure you’ll be doing more than staring slack-jawed at its pretty hue.
