Our first look at the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max

There were two surprises for me when I picked up the iPhone 17 Pro. For one, the colors are bold — a nice change of pace from last year’s barely-there pales. But the bigger surprise is just how much has changed about the back of the phone.

By all accounts, this still feels like an iPhone, with its soft matte aluminum frame. But the polished camera bar — always an underemphasized design element — now stretches across the back. And a detail I missed during the keynote is how the polished glass portion reappears across the center of the back of the device. There’s a glossy square cutout where Apple is using its Ceramic Shield. This is apparently for heat purposes, but it also creates a more interesting two-tone look. It’s a bit like there’s already an accessory placed on the back, or like Apple is inviting you to place one there.

The camera bar extending across the back also has one other benefit: the phone’s wobbliness on a table has been substantially reduced. This has been a major annoyance for me on the standard two-camera model in particular. It’s not entirely gone, because the lenses still protrude from the camera bar. But unless you’re pushing on the upper-left corner, the phone seems to stay steady and flat. A small quality-of-life improvement.

The trio of camera lenses is still there, but they’re now surrounded by a full-width bar. It’s a little like the design language found in Google’s Pixel phones. The cameras themselves are also updated, with 48 megapixels across the board.

The other big updates to the Pro and Pro Max are improved specs, like new A19 Pro processors, the new Ceramic Shield 2 protection on the display with better scratch resistance, up to 3,000 nits of peak screen brightness (from 2,000), a new Center Stage selfie camera, up to 8x optical zoom, bigger batteries, and more.

The new iPhone 17 Pro will start at $1,099 for 256GB of storage, and the 17 Pro Max starts at $1,199 for the same. Preorders from Apple and other retailers are live now, with availability beginning on the 15th. Be sure to keep an eye out for our reviews of the new pair of Pros, as well as the regular iPhone 17 and 17 Plus, and that thin new iPhone Air.