Apple iPhone 17 review: The iPhone most people should buy

I’ll keep this review short and sweet. The iPhone 17 is the iPhone most people should buy this year. Apple has made some significant updates to its standard iPhone this year, changing it from a “Yeah, you should get this phone, but…” to a “Hell yes, this is the phone you should get!” It’s the best regular iPhone Apple has ever made.

Display & design

A large part of it is because of the screen. At long last, Apple has finally given the standard iPhone a ProMotion display. This means the display now has a dynamic refresh rate that can go up from as high as 120Hz to as low as 1Hz.

This has two important implications. Firstly, using the phone looks and feels a lot smoother and more responsive. Secondly, because the refresh rate can drop down to 1Hz, you can have an always-on display. The always-on display should not be underestimated because it makes it so much easier to manage notifications on your phone. Without one, you had to pick up your phone and tap on it just to see if you missed out on anything. And even if you weren’t looking out for notifications, an always-on display lets you know what time it is.

The iPhone 17’s display is also a little larger. I can’t say that it’s immediately noticeable, but it’s grown 0.2 inches to 6.3 inches, which means its screen is now the same size as the iPhone 17 Pro. It’s also protected by Ceramic Shield 2, which is also used in the Pro iPhones and the iPhone Air. Apple claims its new glass material offers 3x better scratch resistance, and having used these new iPhones for a few weeks, I feel that claim just might be true. The displays on my review units are still flawless.

Most of the phone is largely unchanged. It’s very slightly taller and thicker, but still features an aluminium chassis and a glass back. The dual cameras at the back are still housed within a pill-shaped camera bump. Like last year, you get five finishes: Lavender, Sage, Mist Blue, White, and Black. To my eyes, this year’s finishes are more muted and considerably less striking than last year’s. And much to my daughter’s disappointment, we don’t have a pink option this year.

Camera improvements

The other significant hardware change is the front-facing camera. The iPhone 17 gets the same excellent Centre Stage front camera as the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max. I wrote about it in greater detail in the iPhone 17 Pro review, so check that out. But essentially, it uses a square sensor, so it can intelligently crop and reframe depending on how many people are in the frame and if the user wants to take a selfie in portrait or landscape. Even though I hardly take selfies, I will concede that it’s an ingenious solution to the selfie problem, and I expect other phone makers to copy this feature.

The rear cameras see some improvements, too. Though the main camera is unchanged, Apple has made tweaks to the image processing pipeline. To my eyes, images appear less digitised and look more natural. The iPhone 17 also seems more comfortable with letting shadows be, so your photos look more punchy and have more contrast. The main camera also has a 2x crop zoom mode, and this still serves up very pretty photos. Once you go past 2x, the quality starts to drop rapidly, especially in poor light.

The ultra wide camera is now the same 48-megapixel unit that you get in the Pro iPhones. As far as ultra wide cameras go, it’s decent. It can produce nice-looking photos and interesting perspectives with its wide field of view and ability to take macros. However, it’s optically weaker, and the results you get from it depend very much on the quality of light. Photos start to get noisy quickly once it starts getting dark.

The iPhone 17 takes good-looking videos. It still takes 4K Dolby Vision videos, but there’s no support for ProRes or ProRes RAW – that’s exclusive to the Pro iPhones. However, the iPhone 17 does have wind noise reduction, the ability to capture spatial audio, and the Audio Mix feature that debuted in last year’s phones.

Sample images

Note: All photos are uploaded in full resolution and taken with Photographic Styles set to Standard with no adjustments made.

Performance & battery life

Performance is excellent thanks to the A19 chip. It has 6 CPU cores and 5 GPU cores, and benchmarks reveal that it’s one of the most powerful phones you can buy now. The thing you need to know is that it outperforms even the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, so it’ll run anything you can throw at it with ease. If you want to see its results in detail, click on the link below.

One very nice thing about this year’s standard iPhone is that it now comes with 256GB of storage as standard, but at the same starting price as last year’s iPhone 16. In other words, you are getting more storage while paying less compared to the previous year’s phones. For most people, 256GB should suffice, especially if they are supplementing it with iCloud storage. For those who want more, there’s a 512GB option.

Battery life has improved slightly. Apple claims the iPhone 17 can last up to 8 hours more than the iPhone 16 when watching videos, but our test, which involves looping a 720p video at maximum screen brightness and speaker volume, shows that the gains were more modest. The iPhone 17 lasted 78 minutes longer than the iPhone 16, and was just 7 minutes shy of breaking the 10-hour mark. In practice, I found its battery life was more or less the same as last year’s iPhone 16. It could last an entire day with moderate use, but it would need a mid-day charge if I was using it heavily. If battery life is an absolute priority, the Pro iPhones last longer.

The best standard iPhone ever

It’s easy to see why the iPhone 17 is the best standard iPhone Apple has made in years. Much of this is because of its display. After so long, it finally has the display that it deserves. The rest of the phone is also mostly excellent. Performance is top-notch, the main camera takes great photos, and its battery life is decent. Furthermore, it now gets 256GB of storage as standard, making it a better value than its predecessors. It offers such strong value now that it makes the iPhone 16E look overpriced. Apple will certainly need to update the iPhone 16E soon.

But it’s not perfect. Some will grumble that Apple intentionally keeps certain features exclusive to the Pro iPhones, and it can be argued that a phone of this price should really come with three cameras, not just two. We are also missing any significant new AI feature. Image Clean Up and Writing Tools are great, but where’s that incredible “more personalised Siri” that we were shown at WWDC 2024?

However, if you take a step back and look at the bigger picture and consider what it is that you want from a no-frills but high-end, high-performance iPhone, you’ll probably arrive at something that looks a lot like the iPhone 17. It’s unquestionably the iPhone that most people should buy.

Note: You can find the iPhone 17 at Lazada, Shopee, and the Apple Online Store.