iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air vs. Older Models: How Your Phone Compares

Apple unveiled the iPhone 17 lineup at its annual September event, including its first new phone model in years—the ultrathin iPhone Air. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

And the basic iPhone 17 ($799 and up) is looking like a solid value, especially if you haven’t upgraded in a while. You’ll see camera boosts and a slightly larger screen.

You can preorder these phones Friday, and they’ll be available starting Sept. 19, along with the new AirPods Pro 3, the Apple Watch Series 11 and the Apple Watch Ultra 3.

Let’s break down how the new iPhones compare with the one you already use. Yes, if you’re hanging on to an iPhone 11 or older, you can safely assume any option will feel like big leaps forward. For the rest of us, here’s a cheat sheet.

Body and screen size

This is one of those years when the new phones actually look like, you know, new phones. Mostly.

iPhone Air: The big news is this phone’s dimensions: With a thickness of 0.22 inch, it’s quite slender. But it isn’t “small.” The 6.5-inch screen (measured diagonally) puts it just shy of the iPhone 16 Plus that it replaces in the lineup. It’s so sleek a case seems counterproductive, but Apple is bringing back the bumper for worrywarts.

iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max: Apple’s newest premium line keeps the same screen sizes as the iPhone 16 Pros—6.3 inch and 6.9 inch, respectively. Its body design is very different from past Pros, with an aluminum design and a ceramic panel on the back under the camera “plateau.” Both phones gained about a quarter of an ounce following the switch from titanium to aluminum, and Pro models had already been gaining weight year over year.

These design changes are meant to make the phones more durable, and Apple practically dared people to use them without a case. (It did, however, offer some nice cases if you want to wrap them up.)

iPhone 17: Designwise, the basic model changed the least compared with its predecessors. Its bigger boosts are under the hood.

Cameras

As Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben might say, “With great cameras come great…camera bumps.” Only now they’ve become so big, we’re calling them plateaus. Only the baseline iPhone 17 escapes this design element.

iPhone Air: Across the board, the new iPhones all have an 18-megapixel front-facing camera with Center Stage. Software automatically frames your shots, so your selfies are covered—no wrist contortions necessary. They also allow “dual capture,” which is what it sounds like: You record yourself as you’re shooting stuff with the rear cameras.

But on the back, the Air keeps things sleek with a single 48-megapixel camera whose specs resemble those of past models.

iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max: Here’s where the camera story heats up. In addition to the front-facing Center Stage camera, both the Pro and the Pro Max have a trio of 48-megapixel cameras—main, ultrawide and telephoto—on the rear that handle a variety of shooting situations. (Apple says it’s the equivalent of having eight pro lenses.) Most notably, the new, beefed-up telephoto lens has what Apple calls 8x “optical-quality” zoom.

iPhone 17: While the baseline iPhones tend to be low-priority for camera improvements, two come to the iPhone 17 this year: It gets the same Center Stage camera as the premium models, and it now has 48-megapixel sensors on both of its lenses, the main and the ultrawide. 

Battery life

We love when Apple reads its mail and realizes we care deeply about battery life. That was evident Tuesday.

iPhone Air: Superthin phone = superthin battery. Apple made a big deal about how this design is still power-efficient. The specs agree, but shed more insight: Its battery life is about on par with the iPhone 16 Pro, but in a year of big battery-life improvements, the Air falls behind even the baseline iPhone 17.

Apple calls it “all-day battery life,” and there’s no doubt that will be the case for many people. The company is offering a MagSafe magnetic battery to ease anxieties, but if you’re paying for thin, that seems like the last thing you would want.

iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max: The Pro Max generally carries the “longest battery life ever” label for iPhones. This year, it isn’t just ahead of the rest. Apple says it can play videos for up to 39 hours, six hours longer than last year’s model—and 10 hours longer than the 15 Pro Max. The smaller Pro also gets a similar bump-up. (Video playback is Apple’s longest yardstick for reported battery life.)

iPhone 17: As noted, this phone is no slouch on battery, beating last year’s iPhone 16 Pro with up to 30 hours of video playback.

This is our top-line read of the day’s iPhone news. It’s rooted in nearly two decades of iPhone tire-kicking, but we have yet to take the iPhone Air and iPhone 17 lineup for a real road test. That’s on my colleague Nicole Nguyen, who will be busy putting all four models through the paces in the coming days. Meanwhile, she’s putting together her first hands-on impressions, so stay tuned.

Write to Wilson Rothman at wilson.rothman@wsj.com