Hands-on with Apple’s new iPhones: Beauty and the beast and the regular-looking one

CUPERTINO, Calif.—We’re a long way from the days when a new iPhone launch just meant one new phone. It shifted to “basically the same phone in two sizes” a decade or so ago, and then to a version of “one lineup of regular phones and one lineup of Pro phones” in 2017 when the iPhone 8 was introduced next to the iPhone X.

But thanks to Apple’s newly introduced iPhone Air, the iPhone 17 lineup gives new phone buyers more choices and trade-offs than they’ve ever had before. Apple’s phones are now available in a spectrum of sizes, weights, speeds, costs, and camera configurations. And while options are great to have, it also means you need to know more about which one to pick.

We’ve gone hands-on with all four of Apple’s new phones, and while more extensive tire-kicking will be required, we can at least try to nail down exactly what kind of person each of these phones is for.

The iPhone Air: Designed for first impressions

There’s no more iPhone mini, and there’s no more iPhone Plus. Now we have an iPhone Air, and it is very much its own thing.

The phone is just over two-thirds the thickness of the iPhone 17, not counting what Apple now calls a “camera plateau” that stretches across the top of the device. It’s 0.22 inches thick and weighs 5.82 ounces, compared to 0.31 inches thick and 6.24 ounces for the iPhone 17. You have to go back to the iPhone 12 (5.78 ounces) to find a full-size iPhone that’s equally light, and that one had a 6.1-inch screen instead of the Air’s more expansive 6.5 inches.

Those don’t look like huge numbers on paper, but when you’re holding the iPhone Air, it does make a substantial difference. While the camera plateau makes it look top-heavy in photos, in reality, it’s light, and that weight is distributed evenly enough that it feels as well-balanced as any of the other iPhones.

The combination of a large-ish screen and light created a strong perception of lightness, compared to the iPhone 17 or especially the 7.27-ounce iPhone 17 Pro. I also found that the shiny titanium frame, while a fingerprint magnet, did slide around in my hand less than an aluminum finish.

It’s a phone built to make a strong first impression, whether you’re holding it in an Apple Store or just after an Apple event in a throng of YouTubers who are all throwing elbows so that they can film each individual phone in the hands-on area for 20 minutes apiece. But I do worry that living with the Air would be frustrating in the long haul, specifically because of battery life.

Again, on paper, the numbers Apple is quoting aren’t so far apart. The Air is rated for 27 hours of local video playback, compared to 30 hours for the iPhone 17 and 33 hours for the 17 Pro. But there’s a bigger gap between the numbers for streaming video—22 hours, 27 hours, and 30 hours for the Air, 17, and 17 Pro, respectively—that suggests that any activity that’s actively using the A19 Pro chip or wireless communication is going to drain the battery even faster.

Extrapolate that out two years, when your battery is going to be operating at somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of its original capacity, and a midday charge starts to sound like an inevitability. It’s telling that a thickness-and-weight-increasing external battery accessory was announced in the same breath as the iPhone Air.

Apple’s official acknowledgement of and solution to the battery life issue is a $99 external battery that attaches with MagSafe and charges the phone wirelessly; by Apple’s estimates, it adds roughly 13 hours of runtime on top of what you get from the internal battery.

Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of having an iPhone Air, I hear you asking? Maybe so! But it is at least a better aesthetic match for the iPhone than a chunky third-party brick, and one that’s pretty easy to detach and put away once it’s done its job and charged your phone. It has its own separate USB-C port for charging, and a small status light (orange when charging, green when charged) below the Apple logo. The magnetic connection feels sturdy enough that it would be hard to dislodge the battery by accident, but I can’t say that it absolutely couldn’t fall off if you were trying to jam the phone into a pocket or bag and caught the battery on something.

I can say that the iPhone Air probably isn’t for me, because the main things I want from a phone are more battery life and better cameras—I can appreciate something smaller and lighter, but only if it doesn’t compromise that other stuff (I got exactly this kind of upgrade when I jumped from an iPhone 13 Pro to a 15 Pro). That’s fine—when you introduce four phones at once, you don’t need to appeal to every iPhone user with every one of them. But I do wonder whether people will find the Air more convincing than they apparently found the now-departed iPhone mini and iPhone Plus.

The iPhone 17 Pro: Industrial design

If you look at the iPhone Air and you say, “I would actually take a thicker, heavier phone if it had a bigger battery in it,” Apple does already make that phone for you.

The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are more of a design departure from the standard iPhones than they have been in years past, with a distinctive aluminum unibody design and a gigantic camera plateau that replaces the old (and already substantial) three-lens camera bump on the older Pros.

Frankly, I’m not in love with the look of this new design—the aluminum unibody design may be good for durability, but it requires Apple to leave cutouts for other wireless-permeable materials all over the phone’s body, and the result is a two-tone design and a lumpy profile that gives the impression that form follows function on this one. It’s the iPhone equivalent of a polished concrete floor—utilitarian with a trendy veneer. It’s a phone I would be happy to put in a case.

It’s also a bit disappointing that the iPhone 17 Pro continues the Pro phones’ drift back upward in weight—we went from 7.27 ounces to 6.6 ounces from the iPhone 14 Pro to the 15 Pro, then to 7.03 ounces for the 16 Pro, and now right back to 7.27 ounces again. But weight is obviously incidental to other features for many Pro users, and the 17 Pro does at least do cool things that make the increased weight worth it.

The one feature that’s easy to wrap your arms around in just a few minutes with the new phone is the upgraded telephoto camera lens, which shifts to a 48MP sensor that enables Apple’s Fusion Camera functionality for telephoto shots for the first time.

If you don’t know, the Fusion Camera system shoots 48MP images and then shrinks them to 12 or 24MP, depending on the phone you’re using—benefiting from the extra detail captured by the 48MP sensor, but keeping photo sizes manageable. To create “optical zoom,” the camera instead crops a native-resolution 12MP image out of the center of that sensor. Quality is reduced somewhat because you lose the benefits of the “pixel binning” process that is used to turn 48MP shots into 12MP or 24MP shots, but you’re still capturing native-resolution images without digital zoom.

Adding that to the telephoto lens for the first time doubles the amount of zoom Apple can offer—it starts at 4x zoom, and can go as high as 8x before you start relying on digital zoom.

We were able to do a bit of shooting with the iPhone 17 Pro’s telephoto camera on the Apple Park campus. Compared to my iPhone 15 Pro and its 3x telephoto lens, the default 4x zoom on the iPhone 17 Pro already gets us a little closer, and the 8x zoom option gets you a lot closer. Zoom all the way in to the orange “hello” and you’ll notice some fuzziness and less-than-tack-sharp details, but for photo prints or sharing digitally the results are impressive.

The extra weight and unfinished look of the iPhone 17 Pro don’t make as good a first impression as the iPhone Air did, but I suspect iPhone Pro users (myself included) will find its larger battery and better camera to be acceptable trade-offs. It will be the easier phone to live with in the long term, in other words.

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