The unibody and camera plateau feel more significant in person

Surprising absolutely no one, Apple has unveiled the new iPhone 17 series, including the iPhone Air, which CEO Tim Cook said at the launch event today freed the company up to make the Pro handsets the most Pro ever. Is that claim true or mostly hyperbole? Here at Apple Park, I was able to take a high speed hands-on demo of the iPhone 17 Pro, and though obviously I can’t answer that question based on a brief preview of the new phones, I’m certainly intrigued.

I made a beeline for the new Cosmic Orange model, which by the way reminds me strongly of the Action Button on the Apple Watch Ultras. I’m already very taken with the way the iPhone 17 Pro looks and feels, and I don’t even mind the new camera plateau, but maybe that’s just because I’m a sucker for change.

This isn’t just a shiny new thing, to be clear. Far from it. The iPhone 17 Pro that I played with was the orange version and it has a sort of matte finish and a vague “soft touch” feel compared to the iPhone 16 Pro I’ve been using for about a year. I also liked the blue color option, which is slightly richer than it appears in photos. Regardless of the color, I found that the aluminum frame and matte finish around the edges lent a sturdier feel overall, and I say this as someone whose iPhone 16 Pro has a large, nasty series of cracks because it fell and landed on its edge.

I definitely think that though there’s a slight tradeoff in the overall premium vibe to the Pro phones, the possible improvement in durability should be worth it. Importantly, the back of the iPhone 17 Pro also features Ceramic Shield in the paler-hued rounded rectangle part, so it should be more scratch resistant than its predecessor.

In spite of the new unibody design, I found the camera control button on the right still reasonably easy to press, although I think I’m more used to the one on the iPhone 16 Pro and find it a bit easier to click at the moment.

More importantly, and this is something I’ll have to spend more than an hour with an iPhone 17 Pro to verify, the redesign should help with battery life. The camera plateau now houses many components, freeing up space in the rest of the iPhone’s body for the battery. That, together with the A19 Pro processor’s improved power efficiency, is supposed to make the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max last longer than before.

I both loathe and am appreciative of Apple’s tendency to come up with new terms for its features, and while I cringed slightly at the word “plateau” to describe the rounded rectangle module on the back of the iPhone 17 Pro, I certainly find it convenient to use as a reference. The camera plateau contains the three 48-megapixel Fusion cameras that Apple described during the keynote, and I can verify that I saw camera zoom options that went up to 8x in the viewfinder. I tested some of them out briefly at Apple’s Observatory space, zooming up closer to the Infinity building further away. Without much closer looks at the resulting pictures, I can’t vouch for the quality, so all I can say is that the interface remains familiar to use.

I also had a chance to quickly check out the new Center Stage selfie camera, and I have to say it now makes sense why Apple had to redesign the camera app with iOS 26. To enable new features like the auto-rotating aspect ratio or the dual-camera video capture, you’ll have to dive deeper into menus by tapping buttons near the top of the screen. I didn’t immediately know where to find these but I’m sure I’ll learn over time. For now, a helpful Apple representative standing next to the phone showed me where everything was.

Many of the other interesting things about the iPhone 17 Pro weren’t easy to quickly test, so we’ll have to wait till we can review them to see if the claims Apple makes hold up. That’s things like improved performance with the A19 Pro, better thermal management with the onboard vapor chamber, as well as that touted battery life. I’d be curious to see what we learn over time about the redesign and whether it has any impact on call performance and repairability, too.

Though I’m quite taken by the new look and color of the iPhone 17 Pros, I have to admit I’m a little envious of my colleague Sam Rutherford, who got to spend some hands on time with the new iPhone Air. While the colors aren’t as appealing in that line, the extreme thinness is certainly very seductive. Based on my limited experience, the iPhone Air has slightly more rounded edges compared to Samsung’s super thin Galaxy S25 Edge, but you should definitely check out Sam’s impressions for more details.