It’s new iPhone season. After nearly a full year of rumors and leaks, Apple has revealed the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air, all of which sport new features and key hardware upgrades.
As expected, the all-new iPhone Air has inspired plenty of discussion already thanks to its new slim and light design, but I fear this has overshadowed another great redesign in this year’s iPhone lineup.
I’m talking about the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, both of which have been quite drastically remodelled from last year’s iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max.
Apple has expanded the iPhone 17 Pro’s camera module from a square to a full-width raised rectangle, which it’s calling a ‘plateau’. The titanium chassis found on last year’s handsets has been replaced with aluminum, which wraps further around the rear panel (save for a slab of glass, which allows for wireless charging and gives a neat two-tone effect).
Most of this was rumored long before the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max were revealed during the “Awe Dropping” event – the big camera housing and the two-tone back panel, for instance, were hinted at in renders and mock-ups and suggested by leaked accessories.
And to be honest, on first hearing about these changes, I was the furthest thing from a fan. I thought the enlarged camera housing was an uncharacteristic move from Apple’s typically minimalist design departments, and the two-tone effect never quite made sense to me after nearly two decades of sleek, single-color designs.
But looking at the images from our hands-on iPhone 17 Pro preview and hands-on iPhone 17 Pro Max preview, I’ve got to admit that I’ve had a change of heart. That’s partly because the final product is much more refined than the mockups and renders we’d seen previously, but mainly because we now know the story behind some of these design choices.
Form and function
If you ask me, Apple is at its best when it’s blending form and function. The company’s most iconic products – the unibody iMac, the M1 MacBook Air, the iPod – were all made with simple design choices that built up the aesthetic of the device while also serving a clear function.
Through this lens, and with the knowledge shared during Apple’s “Awe Dropping” event, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max’s redesigns make a lot more sense.
The camera plateau, for example, has been raised from the rest of the rear panel to give the phone more internal space to fit a larger battery. Considering that the iPhone 16 Pro Max already featured a protruding camera housing, this actually seems like a fairly logical move – we’re long past the point of phones lying flat on tables, and battery life is plainly more important than shaving a few millimeters off of the phone’s thickness.
As a matter of fact, this sort of thing is exactly what I hoped for in the afterglow of Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge reveal earlier this year. With the iPhone Air catering to those who just want a thin and light premium phone, Apple is free to make the iPhone bulkier and more robust, should doing so better serve the needs of power users.
The two-tone panel has a similar story. The smaller glass area on the back of the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max is courtesy of an expanded aluminum chassis, which replaces last year’s titanium rails to offer better heat dissipation. It’s a functional move that also gives the phone a more rugged, industrial appearance (not that this necessarily translates to enhanced durability).
It helps that the “two-tone” effect is really quite a bit more subtle than some tipsters had suggested – and it’s especially hard to get excited about CAD renders that mock up the shape of the phone in bright yellow and red, as one supposedly leaked image showed.
Before Apple’s “Awe Dropping” event, I generally imagined that the changes coming to the iPhone 17 Pro would be purely aesthetic in nature – though given Apple’s track record, perhaps I should have assumed there’d be some functional benefit.
What do you think of these new designs? Let us know in the comments below.