iPhone 17 Series Test Results

This is a first-of-its-kind post on this website where we are laying out some of our test results as a companion piece to the ShortCircuit videos on iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air. I recommend you watch those videos if you haven't!

Some of the formatting and presentation of this post isn't in its final form, but this should give you a chance to review the results all in one place and without having to pause the video. Let us know any of your thoughts on the LTT Forum!

Battery Discharge Test

• The entire new line-up has impressive battery life.
• The battery life of iPhone 17 Pro(and 17 Pro Max) are especially impressive, a marked improvement over iPhone 16 Pro and higher than comparable devices.
• iPhone Air has respectable battery life which should last you through the day, but less than the S25 Edge. It has battery life in between that of iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro.

We can't match the battery test results achieved by Apple, but they use a different procedure, which is detailed on their website.

Apple's test involves looping a 2-hour and 23-minute HDR movie in the TV app. They have more control over this application/'environment' and can make it efficient to create the ideal environment for battery life tests.

Battery Charge Test

Tests in the charts below were conducted with adaptive charging modes disabled and the devices powered off, with the charger that is listed in the title block. These charts may require a little bit of time to read and analyze, see this previous article for context.

All tests in the table below were conducted with the Anker NANO II 45W (A2664) charger. All adaptive charging modes and features were disabled and the devices were powered off.

• The test results in the table are slightly informative, but with the aggressive battery protection employed by most devices the total duration is less meaningful than looking at the entire charging curve.
• The graphs show that we've confirmed all of Apple's claims of 50% charge within 20 or 30 minutes with a 40W or greater power adapter.

Benchmarks

• The iPhone Air results had higher variance than the results of other devices. We could see that iPhone Air performance was decreasing substantially over the relatively brief test duration, presumably due to thermal throttling, making it more sensitive to the starting state/temperature.
• iPhone Air has 18% higher single-core CPU score than the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, but a very similar multi-core CPU score. iPhone Air also gets far outperformed by the S25 Edge in GPU tests.
• iPhone 17 performs very similarly to iPhone Air, but up to 15% worse than iPhone 17 Pro.
• The iPhone 17 series has a large step up in GPU performance over the iPhone 16 series.

Display Luminance

All measurements in the tables below are in nits.(candela per square meter)

Standard Dynamic Range - SDR

High Dynamic Range - HDR

• As expected, there are very similar results between all of the new iPhone models. They all get same 800 nits brightness for SDR content(regular interfaces), but now with auto-brightness enabled they are able to get up to 3000 nits for small regions.
• We also found that even with auto-brightness disabled, the devices will react to light stimulus by increasing the brightness. This is unintuitive and could be frustrating if you expect it to absolutely fix the screen brightness, but is likely helpful for everyday use.
• Note that there are some small differences in measurements between the phones with auto-brightness enabled. It can be difficult to consistently stimulate the light sensor but everything points towards the displays being identical.

Telephoto Comparison

Taken with iPhone X 2x telephoto, iPhone 13 Pro 3x telephoto, and iPhone 17 Pro 4x telephoto, respectively. These will be impacted by the compression of our website, but they may provide context for upgrades from older devices.