Apple’s iPhone 17 is supposed to be the most standard and unexciting smartphone of the bunch — so why does it feel so enjoyable to use?
When iPhones launched earlier last month, people were wowed by the iPhone Air, and they appreciated the updates coming to the iPhone 17 Pro, but I wonder if the real sleeper hit here might just be the iPhone 17. It’s funny because if you want to refer to the iPhone 17, you just call it « the iPhone » or the « iPhone 17. » There are no additional monikers or descriptors, like « Pro » or « Max » or « Air » and that might be its secret power.
The iPhone 17 feels like Apple’s Wild Card. Like a wild card in poker, this phone can be what it needs to be for whoever needs it. It’s the sleeper hit that sneaks in under the radar with how very, very good it is. Apple updated this phone with a lot of « Pro » features it had previously reserved for Pro models, so in its own way, the iPhone 17 is the biggest year over year upgrade you can make.
In order to put this phone in perspective, I took Apple’s Wild Card to an MLB Wild Card game. My beloved Chicago Cubs are currently fighting for their lives season as I write this from outside the ballpark, but I’m glad I have the iPhone 17 to experience it. I’ve been using the iPhone 17 for about a week, and this is my full review.Upgrades aplenty
On the outside, the iPhone 17 seems to have changed very little. From the dimensions of the body of the phone to the vertical alignment of the cameras, there’s a lot of the same. The upgrades are more subtle. The new phone has an LPTO Pro Motion display with 120Hz refresh rate. That is covered by Ceramic Shield 2 glass on the front.
Sticking with the front of the phone, the iPhone 17 gets the same 18-megapixel square sensor that allows you to shoot selfies in portrait or landscape. On the back of the phone, you get a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera — up from 12 megapixels from last year. The base storage this year also starts at 256GB, up from 128GB.
This is all in addition to the normal upgrades in battery and processor that we’ve all come to expect year after year. In all, there is a ton of extra to love about this phone, and there are very few exclusive traits that the more expensive models have.Classy Glass
I touched on Liquid Glass a bit when I reviewed the iPhone Air, and obviously, Liquid Glass is on the iPhone 17 as well. Overall, I like it, and I have found strategic blurring of backgrounds to be key to successfully navigating it. That being said, I found a few areas where it can be tough to use, and for the most part I think I’m just running into minor glitches here and there.
Notably, when I open a photo from the camera’s gallery, sometimes the UI comes up in white text as opposed to black test which makes reading those buttons against the white background of the gallery tough. Similarly, on many occasions, I will open an app that uses the keyboard, like the Messages app, and I will find the text behind the keyboard, as if the app just hadn’t scrolled down enough. In those cases, simply scrolling to the bottom fixes the issue, but both of those fly in the face of Apple’s « it just works » philosophy.
