Every fall, I find myself hoping that this is going to be the new iPhone or
the new iOS that's going to inspire me to switch back to Apple. And yet, every
fall, they seem to autumn short. But, while it used to be by a lot, this
last round of updates has me this close to jumping into their walled garden with
both feet. So, I did it. I spent most of the last
couple of months daily driving this iPhone Air. The sex appeal of this
device is undeniable, and it's different enough from their past models that I
really wanted to give it a fair shake. Then, I spent the last couple of weeks
with the iPhone 17 and the 17 Pro Max to
see what I was missing out on by going with the skinny one.
There ended up being a lot for me to like about all of them, actually. But,
as you would expect, I also managed to run into my fair share of
"Only Linus could break an iPhone this horribly" issues, as well.
And, as you would expect, this segues to our sponsor,
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Just like last time, my switch from Android got off to a pretty rocky start.
Apple's Move to iOS app is, to put it bluntly, utterly useless. Almost as
useless as Apple Support, whose only advice to fix the issue was,
"I don't know, just try it again." So, after several failed attempts, I
settled for what little it managed to copy over for me, and then I manually
set up the rest. These issues might become a thing of the past, by the way.
9to5Mac recently reported that Apple and Google are apparently working together
on making platform migrations more streamlined. But, I'll believe it when I
see it at this point. Overall, my opinion of iOS hasn't changed much since
my iPhone 16 review last year. The liquid glass interface looks pretty, but
it's not what I would have liked Apple to be working on, with my main gripe
still being iOS's meme-worthy autocorrect and complete ducking lack of
meaningful keyboard customization, even with third-party keyboards that work
great for me on Android. I type on my phone a lot. Texts, emails, Teams chats,
editing video titles, and updating our tracker sheet, and much of what I do
requires frequent use of special characters and non-normie vocab. And if
I can't text efficiently, then I can't operate efficiently. But, you've heard
all that before. Let's talk about new stuff. My first impression of the iPhone
Air was absolutely outstanding. I mean, it's just it's so sleek. It's so light,
which I really appreciate now that Apple's flagship phones have gotten so
brick-like. But, here's the rub. No, like, right here is
the rub. Once you actually hold the Air and use it day-to-day, the narrow frame
creates kind of a pressure point on the pinky right here. And also, because of
the camera bump and the compute being up here, the weight balance is not great.
Of course, you can fix all of that with a case, but I mean, what is the point of the Air at
that point? It's like ordering a diet Coke with your baconator. Another
ergonomic challenge is picking up or holding the phone without mashing the
camera control button here. Now, to be fair, this can be tuned in
Apple's favorite hiding place for useful features that should be obvious, the
accessibility settings menu, but the default experience is noticeably worse
than other members of the iPhone 17 family, where there's a little bit of
solid ground on either side. The same goes for battery life. It's mostly fine,
simply because Apple's idle battery management is so good. But, I did have a
couple of days where I was traveling for factory tours, and I needed to hotspot
off of my phone. I ended up running out of battery as early as 6:00 p.m., which simply
wouldn't happen on my Pixel 9A or on one of the chunkier iPhones.
Once again, Apple does offer a solution for that, a MagSafe power bank, but
baconator. You get the point. And the Air also
charges slower than the other 17 models, which
actually, look, I I don't want to spend the rest of our time together dunking on this thing. So, let's get through the
rest of this quickly so I can talk about the iPhone that I actually liked. The
mono speaker is atrocious for watching landscape content. The single
48-megapixel camera feels extremely limiting, even for someone who only uses
it casually to snap pictures of his kids and cats. I had on-again, off-again
reception issues both with Wi-Fi and cellular. And while I initially
appreciated its heroin chic figure, the novelty of the form factor wore off
pretty quickly. Now, there has been some speculation that the main reason that
Apple put the iPhone on a diet was to aid the development of a future foldable
phone. I can't speak to that, but what I can say is that, like so many of Apple's
first-generation products, the Air feels like an expensive niche device for early
adopters. And if the reports of slow sales of the Air are anything to go by,
I'm not the only one who feels this way. And I didn't miss it even a little after
switching to the iPhone 17, which resolved pretty much every issue that I
had with the Air. To be clear, there are things that are great about the Air.
It's just that they also happen to be great about the whole iPhone 17 lineup.
Like the displays. Good lord, are these things ever
freaking awesome? Like, seriously, Corning's durable Ceramic Shield 2 glass
is tough. Like, even in my clumsy hands,
I managed to make it through months with these things with no scratches. I mean,
look. Look at this ding in the titanium frame of the Air. That's titanium. I
dropped this thing on the concrete when I missed my pocket. And like,
"Where are the scratches on the glass, Jerry?" The Ceramic Shield 2 is
definitely a massive improvement this year. And that's not even the best part.
Apple has finally put 120 Hz adaptive
ProMotion displays on the entire lineup, rather than paywalling smooth scrolling
behind the Pro tax. Across the lineup, these displays get incredibly bright,
almost hitting their claimed peak of 1,600 nits in a 1% HDR window during
Labs testing, not to mention a whopping 3,000 nits when auto brightness kicks
in. And that's not even the best feature of them. I love being able to drop down
to just 1 nit when it is time to relax
before bed. Seriously, it gets so dim that if you forget to turn that feature
off, it can be hard to turn it back off when you're actually in
reasonable light. Anyway, so super cool feature. Of course, it's hidden in the
accessibility menu, so do yourself a favor and add a shortcut to Control
Center. Now, let's talk a bit more specifically about my favorite iPhone
right now, the iPhone 17. There's
not really much to set it apart. But, that's a good thing. It works great
as a phone with only marginally lower performance than its bigger, more
professional brother. It's got a solid camera, two, in fact, plus the
outstanding new square sensor selfie camera that looks great in both portrait
and landscape. It's got solid video capabilities, not on par with the Pro,
but better than pretty much anything you'll see on the Android side of the garden wall, and it's got stereo
speakers with decent options for storage, 256 gigs base and a 512 gig
option. All told, I think the iPhone 17 is the best-rounded iPhone in years.
It's a hair shy of the Pro version in every way that matters, but hundreds of
dollars cheaper. It's so good that I think it's the reason that Apple dropped
their Plus model. Like, if I could get a bigger screen without springing for the
Pro Max, that is 100% the route that I would have taken. It isn't perfect. It's
got USB 2. It wobbles when it's placed screen up. And like any modern iPhone,
it uses iOS 26, which has felt uncharacteristically unpolished during
my time with it. Wi-Fi tethering had this weird habit of just kind of
turning off. And across all the phones I used, I experienced a wide array of just
buggy behaviors. Finally, let's talk about the Pro Max. I
didn't really use the 17 Pro since it didn't offer anything over the 17 for
me, but if you are big into vlogging or
doing pocket photography, it's probably worth the extra. The extra 48-megapixel
telephoto lens is a welcome addition. The Pro gets a nice speed bump with the
USB 3 at up to 10 gigabit per second, which you will need if you want to
record ProRes 4K at 120 FPS to an external drive. And our Labs team found
that the Pro Max had the best iPhone battery discharge that we have ever
tested. Also, the Pro and the Pro Max
can be equipped with up to a terabyte and 2 terabytes of storage,
respectively. If you can stomach the $2,000 price tag.
I don't really need any of that, though. So, if I was going to stick with iPhone this generation, I'd be going for the
regular 17. But,
I don't think I can do it. No side-loading, no keyboard
customizations, crappy default screenshot management, including locking
scrolling screenshots to only particular apps. Like, why?
And also, that I can have a software experience that is every bit as buggy as
Android. I don't know, Apple. Maybe next year.
Maybe with Apple Hold. Until then, I
think it's back to Android for me, and back to segwaying
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Not that short. If you guys like this video, why not
check out the video when the iPhone 17 launched in September? It's a good
little round up of all the new features and the new hardware.