Everyone's talking about the iPhone Air, but I think the iPhone 17 is the most
exciting phone in the lineup. So much so that I actually upgraded my iPhone 13
Pro to an iPhone 17 already. But I'm going to pretend I don't know anything
about it so we can unbox it here today. Apple's probably calling this their best
iPhone yet, other than the Pro and the Air. And I believe it. First of all,
what a great green. There's actually some controversy online. People are
saying that last year's colors are better, but man, this sage, it looks
awesome. I actually originally pre-ordered the green and then I canceled and went for black because I'm
a coward. But holding it in my hands, it looks awesome. And the matching rails,
oh, it looks so good. The only hesitation is that from the front, you
can kind of see the green, which to me is a little distracting, but I don't think most people will care. In the box,
are keeping things simple. We've got a cable and literally just one slip of
paper now saying you no longer need a physical SIM. Let's see how long this
cable is. Cuz if there's no brick, you know, at least it should be a nice
cable. This packaging is fancy. What the hell? Look at this. This is crazy. This
is just a cable, bro. For cables, it's a USBC to C. And it's sleeved. Really nice
texture. And for length, it is 1 m long.
What is that in feet and inches? I don't know. 3.3 feels small. I'm only 2 ft
taller than this. That's crazy. All right, back to the design of the phone. I think it looks good. It looks exactly
like the 16, which is kind of disappointing considering the Pro got obviously a big redesign, and the Air
looks unique. On the left side, we have our action button, which lets you rebind
to different features. I set mine to Shazam, so you can easily Shazam music
on Instagram reels, whatever like that. And we have our volume rockers. On the
top, nothing but an antenna band. On the right side, we have our power button/
Siri button/wallet button and our camera
cutout. This is my first phone with that cutout, and it is all right. I find it
to be in an okay place, but also in a place where when I'm taking it out of my
pocket, I'm kind of grabbing it by the button, which is a little annoying, but
I'll get used to it. And on the bottom, we have our speaker grill and our USBC 2
port. Same as last year, you're not getting the same speeds on your USB port
as you are in the Pro phones, which is a little disappointing considering they've upgraded the cameras on the back. So, we
now have a 48 megapixel main camera and 48 megapixel ultrawide, which means
you'll be taking high quality photos and videos and then transferring it off very
slowly via AirDrop or cable, which is annoying, but I guess if you're going to
do anything with video, you're getting the Pro. Seems like a weak excuse these
days. One thing I noticed right off the bat when I got my 17 is that the hand feel is great. Coming from the older
phones where it's flat. I think it can look quite good, but it's a little sharp
in your hand versus the new series, it's flat on the sides, but it's kind of
rounded into itself. So, it fits in your hand really naturally. It doesn't feel
sharp and it still feels like I have a grip on it, which is awesome. It's also
nice to get away from the shiny edges where it gets pretty fingerprinty pretty
fast. Another nice change is the front glass, which is now ceramic shield 2,
which promises three times better scratch resistance, which is great
because I don't like to use a case. I don't like to use a screen protector.
And on my 13 Pro, you can see it's getting little scratches on the sides.
So, if I can prevent that, that would be fantastic. And this is with me trying to
take care of it, but there's no real way to put down your phone. You can either
put it on the screen or you can put it on the cameras. And I don't really want
to damage either. So, I guess I'm out of luck. But you know who's not out of
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shortcircuit for 15% off a data plan today. One thing I can't show off here,
but I have to call out as being really nice. When I set up my phone to transfer all my stuff from my other phone, it
just automatically ripped the information from the SIM card and put it as an eSIM on my new phone. Super
convenient. Anyways, back to the phone. Here we have a 6.3 in Super XDR display.
Their best display ever. And they mean it this time because it's actually the
same display as the Pro models, which is awesome. So now you're getting 120 Hz.
You're getting always on display. You're getting 30,000 nits of brightness, and
you actually get that. We had Labs check out the phone, obviously, and they're
able to validate those claims as 30,000 and some nits, and that's excellent.
They also boast about getting 33% less reflections on your screen, but don't
expect anything like the S25 Ultra. You're still going to have pretty gnarly
reflections. But yeah, I guess it's better than my 13 Pro. Still not super
visible. And though the screen gets 50% brighter than the iPhone 16, you don't
have to worry about a huge hit to your battery life. This thing is a tank. I
don't know why Apple is so afraid of telling us how many watt hours or millah
battery is because this thing got what? 21 hours of battery life. That's crazy.
I'm going to watch K-pop Demon Hunters like eight times. I've never seen it
before. >> And if somehow you drain your battery
all in one day, don't worry. You've got fast charging. Now, finally, on these
regular phones, you're getting a 50% charge in 20 minutes. And again, Labs
was able to verify that claim. You're actually going to get about 50% charge
in just 20 minutes, which is a 10-minute improvement over the iPhone 16. That's
great. But the only way this can be so good for media, and if I'm going to
watch 21 hours of uh hit Netflix TV show, is if the screen and speaker sound
good. So, let's pull up Crab Brave. Woo! Excuse the top down camera cuz this is
blown out, but this screen is bright. Oh
my goodness, this looks great. Other
than the Face ID cutout, but I got to say, Face ID is worth the cutout. I was
using the Pixel 10 Pro for a while and I did not like the uh underscreen
fingerprint scanner compared to Face ID. Anyways, speakers.
Okay, I got to say it sounds pretty good. It gets loud enough at 100% where
it's almost a little uncomfortable, especially when you're holding the phone kind of cupping the speakers to be
towards your ears. But at a lower volume that's a little bit more natural to be
listening to. It still sounds pretty good. You still get a little tiny thump of bass. And uh yeah, overall pretty
impressed. And if you're wondering, yes, it has two speakers. Unlike the Air,
which only has one. You need two speakers. When it comes to performance,
you'll never believe it. It's great. Like most iPhones, they're going to do
excellently when it comes to CPU and GPU usage. Though you can't expect to be as
good as the 17 Pro, it's actually not that far off being within 10 to 15% most
benchmarks. and it absolutely hogwalops the Pixel 10 in every single test we
threw at it. Destroyed. If you want more specifics, check out the Labs website.
They're going to have a detailed rundown of all the new iPhones so you can see
exactly how they line up. All right, here's the thing that's going to help
you decide whether you're getting a 17 or a 17 Pro, the cameras, because that's
really the big difference. Of course, the Pro is getting, you know, extra GPU,
CPU, core, whatever that means, but the big thing is is that plateau with the
extra camera. This one here only has, like I said, the 48 megapixel wide and
ultrawide, but the Pro has the 48 megapixel 4x telephoto. Do you actually
need it, though? Let's take a look. All right, we got perfect timing. My best
friend, honestly, great guy, Adam Sergar, is here wearing a nice new LT
Store shirt. Again, launching today on LT Store. Okay, so this is 1x, we got.5,
and our 2x what they call optical quality zoom. And that just means
they're taking that 48 megapixel sensor and binning it down to 12 megapixels to
crop in. And it's supposed to look as good as if you had a real optical, but
uh it probably doesn't. All right, here's a photo from our main camera. And
I got to say, looks pretty good. It is very sharp even with the very
challenging lighting. You can see the processing is trying to do a little bit to make sure that Adam is visible. He
kind of gets the same effect that the Pixel 10 video had where Reese looked
like a cardboard cutout. Adam kind of does here too, especially because he
hits that pose so hard. But overall, a
good photo, if not a little uncanny. Going into the ultra wide, again, things
look pretty good. There's not a whole lot of distortion on the edges, which is
fantastic. I mean, they've had a while to figure that out, but it seems like
they've figured it out. And again, zooming in, you're getting a lot of
quality when you punch in. Though, Adam does still look a little odd, but I
think it's better than just having him completely unrecognizable or blown out
because of all the lights. Going to our 2x optical quality zoom. You know what?
That does look pretty good. I'm not going to lie, he looks pretty sharp. You
can see the individual beard hairs and everything clearly. Going into the
light, you can start to see again the details in the ribbon. There's a little
bit of what looks like AI processing. Like things likely aren't that sharp
naturally, but it's pretty convincing if it is just processing cuz again, who's
really going to be punching in that that deep? So, yeah, it would be nice to have
more of a zoom, but let's see what happens if we just zoom past this
optical quality 2x zoom. All right, here's a photo at 4x, which is the
optical quality on the Pro. And here's one at the max 10x digital zoom. Let's
see if we can actually read anything on the cup at either of those levels. All
right, here's the 4x. It's okay. I kind
of appreciate that it's not guessing. I've seen videos from other creators
where you can really see in like the Samsung cameras where they're trying to
use AI to guess what it says and it just mangles everything. Uh the iPhone does
not. It just lets you not be able to read it, which I guess is commendable. Going into the 10X, again, not bad. It
says mark and it says R, but if I didn't know it said it, I might hesitate, but
it's not it's not bad. I don't know what the order is, but it could be worse,
especially when you punch out to the regular photo. I think Andrew looks totally fine here, though. I don't think
it'd be something he'd set as a profile picture. By comparison, the 17 Pro can
go all the way up to 40x using its digital zoom. You'll have to see how
that turned out in Lines's video. And this is video. It also gives us a chance
to check out the dual capture feature. So, if you're recording, you know, your
friends and you're showing things around, you now get to pay attention to
you in the corner and be distracted by that and probably miss whatever you're
trying to shoot. Uh, I'm not sure. But you can move it around. Uh, you can't
move it around after the fact and it'll show up in the video moving around the
screen, which is kind of neat. But I I don't really know what this is for. I
guess this is not for me. But hey, if this is for you, congrats. And yes, I've
saved the best for last. And it's so rare to say this about a frontfacing
camera, but it truly is the coolest camera on the phone and probably a peak
into the future of what iPhone cameras look like because this has center stage.
And you might say, I have that on my Mac. But it's a little different here
because the front-facing camera has a larger square sensor which lets you do
this. You can go to take a photo and go, I actually want it to be landscape. Tap
the screen and boom. Whoa. It's punched out. And now you have all this space for
all your friends. Look at Look at us. That's fantastic. I think it's really
cool. And it will use AI to automatically detect when there are
other people and let them into the frame as well. And it works for video as well.
Look at this. I have landscape video, but I'm holding the phone vertically.
Much more comfortable. And I guess that is the only perk of
being able to do this. Remember when I said I'd talk about the camera capture button later? I kind of lied because in
all that I never used it. It's really hard to get used to having this pressure
sensitive button that does some things, but also, you know, it has it's really
hard to tell what and when and how much pressure to use. And if you tap and
hold, it changes things. And like just look at the settings menu for it. You
can change single and double click if you need the screen on. These are all the adjustments you can change. And then
I guess the order of those matters. I don't understand. And again, it's in a
spot where you're pressing it quite often. It would have been a great Touch ID button. I was really hoping they were
going to bring it as a Touch ID button, but they didn't. But you can use it to
take a photo. Or you can use it to activate visual intelligence by holding
it. And bam, visual intelligence. Learn about the objects and places around you
and get more information about what you see. It's shared with Apple to process what's in view. Objects and places are
not stored on device. So, if you care about that, be aware. All right. Let's
see what happens if I click ask. Tapping
the question box. Ask Chat GBD for more information by capturing what's in view.
Okay. Uh, asking, "What am I looking at?" Film production setups often
include multiple cameras, lighting rigs, and crew. Okay, that's kind of cool.
What kind of iPhone is this? The iPhone shown has a triple lens camera system. I
don't know if it's listening when it says asking CHBT. I actually think it's just sending a photo and it's giving a
response that it wants, which is a little odd. I guess typing in here is
convenient, but I would much rather be able to talk to it while I'm showing it
whatever's on my screen. Okay, so tapping the search button searches
Google for similar images by capturing and sending what's in view.
I mean, it worked. It's just pictures of people's laptops. Very odd. Again, I
don't really know what I would use this for. It's there. It's accessible in a button that I already don't want to use.
So, your mileage may vary. And the last thing to talk about is iOS 26. You know,
it's all liquid glass now, whatever that means. But, I actually think it looks
kind of good. There are times where I think, you know, there's a lot of colors
going on here because it's reflecting the home screen and things just look a
little kind of all over the place, but overall, I think it actually kind of
looks neat. But I might have just been getting bored with how everything was
looking. And now having anything different is kind of a blessing. It's
the same way I feel about the camera design. I think the Pro and the Air look kind of cool just because they look
different. And that's where the biggest downfall of the iPhone 17 kind of comes
into play, which is that it just looks like an iPhone. If you're someone who
likes to show off your phone, the Pro really is that or the Air. And this is
just the phone you should probably get, and that's not very exciting. But does
exciting matter? It just seems to be the best phone. Starting at $800 for 256
gigs, is fantastic. The always on display, which will hurt your battery
life a little bit, but gives you so much more information at a glance. the 120
Hz, which again doesn't really add a whole lot, but just feels great to use.
The upgraded cameras, it just seems like the no-brainer, and maybe that's enough.
But what do you think? Are you going to pick up an iPhone 17 series phone? Are
these upgrades tempting enough to make you upgrade? Let us know down in the
comments, and check out Lionus' coverage of the Air and the 17 Pro. They look
exciting, but I think the base iPhone 17 is for