Sorry. Now that I'm getting to be a middle-aged man, I just have to check my
pros pros. My Apple iPhone 17 Pros.
We've got the Pro and the Pro Max. And
it's like Apple is trying to get me to switch to an iPhone. They even did one
in my color. It's hideous. But that's
okay. We don't care about that. And we don't care about the fact that Apple
includes almost no accessories with their phones anymore. just a simple USB
2 type-C to type-C
and a piece of paper that says you no longer need a SIM card or a, you know,
USBC to 3 and 1/2 mm adapter or any of
the things that Apple used to include in the box. But hey, you're going to like
it anyway because these things look flipping sick. Around the outside, we've
got two trailer part girls. Sorry. No, we've got Apple's new aluminum unibody
frame that they claim along with their new redesigned vapor chamber gives them
better cooling than any iPhone before and perhaps more importantly, if you are
a professional user, more battery life than any iPhone before with the Pro Max
measuring, and this is crazy, 26 hours
of continuous video playback streamed in
the real world on a single charge. That
is nuts. These really are, in my mind,
the first iPhone Pros that are for
professionals, not just people who cosplay as professional or enthusiasts
who just want to have, you know, smoother screen swiping or whatever the
case may be. And the biggest part of that is the cameras. All three, the main
shooter, the ultrawide, and the telephoto are 48 megapixels. So there's
not a single one that they've cheaped out on with the pixel count. And perhaps
more importantly, they have support for Apple log 2 along with professional nice
to haves like improved time sync with Genlog. So if you are running a
production where you've got a whole bunch of different cameras and
microphones in your ecosystem and you're trying to sync it all up on the timeline
after the fact, you will finally be able to do it with the iPhone 17 Pro. This is
potentially a gamecher for us around here because I'm looking at this going,
"Why would I ever buy another action cam? They're IP rated, so I can take
them freaking underwater. They have an outstanding built-in mic. So, in terms
of getting scratch audio, boom, I'm taken care of there." Like, seriously,
give me a reason. Oh, right. the price
1,100 bucks, but that's going to get you
only 256 gigs of storage, which for Apple is pretty good for a starting
configuration. But if you want the 1 TB for the 17 Pro, you're going to be
spending $1,500. And if you want the 2 TB spec for the 17
Pro Max, that'll set you back a cool 2
grand. I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, though. Let's have a look at
the IO. On the bottom of all of them, you get a USB 3 type-C port that can do
up to 10 Gbit per second. Unlike the Air, you get a bottom speaker. Thank you
very much, Apple. It's good that you didn't completely take it away. On the right, you get a lock button as well as
camera button. Personally, I don't really like it for the shutter. Um, but
I like having a quick launch button so that I can quickly open up my camera.
Wish it had a touch sensor in it, but hey, whatever. That's a conversation for
another time. Over on the left side, you've got your action button. just hold
that down and, you know, go to silent or ring or whatever you'd like to configure
it to, as long as it's one of Apple's authorized things, as well as your volume rocker. And then on the top,
you've got I guess that's just an antenna spot for the unibody to go along
with their antenna stripes all over the place. With all that out of the way,
it's time to take a look at the display. This is Apple's best yet with them
claiming 3,000 nits maximum brightness outdoors and up to 1,600 nits max in HDR
content with what is perhaps more important to me, a minimum level of just
one nit if you use their reduced white point mode. This is great for when it's
late at night and you don't want to freaking sear the backs of your retinas.
We weren't quite able to reach Apple's claimed 3000 nits, but we got darn close
and we think it could have to do with our methodology just because they do have a couple of ambient light sensors
and getting both of them exposed to direct daylight in order to get it to
boost to maximum can be a little tricky. As with the last few generations of
iPhone Pros, you get an up to I hate trains. Up to 120 Hz maximum refresh
rate prootion display, which unlike previous generations of iPhones, does
not set the Pro apart from the regular nonpro iPhone 17. Meaning that unless
you really value the extra camera lens and the extra camera features, there's
actually not that much to set the Pro
model apart from the regular iPhone 17.
Oh, other than the processor, of course, it uses the A19 Pro rather than the
regular A19. But we'll talk about that in a minute after this message from our
sponsor. Oh, it's Dbrand. That kind of figures.
Every other time we call up Dbrand, it's like, "Oh, no. I couldn't possibly. I'm
far too poor. You know, I'm only in Best Buy now, selling out like immediately,
and they can't keep the product in stock, but oh, oh, it's an iPhone. Oh,
now all of a sudden we can find the money. Sure. You know what, Dbrand? I'm
fine with it. They sent over their new Ghost 2.0 case. It stays clear longer
than you will stay alive. What a weird uncomfortable thing to say about your
product. Oh, yeah. I didn't even know what this one was. I was like, "Oh, that
looks and feels cheap." Um, I I kind of
figured it I thought maybe Dbrand had
fallen off. Like, look at this. Look at this bottom. Like, you couldn't even
finish your case. How can Apple be a company that prides itself so much on
design and materials and then let Dbrand, some upstart two bit ass company
from Toronto, out compete them to this level? Get yours today at my boss is a
short narcissistic asshole.com >> or
>> nope. I'm going to make them buy it. Anyway, coming back to the performance,
the A19 Pro SOC outperforms literally
any other phone that isn't also called
iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone 17 Pro Max. Both
of these managed to perform within I think it's about a percent of each other
basically across the board. And impressively, while we did note that
both phones did thermal throttle under extended load, what we did see was a bit
of a slower decay curve compared to what we're used to seeing. So, if you have a
sustained load, whether it's a game or some kind of professional application,
you should expect to have a longer period of quite high performance before
it trails off to the minimum. With that said, even the minimum performance that
we saw out of these phones was extremely impressive compared to anything that
isn't each other and especially compared
to the Pixel 10 Pro. My goodness. Like,
it's freaking embarrassing that Google is this far behind on CPU, GPU,
basically anything you. On the Qualcomm side of things, it's a little bit less
humiliating with the Galaxy S25 Edge managing to hang with the A19 Pro
sometimes, but even then, it wasn't that close.
Now, it is worth noting the S25 Edge is not the ideal comparison to these
phones. We tested that because we had the iPhone Air unboxing to do and also
because Samsung doesn't usually leave their phones with us, so we didn't have
any other S whatever Ultras kicking around. Samsung, we've talked about
this. I told you this was going to happen. The point is, if you want the
utmost in mobile performance, A19 Pro is
it. And if you want more details on how it it is, we're going to have the lab's
website linked down below where you can check out their accompanying article.
They'll also have a bunch more information about charging. In general,
we were able to validate most of Apple's claims with respect to charging speed.
We got about 40 watts max on the Pro Max and about 30 watts max on the regular
Pro. And both of them charged to full in about 2 hours, which doesn't sound that
impressive in this day and age, except that they both reached about 50% in just
about 20 minutes. I know that's a lot of abouts. If you want more details, you
can go check that out. The point is, Apple kind of reduces the charging power
aggressively toward the end, which is better for your battery, but does mean
that topping all the way up might be done overnight. Now, let's play around
with the camera. And I am expecting this thing to be flipping awesome. Is it
supposed to be any different from the air for just, you know, the main shooter? Doesn't really seem any
different. Let's try the telephoto, though. I want to try the telephoto.
Hello, Mr. Bell. That is actually far
from the best performance I've seen on this in terms of not being all washed
out and crappy looking. In terms of sharpness, though, my god, so unfair for
Apple because if it was anyone else, like if I was holding a Vivo phone or
something, I'd be blown away right now. I'd be so impressed. But with Apple, I
like I expect it to be really good. And so when it's anything other than head
and shoulders above anything else I've ever seen, then I'm just not that impressed. It's it's like it's rough to
be on top. Hey, Apple. It's it's I mean, it's great obviously, but there are
areas that I'm looking at going like, "Yeah, that TV is not pink." Even just
here on the set, there's a couple of little things that I'm looking for, and
that's one of them. So, like any smartphone camera, it's going to be a
little situational. It does a pretty poor job of this. And it's a shame
because you can actually see it looks better in the live photo before they
apply their processing and then it just looks like crap. Man, I'm excited for
the video camera though. Like some of this is just flipping unnecessary. Does
anybody really need to do 4K 120 frames
per second Dolby Vision? Anyone? Buler.
But with this you can you won't be storing a ton of that unless you spring
for like a 1 TB or a two TB model.
Give me that smoothness. But damn. Also, I know some people
didn't really like liquid glass. They call it like liquid ass or whatever. I
love it. I love this. This is so cool.
Holy Like, every time I'm looking at an Android phone, I like to look at
like the Android Jutter. Like, none of them handle stabilization like Apple
does. It's so smooth. It looks like I
have it on like a a gimbal or something. And if I want even more stabilization
than this, it has an action mode that will apply even more. That is really
impressive. You know what I'd rather talk about right now? The selfie camera.
This thing is freaking awesome. It uses a new 18 megapixel square sensor that
using Apple intelligence will automatically frame either in portrait
or landscape depending on what is best
for the current situation. So, it'll have a look and go, "Oh, yeah. You're
holding your phone in portrait right now, but there's a whole bunch of people crowding in to get into the picture."
Boom. It'll crop it landscape, make it wider, and you can snap your picture. I
actually took this picture on the Air, but the entire iPhone 17 family and the
Air features the same front-facing camera, and I freaking love it. It's
awesome. I mean, I might as well take a picture or two on the Pro. I don't know
why it went wide there. There. Let's just not go wide. Okay. Okay, so it
doesn't always make the best decisions. That is an extremely wide and worse
selfie. Man, the Pro Max is big.
They both feel so heavy compared to the Air. Oh, we should try the speakers.
That's one thing that could convince me to get these instead of the Air. The
speakers on the Air are so bad. Or should I say speaker?
As usual, the iPhone Pro is better than any phone has any right to be. Although
I wouldn't say that this is a night and day difference over last gen by any
stretch of the imagination. How's the Max?
Yeah. For better or for worse, the difference between the 17 Pro and the
Pro Max has never been less. It pretty much just boils down to more battery
life on the Pro Max, a bigger screen, and of course, up to two terabytes
instead of just 1 TB of storage. But that's not a bad thing. They're kind of
the best iPhones ever. Apple's new Ceramic Shield 2 is the first front
glass and is present across this entire generation of iPhones that has ever led
Zach from JerryRig Everything to say anything other than scratches lately at
level six with deeper scratches at seven. Instead, it's lightly at seven
with deeper scratches at eight. That's kind of flipping incredible. Uh they've
all got Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6. We've got faster mag safe charging than ever
before, up to 25 watts >> on the Pro models, along with a return
of some of Apple's really cool emergency features like detecting a severe crash
and contacting authorities or allowing you to contact an emergency contact via
satellite if you are lost and not able to get cellular signal. None of that is
unique enough to drive me to switch to the iPhone. I have to give credit to
that to iOS 26. Looks freaking awesome.
Apple has slowly but surely been chipping away at all the little things
that have kept me off of it. We have T9 dialing now. We can put desktop icons
anywhere we freaking want to for the most part. And they've got a bunch of
really cool new stuff. Their call screeny looks amazing. My phone doesn't
even ring for an unknown number until they've stated their purpose to an Apple
AI. And I hate sitting on hold. Yes, it's not a new feature, but it's new to
Apple. And being able to have my phone just tell me, "Yeah, they're ready to talk to you." H oh, absolute lifesaver.
So, I have a plan. I'm going to switch to iPhone for 30 days again, but I'm
going to do it a little bit differently this time. I'm going to put three different iPhones in my pocket. The
regular 17, the Air, and one of the Pros, and see which one I gravitate to
over the course of the month. Make sure you're subscribed to LTT so you can
check that out. And make sure you subscribe to ShortCircuit.