Apple just dropped the iPhone 17 Pro Air — thinner, lighter, packed with wild features… but are there red flags you should watch out for before buying? 👀
#iPhone17 #Apple #TechReview #Smartphones #FirstImpressions
#iPhone17 #Apple #TechReview #Smartphones #FirstImpressions
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00:00Hey, what's up? MKBHD here, and welcome to your first look and hands-on of everything Apple just
00:06unveiled today at their 2025 September event. This is iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Air. Definitely get
00:14subscribed to be among the first to see the full reviews when they come out, but this is my first
00:17impressions, and I actually found it pretty simple to synthesize my thoughts on everything
00:24they announced today. Like, there is some good tech, there's some interesting new designs,
00:28and some questionable decisions, but the funny thing is, you know, as I go to these events and
00:33as I think about all this stuff, what usually happens is I end up typically getting some texts
00:37from friends asking what I think of the announcements, and my mental task is to
00:43summarize everything I'm thinking about into one or two easily digestible sentences or just words
00:49to understand what's new and what happened. I don't want to tell them too much information,
00:54and so that's what I'm going to give you about each of the things Apple announced today. I'm
00:58going to give you my super, super compressed version of what I saw. So let's just start
01:02with the iPhone 17, right? The base new iPhones. My ultra simple summary for the iPhone 17 would be,
01:09hey, it got ProMotion and a better selfie camera, and the rest is mostly the same. So the design
01:15is mostly unchanged other than the new colors, same screen sizes, same dimensions, same camera bump,
01:21same buttons and camera control, which they barely talked about, but there's a new A19 chip inside,
01:28that should see some nice performance gains and efficiency bumps, roughly 20% faster CPU,
01:33which is nice, and battery life should be a few beats longer, and the display is brighter too,
01:39getting up to 3,000 nits. But this is the first time we are seeing a Pro branded feature on a non-Pro
01:46iPhone because every new iPhone across the range now has ProMotion, and it's the same ProMotion too.
01:52The adaptive 1 to 120Hz doesn't seem to be handicapped at all. It's funny, we always used
01:58to have that regular people don't care about 120Hz argument, but now here it is on the new base
02:04iPhones. So, hey, sounds great to me. This makes the base iPhones much more usable, and so does the
02:10new base storage of 256 gigs. So those are welcome upgrades. But the other new thing was the selfie
02:16camera. And it was funny, the keynote was pretty chill up until the point where they started to talk
02:21about this, and it was actually the loudest applause, and it was really tempting to make
02:24fun of it. But I actually do think this is really clever because all these new iPhones have this
02:30massively upgraded selfie camera system. They're calling it center stage, but I actually think
02:34that kind of does a disservice because the actual center stage on their laptops and stuff is kind of
02:38annoying. But what's happening is with these phones, they all have a larger 24 megapixel square
02:44selfie camera sensor. And so then when you go to take a selfie, the phone can take a regular
02:49vertical selfie or can manually or even automatically take a horizontal selfie without you having to
02:57rotate the phone. And honestly, this might be genius. Like the default for most people is obviously to
03:03take a vertical selfie. Now it just fits on the phone. You're probably viewing it on the phone.
03:07But if you go to take a horizontal selfie to fit more people, suddenly the camera lens is off to the
03:11side and it's a little bit less natural looking. So now since the selfie camera is larger and a square,
03:18it can literally just crop an 18 megapixel selfie in portrait or landscape and for videos or photos.
03:26I think it's great. It's very useful. It might be the biggest upgrade to the iPhone 17.
03:31So then there's the iPhone 17 Pro. And my quick friendly summary of the Pro phones is, hey, they got better
03:41zoom and more battery and orange. So the Pro iPhones actually look a little bit different. There's actually
03:47quite a bit going on here with this new design. First of all, there's only three colors, cosmic orange,
03:53deep blue, and silver. Really bumming me out that there's no black Pro phone. But then I remember
04:00dbrand exists. Nevermind. But then the thing that's going to catch everyone's eye on the back is the
04:05camera bar up at the top, which is what Apple keeps calling in their keynote a plateau. It kind of looks a
04:09little bit like the Pixel's visor or frankly, what we've been seeing on a ton of other Android phones for
04:14years now, just a huge bar across the top of the back of the phone. But it's actually not just
04:20cameras in here. Apple's done some rearranging of the insides of the phone to actually shove more
04:25components like the A19 Pro chip and the logic board and storage up here in that bar so they could fill
04:33out more of the bottom of the phone with more battery. And that approach is going to make even more
04:39sense in a little bit. But my first reaction to that is, oh yeah, great. That sounds like these
04:44Pro phones might actually come with a real substantial battery upgrade from last year,
04:48which is again, very welcome. Now you might also notice some other little things like the
04:52millimeter wave antenna at the top of the phone and the ring around that plateau actually also being
04:58an antenna. But then the other new design element is that they actually switched back to aluminum,
05:03which is interesting because we just saw like two years ago, the iPhone 15 Pro's whole thing was
05:11titanium, the new titanium color and titanium rails. And it was a whole big deal. But now they're
05:16switching back to aluminum in a unibody form because it's much better thermally. And so there's
05:22also a new vapor chamber right in the middle of the back of this phone. First time we've seen a vapor
05:27chamber on the iPhone. And so this new cooling system and new unibody aluminum build should mean
05:33the iPhone shouldn't get nearly as hot from sustained loads to the chip, which is different
05:38from normal bursty quick on and off workloads of everyday use. I'm talking more about like rendering
05:43long videos or playing an intense game for a long time with ray tracing at high frame rates. This phone
05:49should be able to keep cool and keep that performance high without overheating. Apple is saying
05:5440% better sustained performance. So yeah, this design, it is just a little bit more than meets the eye,
06:00you know, rearranging some components here and there, being more efficient, better cooling and
06:05better battery. The number that they quoted on stage was 39 hours of video playback, which
06:12whatever, dumb stat, video playback is kind of ridiculous, but okay, we'll take that. And I also
06:17looked up the iPhone 16 Pro Max's video playback, and that was also a great battery life phone.
06:22That one quoted 33 hours. So maybe up to like 10% battery life on this phone, which is sick.
06:28And then there's the cameras that I mentioned. They always go hard with pro phones and cameras.
06:33And this generation is no exception with the main improvement being the new 48 megapixel 4x
06:38telephoto camera. Now 4x might be a lesser number than last year's 5x, but that was a smaller 12
06:47megapixel sensor. This new zoom camera is a 56% larger sensor and has way more resolution. It's 48 megapixels.
06:54So that is a smaller gap between the main camera and the zoom. And you should be able to continue
07:01to zoom further and crop more with less consequence now that you have 48 megapixels.
07:05The pro phones also get the new selfie camera. They also get the new brighter display.
07:10These also got Qi 2 support. And then they also got some seriously pro features that I'm looking
07:14forward to testing, like Genlock Sync support and also ProRes RAW video, which I will hopefully be
07:21getting to test in an autofocus video coming up very soon. But of course there was one more new
07:26iPhone, the iPhone Air. No number, just Air. And y'all know what that means? They're doing the ultra thin
07:35thing and they're leaning in hard. So this thing is a stunningly, ridiculously thin 5.6 millimeters
07:43at the thinnest part. And you can tell from the commercials, you can tell from my footage here.
07:48And you know, the first time I hold the phone, it has the same effect on me that the S25 Edge did
07:53from Samsung, which is just, it's so sick. Like clearly nobody's asking for thinner phones,
08:00but once you hold one, it is pretty impressive that they're able to make something like this.
08:05But there are also absolutely some red flags that come along with this. So the basics are,
08:11it's a six and a half inch ProMotion display. It's got the A19 Pro chip inside, titanium body.
08:19The new selfie camera, of course, is in there. And it has a single 48 megapixel fusion camera on the
08:24back with the new design again, same camera as the iPhone 17, but with the nice plateau from the
08:30ProPhone. And then there's a new N1 chip inside for all the networking connectivity, which is Wi-Fi 7,
08:36Bluetooth 6, thread, and a new more energy efficient C1X modem for cellular. I put out a short that
08:43basically already said this, but I really think this phone is going to be a hard sell
08:48because if you subtract emotions from it, it's just, it's the worst one. This is going to jump
08:56in the lineup at $999. It replaces essentially the plus phones in the lineup. And it is surrounded by
09:01other iPhones that are better than it in basically every way, other than being super thin and light.
09:06So it's a fascinating gamble. This phone has the same A19 Pro chip in it as the ProPhones, minus one
09:13GPU core. Interesting choice. Apparently it's a bit more efficient than the base A19, so that's good for
09:19battery life. But we also just heard a whole long list of choices Apple made with the ProPhones to make
09:26them more thermally efficient to not overheat, switching from titanium to aluminum and adding
09:31a vapor chamber to the back. But this phone is still titanium and absolutely does not have room
09:38for an advanced thermal solution or any sort of vapor chamber. So it sounds like this phone could
09:43get much hotter and throttle performance much quicker. It's a red flag. Now, we also know that
09:50ultra thin phones have a tendency to be a little bit less durable. They've bent over the years.
09:56And I'm not going to be the first one to point this out. I mean, I'm sure already glued to Jerry
09:59Rig Everything's channel for his bend test. And Apple, of course, has thought about this. They've for
10:05sure tested this. And they're telling us it's the most durable iPhone ever. But I mean, I'm looking at
10:10the phone and I think it qualifies also as a red flag. And then we already know there is just no way
10:19battery life can be good on this phone, right? There's just no way. I've been reviewing phones
10:23for more than a decade and all signs point to it being trash. There was a slide in the keynote today
10:28about how they were still proud to achieve all day battery life. But like, come on, really? I mean,
10:37they still do the thing where they rearrange the components up until the little plateau at the top
10:41to make room for more battery at the bottom. But there is just absolutely not enough room in this
10:46phone for a large battery. And it doesn't appear to be silicon carbon or any sort of a special
10:51ultra high density battery. And Apple also announced it alongside a special dedicated MagSafe battery
10:57accessory just for this phone that adds 3,149 million powers and just barely combined will match the
11:0517 Pro in terms of quoted video playback. So if that doesn't scream red flag, I don't know what to tell you.
11:12It is also eSIM only globally, because there's no room in any version of this phone for a plastic
11:18SIM card. There's also no millimeter wave 5G. And like I said, it's coming in at $1,000,
11:25which is more expensive than the base iPhone, which will have a better camera system and better
11:31battery life and may overheat less. So look, I think there's two ways to look at this phone.
11:38This is either Apple just throwing something new at the wall and seeing if it sticks. Like we just
11:46saw them try, okay, they had the mini phone for like two years and that really didn't sell that
11:50well. So then they moved to the plus and that was also a little bit underwhelming. So now they're
11:55trying that same spot in the lineup for a ultra thin phone and seeing if maybe they can market that
12:00to turn into some more sales. So you can see it as that, or you can see this as a visionary, long time
12:08in the making preview at the future of all phones. Like maybe someday in the future, every phone will be
12:16this thin. And Apple is just now today getting the tech together with the battery and display and modem
12:23and Apple Silicon to make this phone possible. Maybe kind of like how the first MacBook Air
12:29sucked and was underpowered, but then eventually all laptops became that thin. Maybe that's also
12:35what's going to happen to smartphones. And maybe the same way Samsung made the ultra thin S25 Edge.
12:40And then a few months later, they came out with their super thin foldable, the Z Fold 7.
12:44And I felt like the Edge phone was one half of that foldable. Maybe that's also what Apple's doing.
12:49Maybe we're going to see an ultra thin foldable iPhone next year. Maybe. Either way, I do think
12:55it's clear that you probably won't find too many logical reasons to pick up this first gen iPhone
13:02Air. But I do also think that picking it up and holding it is going to convince a lot of people
13:09because it's pretty stunning in person. And it's the same thing I said about the Samsung phone.
13:13It's pretty sick, but only time will tell for that part of the story. Now there were a couple other
13:17announcements today. There were new AirPods Pro 3, which have twice as good ANC as the last gen,
13:23which is crazy. Plus IP57 and heart rate tracking during workouts, all at the same $250 price.
13:29Definitely going to test those. And there's also a new Apple Watch Series 11 now with 5G and possible
13:35hypertension detection. And a slightly new Watch Ultra 3 with thinner bezels, LTPO3, and slightly longer
13:42battery life. I'm going to be testing all this stuff over the next couple of weeks. So get subscribed and
13:46I'll see you in those videos. And shout out to channel sponsor Ridge for being ahead of the game
13:50because while the iPhone Air does lack battery, it does still have MagSafe, which means you're going
13:57to want to pick up a Ridge power bank. I've seen plenty of power banks over my 15 years of reviewing
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14:12Apple devices and a charging pad for your Apple Watch. Pass through charging. So it doubles as a hub
14:18and it also comes in three colors, matte black, matte olive, and I guess perfect for the new iPhone 17
14:24pro color, base camp orange. Ridge also makes a MagSafe card holder that snaps right onto your iPhone
14:29and holds up to three cards. Every Ridge product comes with a lifetime warranty and a 99 day risk-free
14:34trial. So get one today and head over to ridge.com slash mkbhd for 10% off. Thanks for watching.
14:39See you guys very soon in the next videos. Peace.
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