The iPhone 17

Last year’s iPhone 16 Pro bumped the screen sizes from 6.1 and 6.7 inches to 6.3 and 6.9 inches. This year’s iPhone 17 will allegedly get a 6.3-inch screen with a high-refresh-rate ProMotion panel, but the iPhone Plus is said to be going away. Credit: Apple

Apple’s vanilla one-size-fits-most iPhone is always the centerpiece of the lineup, and this year’s iteration is expected to bring the typical batch of gradual iterative upgrades.

The screen will supposedly be the biggest beneficiary, upgrading from 6.1 inches to 6.3 inches (the same size as the current iPhone 16 Pro) and adding a high-refresh-rate ProMotion screen that has typically been reserved for the Pro phones. Apple is always careful not to add too many “Pro”-level features to the entry-level iPhones, but this one is probably overdue—even less-expensive Android phones like the Pixel 9a ship often ship with 90 Hz or 120 Hz screens at this point. It’s not clear whether that will also enable the always-on display feature that has also historically been exclusive to the iPhone Pro, but the fluidity upgrade will be nice regardless.

Aside from that, there aren’t many specific improvements we’ve seen reported on, but there are plenty we can comfortably guess at. Improved front- and rear-facing cameras and a new Apple A19-series chip with at least the 8GB of RAM needed to support Apple Intelligence are both pretty safe bets.

But there’s one thing we supposedly won’t get, which is a new large-sized iPhone Plus. That brings us to our next rumor.

The “iPhone Air”
For the last few years, every new iPhone launch has actually brought us four iPhones—a regular iPhone in two different sizes and an iPhone Pro with a better camera, better screen, faster chip, and other improvements in a regular size and a large size.

It’s the second size of the regular iPhone that has apparently given Apple some trouble. It made a couple of generations of “iPhone mini,” an attempt to address a small-but-vocal contingent of Phones Are Just Too Big These Days people that apparently didn’t sell well enough to continue making. That was replaced by the iPhone Plus, aimed at people who wanted a bigger screen but who weren’t ready to pay for an iPhone Pro Max.

The Plus phones at least gave the iPhone lineup a nice symmetry—two tiers of phone, with a regular one and a big one at each tier—but rumors suggest that the Plus phone is also going away this year. Like the iPhone mini before it, it apparently just wasn’t selling well enough to be worth the continued effort.

That brings us to this year’s fourth iPhone: Apple is allegedly planning to release an “iPhone Air,” which will weigh less than the regular iPhone and is said to be 5.5 or 6 mm thick, depending on who you ask (the iPhone 16 is 7.8 mm).

A 6.3-inch ProMotion display and A19-series chip are also expected to be a part of the iPhone Air, but rather than try to squeeze every feature of the iPhone 17 into a thinner phone, it sounds like the iPhone 17 Air will cater to people who are willing to give a few things up in the interest of getting a thinner and lighter device. It will reportedly have worse battery life than the regular iPhone and just a single-lens camera setup (though the 48MP sensors Apple has switched to in recent iPhones do make it easier to “fake” optical zoom features than it used to be).

We don’t know anything about the pricing for any of these phones, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggests that the iPhone Air will be positioned between the regular iPhone and the iPhone Pro—more like the iPad lineup, where the Air is the mid-tier choice, and less like the Mac, where the Air is the entry-level laptop.

iPhone 17 Pro
Apple’s Pro iPhones are generally “the regular iPhone, but more,” and sometimes they’re “what all iPhones will look like in a couple of years, but available right now for people who will pay more for it.” The new ones seem set to continue in that vein.

The most radical change will apparently be on the back—Apple is said to be switching to an even larger camera array that stretches across the entire top-rear section of the phone, an arrangement you’ll occasionally see in some high-end Android phones (Google’s Pixel 10 is one). That larger camera bump will likely enable a few upgrades, including a switch from a 12MP sensor for the telephoto zoom lens to a 48MP sensor. And it will also be part of a more comprehensive metal-and-glass body that’s more of a departure from the glass-backed-slab design Apple has been using since the iPhone 12.

A 48MP telephoto sensor could increase the amount of pseudo-optical-zoom that the iPhone can offer. The main iPhones will condense a 48MP photo down to 12MP when you’re in the regular shooting mode, binning pixels to improve image quality. For zoomed-in photos, it can just take a 12MP section out of the middle of the 48MP image—you lose the benefit of pixel binning, but you’re still getting a “native resolution” photo without blurry digital zoom. With a better sensor, Apple could do exactly the same thing with the telephoto lens.

Apple reportedly isn’t planning any changes to screen size this year—still 6.3 inches for the regular Pro and 6.9 inches for the Max. But they are said to be getting new “A19 Pro” series chips that are superior to the regular A19 processors (though in what way, exactly, we don’t yet know). But it could possibly shrink the amount of screen space dedicated to the Dynamic Island.