The iPhone 17 Event: Less Awe, More Unsexy & That’s A Good Thing

As you know, for the first time since the iPhone era began, I didn’t attend the iPhone launch event. I am gutted that I didn’t get to see the new iPhone 17 devices in person. Still, I couldn’t help myself. I tweeted a bit about the event whilewatching the stream. What can I say? I still like to believe that I am the grand poohbah of the peanut gallery around Apple events. 

And when the dust settled and I had some time during the evening, I started to put together my thoughts about the event. Apple’s iPhone 17 event had only one true awe — the massive capabilities of the team behind Apple Silicon and their counterparts in engineering. 

Yes, we all know that these events are carefully staged PR shows, like fashion week for tech. Yes, they reflect the painful reality of the twilight of the smartphone era. Yes, we know that the rectangular slab that has revolutionized our lives since 2007 is on its final countdown, just like those 12-keypad phones before it.

We’re watching history rhyme — better cameras, longer battery life, new colors, thinner profiles. As someone who has covered smartphones since the concept first emerged from Nokia’s labs, the déjà vu is almost painful. (Nokia nerds, share a comment in the section below.)

I get it. Enduring design doesn’t need constant reinvention, and Apple doesn’t want to mess with a winning formula. It has worked for Porsche, and it has so far worked for Apple. You can see that engineering and chip skills can only mask the need for real reinvention for so long. The iPhone 17 lineup — with its Air, standard, Pro, and Pro Max variants — is Apple doing what it does best: polishing a form factor that has plateaued.

To argue with my own criticisms, I am also the first to appreciate the real innovation happening under the hood. That new A19 Pro chip with its desktop-class GPU capabilities, the vapor chamber cooling system borrowed from desktop engineering, the Ceramic Shield that’s now 50% tougher? This isn’t sexy stuff you can Instagram, but it’s the engineering excellence that keeps Apple ahead, for now at least, when it comes to hardware.

Apple Silicon is the Real MVP

The silicon team at Apple remains the pointy end of the spear. The A19 Pro, with its 6-core CPU and 6-core GPU featuring built-in Neural Accelerators, delivers up to 40% better sustained performance than the A18 Pro. This isn’t just another chip — it’s the foundation that makes everything else possible on the iPhone 17.

As I said on Twitter, “Apple Silicon keeping Apple relevant. Let just apps enjoy this ‘edge AI’ power. Let others build the AI. You focus on devices and chips, Apple.” Desktop-level GPU on a phone? Check. 35% better energy efficiency? Check. The computational power to run on-device AI without burning through your battery? Check and mate.

Mad science and crazy cutting-edge engineering are Apple’s actual moat. This is a company that knows how to build things well. But AI and internet software are a difficult beast for them to tame, and it’s not because they don’t have the talent. It’s because their DNA is hardware-first engineering and design. Every time I use my Vision Pro, I can’t believe that it is actually a product on the market. 

The new iPhone 17 Pro only proves that they are the only company that will spend hundreds of millions to build a new cooling gizmo for the phone.

The new internal architecture features an Apple-designed vapor chamber to enhance heat dissipation and performance. Deionized water is sealed inside the vapor chamber, which is laser-welded into the aluminum chassis to move heat away from the powerful A19 Pro, allowing it to operate at even higher performance levels. The heat is carried into the forged aluminum unibody, where it is distributed evenly through the system, managing power and surface temperatures

Most companies do vaporware. Apple does vapor chambers. 

Apple makes gigatons of money. But then it spends it well. Who else is doing this kind of wizardry in hardware at present? No one with Android margins. While others scramble to stuff Qualcomm or MediaTek chips into their devices, Apple’s vertical integration lets them build silicon that’s perfectly matched to their software ambitions. That new N1 wireless chip enabling Wi-Fi 7 and Thread? The C1X modem that’s 30% more efficient? These aren’t headline features, but they’re what make the iPhone experience feel seamless.

Battery Is The Revolution

Here’s what really impressed me but won’t make headlines: the iPhone 17 Pro Max now delivers up to 39 hours of video playback — up from 29 hours last year. That’s not just a spec bump; it’s a fundamental rethinking of power management. The combination of that vapor chamber cooling (which lets the A19 Pro run more efficiently), the larger battery made possible by the unibody design, and iOS 26’s Adaptive Power Mode that learns your usage patterns — this is systems-level engineering at its finest.

I was there for the first iPhone launch in 2007. The 1,400 milliamp-hour (mAh) battery was puny, no matter what Steve Jobs said. It was always a race from one charging outpost to another. Today, the new pretty thing, the iPhone Air can pack an estimated 3,500-3,800 mAh into an impossibly thin design and deliver all-day battery life. The iPhone of 2007 worked on 2G. Today, we’re streaming videos on 5G.

Battery is the real improvement story here. I interviewed some senior executives and chip designers at the company a few years ago, and they pointed out that because Apple makes its own chips, its own OS, and knows how its customers use the phone, it can build smarts into its products to squeeze a proverbial drop of blood from a proverbial stone, aka the battery. Looking beyond the PR, this is Apple saying that different models need different trade-offs and different engineering.

What we’re seeing is Apple solving the battery problem not through some breakthrough in battery chemistry (that’s still years away), but through obsessive optimization of every other component. The new C1X modem alone contributes to 30% better power efficiency. This kind of invisible innovation — where hundreds of small improvements compound into meaningful gains — is exactly what Apple does best and what its competitors struggle to match.

The Fully Frontal Camera

After 500 billion selfies (Apple’s count, not mine), they finally acknowledged what we all knew: the front camera is the real camera for most people.

The square sensor design on the iPhone 17 Air and the 18-megapixel Center Stage front camera across the lineup makesme wonder what took them so long. I mean, if anything, TikTok shows the world is now front camera first. Chinese phone makers know this well. From using them as tools for makeup or AI shopping, they have taken the lessons of TikTok (or its equivalent) and made front cameras not only an art form but some kind of voodoo. I think Apple has whiffed on this, but hopefully, this is the start of a new journey for them. Yes, I am excited.

The single-lens aesthetic on the Air is clean, purposeful, almost philosophical in its simplicity. With its 48MP Fusion camera system, it gives users the equivalent of four lenses – the main 28mm and 35mm focal lengths, plus an optical-quality 2x Telephoto that leverages the Photonic Engine for better details and color. This reminds me of the old Lytro camera and its computational photography capabilities. If memory serves me right, Apple bought their IP assets. 

What left me gobsmacked was that they packed all that into what Apple is calling “Camera Plateau.” Not a great name, but still a great technical achievement to really put all the brains of the phone into that small slice. Yes, I get emotional about such boring nerdy stuff. So sue me. 

Meanwhile, the Pro models with their 48MP sensors and that 8x optical zoom are doing what Apple does best: making pro-level photography accessible to amateurs who will never use half the features but love knowing they’re there.

iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max feature Appleʼs best-ever camera systems with higher-resolution sensors front and back — equivalent to having eight pro lenses in a userʼs pocket. Three 48MP Fusion cameras capture sharper and more detailed images. A new 48MP Telephoto camera has a next-generation tetraprism design with a sensor that is 56 percent larger than the previous generation to improve sharpness in bright light and bring more detail to darker shots. The new 4x optical zoom at 100mm offers a classic lens for portraiture, while the 8x optical zoom at 200mm, the longest ever on iPhone, provides longer reach and more creative choice. 

I can’t wait to put this new iPhone to use.

What irritates me? Apple’s insistence on showcasing these cameras with “pro photographers.” Give me real people taking real photos in real situations. I’ve dragged my iPhone to the ends of the earth and made magic with it, and I’m barely competent with a camera. Don’t they get that real people buy the phones for the cameras? The pros just want freebies and move on to the next Pixel or whatever.

Look Ma, No AI 

Notice what Apple didn’t do? They didn’t spend the entire event breathlessly hyping “AI” like every other tech company. This is good, Apple: do what you know best. Let others pioneer the technology, then mainstream it when it’s ready for normal humans. 

And that is why the company needs to go back to its old playbook. Just as Apple lets Google handle search and pays them for it, why not let the big players in AI do their thing? Just protect our identity, data, and privacy, and act as an intermediary between us and the AI companies. Charge them a premium. Trust me, they would want access to all your customers.

My Final Word

Here’s what this event really told us:

1. Orange iPhone Pro — we’ve come a long way from 2007’s single color option.
2. The engineering team remains “G” (as we old-timers say) — that vapor chamber cooling is legitimately impressive.
3. Apple Silicon continues to be the engine that matters — everything interesting flows from chip innovation.
4. Minimal AI talk was smart — under-promise, over-deliver.
5. The iPhone Air will sell like hotcakes — thin and light always wins.
6. Apple’s renewed focus on accessories — Apple is introducing new TechWoven cases, Crossbody Straps, and MagSafe external batteries. My bet is that they need to boost the revenue stream with sales of accessories, insteadof letting third-party accessory makers walk off into the sunset. 
7. Which iPhone 17 will I buy? — I’m sticking with the Pro Max. I will go for the Blue model. I am a “blue” kinda guy. Just peek at my collection of blue inks. It’s a form factor I like and feel gives me everything I need.

The smartphone as we know it may have about five years left in this form factor. No one, including Apple, wants to upset the apple cart (pun intended). But while everyone else is trying to figure out what comes next, Apple is pushing the current paradigm as far as engineering allows. That’s not sexy, but it’s smart.

It’s not revolutionary, but it is excellent engineering. And in a world where everyone else is chasing AI chatbots and foldable gimmicks, there’s something reassuring about Apple’s relentless focus on making the rectangle in your pocket a little bit better year after year.

Even if that rectangle is fundamentally the same shape it’s been since 2007. Sort of like a Porsche from the 1950s looks vaguely like the latest EV rolling off their factory floor. 

And yet, I am craving something new. Not a foldable phone. Not a skinnier phone. But an un-phone that sparks a new revolution, like the iPhone did by reimagining the phone. I want Apple’s chip, engineering, and design teams to dream up a new future and show the world that it is doable, without Steve Jobs and without Jony Ive’s baritone saying — “aluminum.”