iPhone 17 Review: No Asterisks!

Summary

MKBHD delivers a glowing review of the iPhone 17, calling it the best base iPhone since Apple introduced the Pro lineup. The review opens with a comedic skit at “Honesty Wireless” where even a lottery winner is advised to buy the standard iPhone 17 over the Pro model. The core thesis: the iPhone 17 is finally a “straight up good deal” with no asterisks or caveats. Apple has added features previously reserved for Pro models - including a 120Hz variable refresh rate display, an innovative square selfie camera that automatically switches between horizontal and vertical crops, improved battery life, and doubled base storage to 256GB. At $800 (vs the Pixel 10’s $900 for equivalent storage), MKBHD argues the iPhone 17 offers better value while making the $300 premium for the Pro harder to justify for most users.

Highlights

”Best Base iPhone Since Pro Lineup”

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“There’s this funny thing that happens when the cheapest phone in a lineup of phones is a really good deal. It makes all of the more expensive versions feel like worse deals because they are. And this is the best base iPhone since they added the Pro to the lineup. And I don’t think it’s particularly close.” — Marques Brownlee, 2:18

”Finally Saying Goodbye to the $800 60Hz iPhone”

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“So, not only can we finally say goodbye to the $800 60 Hz iPhone, but it also now enables things like the always on display if you’re into that.” — Marques Brownlee, 3:05

”The Selfie Camera Everyone Should Copy”

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“So this new selfie camera is across all the new iPhones in the lineup, the base, the Air, and the Pros. I think it’s kind of genius and I think everyone should copy it and I think they probably will.” — Marques Brownlee, 5:10

”No Asterisks, No Ifs, Ands, or Buts”

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“The new iPhone 17 is just a straight up good deal now. No asterisks, no ifs, ands, or buts, just this phone is actually a good deal.” — Marques Brownlee, 6:30

”Camera Control Button Giving 3D Touch Vibes”

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“It’s giving me 3D Touch vibes. Like, I actually wouldn’t be totally shocked if it quietly disappeared in 2 years. I kind of hope it doesn’t.” — Marques Brownlee, 9:17

Key Points

• 2:18 - When the cheapest phone in a lineup is a really good deal, it makes the more expensive versions feel like worse deals
• 2:33 - This is the best base iPhone since they added the Pro to the lineup
• 3:05 - Display now has 3000 nits brightness and 120Hz variable refresh rate (1Hz to 120Hz)
• 3:18 - Finally saying goodbye to the $800 60Hz iPhone; enables always-on display
• 3:56 - New 24MP square selfie camera allows 18MP horizontal or vertical crops automatically
• 4:29 - Group selfies automatically switch to horizontal orientation without rotating phone
• 4:44 - Selfie quality noticeably better than even last year’s 16 Pro
• 4:51 - Extra sensor area enables better video stabilization for walk-and-talk videos
• 5:23 - Better display, better selfie camera, and better battery - the trio of obvious improvements
• 5:31 - Every new iPhone this year has a physically larger battery than previous year
• 5:55 - 5 hours of screen-on time; charges noticeably faster
• 6:01 - Powered by new A19 chip - one of the most powerful single-core chips on the planet
• 6:12 - Base storage doubled from 128GB to 256GB, effectively making phone feel $100 cheaper
• 6:30 - iPhone 17 is a “straight up good deal now - no asterisks, no ifs, ands, or buts”
• 6:47 - Pixel 10 base 256GB is $900; iPhone 17 beats it on screen, cameras, battery, and chip for $100 less
• 7:27 - Minor complaint: Can’t record full square sensor with stock camera app
• 7:52 - New dual capture feature lets you shoot front and back cameras simultaneously
• 8:18 - USB 2.0 data transfer speeds still slow
• 8:30 - No telephoto camera in a price bracket where competitors still have them
• 8:36 - No real improvements to Apple Intelligence in the last couple months
• 8:53 - Design unchanged from iPhone 16; still matte finish, IP68 water resistant
• 9:08 - Camera control button still present; Apple suspiciously quiet about it (3D Touch vibes)
• 9:51 - Why spend $300 extra for Pro? You get vapor chamber and telephoto camera
• 10:20 - Pro features: better GPU, vapor chamber for thermal performance, LiDAR for autofocus, telephoto, ProRes RAW
• 11:00 - Very few convincing reasons to spend extra $300 on Pro for most people
• 11:09 - “This is the phone most people should get”

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Surprising Quotes

“You know, there’s this funny thing that happens when the cheapest phone in a lineup of phones is a really good deal. It makes all of the more expensive versions feel like worse deals because they are.”

• 2:18

“This is the best base iPhone since they added the Pro to the lineup. And I don’t think it’s particularly close.”

• 2:33

“The new iPhone 17 is just a straight up good deal now. No asterisks, no ifs, ands, or buts, just this phone is actually a good deal.”

• 6:30

“This base iPhone has a better screen, a better main camera, a better selfie camera, a better battery life, and a way more powerful chip with more headroom, and just one less telephoto camera for a hundred bucks less than the equivalent Pixel. That’s kind of crazy.”

• 6:50

“It’s giving me 3D Touch vibes. Like, I actually wouldn’t be totally shocked if it quietly disappeared in 2 years.”

• On the camera control button, 9:17

“The Pro phones are actually appropriately named because the things you’re getting out of those phones now for spending that extra money are a little smaller things that really only pros are going to notice or need.”

• 10:07

Full Transcript

0:00 Hey, hey, welcome to Honesty Wireless. World’s most honest salesman here. How can I help you look familiar? You are You’re the guy who bought the iPhone 16, aren’t you? Yep, that was me. Told you not to do it. You did. You sure did.

0:24 Yeah. So, what brings you back? Need more perfectly honest advice? Well, I actually have good news and bad news. So, bad news is uh I I broke the 16E. I sat on it. It’s a goner. Don’t worry about it. Cuz the good news is I won the lottery. Oh. Oh. Oh my god.

0:44 Yeah. Pretty sick. Now, keep it on the DL. You know, I’m not telling anybody, but I’m telling you because I can now buy whatever phone I want. Money, no object. Oh, okay. Yeah, great. Money, no object. Yeah, it’s happening. I’m the dream customer for you right now. I will literally buy whatever phone you tell me to. Just I want one of the iPhones. So, what’s it Okay. Wow.

1:17 Yeah. So, you you should order an iPhone Not the 17 Pro. Nope. Just 17. So, so not the pro. Not the pro. No, I don’t think you’re understanding. I can spend all the money. I just I I’ll do whatever. Like, I just want the best one for me.

1:35 I hear that. But you want the best purchase and you still like higher refresh rate and you still want Mag Safe. Yeah. And you’re coming from a 16e. Yeah. All true. But you don’t want people to know you won the lottery. Also true.

1:50 Okay. So, I mean, you could spend $2,000 on a brand new two TB 17 Pro Max in orange, but you could also just buy the 17 and use it the exact same way that you were going to. That’s Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. Uh, check out’s right over here.

2:18 You know, there’s this funny thing that happens when the cheapest phone in a lineup of phones is a really good deal. It makes all of the more expensive versions feel like worse deals because they are. And this is the best base iPhone since they added the Pro to the lineup. And I don’t think it’s particularly close.

2:35 Now, any smart company selling both a premium phone and a cheaper phone will do everything in their power to keep them as not overlapping as possible, which means there’s always been one or two major features that the Pro has that it feels like the nonpros would never get. But this year, they just went ahead and added all the stuff we thought they should. And they didn’t halfass that stuff either.

3:03 So, first and foremost, they finally gave it a top tier display. It’s brighter up to 3000 nits. It looks great outdoors. And most importantly, it finally has a variable refresh rate up to 120 Hz, which I love, and down to one hertz minimum for efficiency. So, not only can we finally say goodbye to the $800 60 Hz iPhone, but it also now enables things like the always on display if you’re into that.

3:27 And it’s also added PWM dimming. It may be buried in the accessibility settings, but that’s a welcome addition, too. So, this is a super responsive, very bright, high-quality display with really thin bezels. Dare I say a flagship quality display finally. This screen is also protected by the new ceramic shield 2.

3:44 But then buried in this display up in this little cutout that hasn’t changed in size is something genuinely new and interesting to the point where I think basically everyone else should copy it. It’s the new selfie camera. Apple is calling it center stage, which I guess makes sense, but also the rest of their center stage cameras kind of sucks. I kind of wish they didn’t use that.

4:06 But either way, essentially, Apple’s using a huge new 24 megapixel square selfie camera. So, when you go to take a selfie, you can take either an 18 megapixel horizontal crop or an 18 megapixel vertical crop. And it makes so much sense. It’s like you go in to take a normal vertical selfie and it looks exactly the way you expect it to, but if a bunch of other people enter the frame and it becomes clear you’re taking a group selfie, it automatically switches to a horizontal selfie without you having to rotate the phone at all.

4:38 You can obviously do this manually if you want to, but that’s already awesome. And the actual quality of the selfies are also top-notch. I think noticeably better than even the best from last year’s 16 Pro.

4:50 Another nice benefit though is selfie videos. Since there’s way more sensor around the outside of the frame you’re using, it can use that extra information for way better stabilization. And so even without any sort of action mode or special settings being turned on, the walk and talk videos I took from the selfie camera also look much smoother thanks to the EIS having all that extra information to play with.

5:10 So this new selfie camera is across all the new iPhones in the lineup, the base, the Air, and the Pros. I think it’s kind of genius and I think everyone should copy it and I think they probably will.

5:23 So, better display, better selfie camera, and then to round out the trio of obvious improvements that everyone will like on a new phone, better battery. And again, actually, every new iPhone this year has a physically larger battery than the previous year.

5:35 The base iPhone didn’t get as much of a capacity jump as the Pro phones did, but it did also just get that more efficient variable refresh rate display instead of being locked at 60 Hz all the time. So yeah, you can save battery by dropping down to one hertz for always on display and for not scrolling, just looking at photos and things like that.

5:51 So it is actually getting a meaningfully longer battery life than the last gen. Nothing drastic, but I love having 5 hours of screen on time. And it charges noticeably faster, too.

6:01 And the whole thing, it’s all powered by the new A19 chip, which isn’t the Pro, but it’s still literally one of the most powerful single core chips on the planet right now and has a ton of headroom for the future.

6:12 But then the icing on the cake is that they doubled the base storage from 128 to 256 gigs, which that that’s where all the price comparisons start coming in because if you were going to upgrade storage tiers anyway, that makes every model of the phone feel like a 100 bucks cheaper.

6:29 So dare I say, the new iPhone 17 is just a straight up good deal now. No asterisks, no ifs, ands, or buts, just this phone is actually a good deal.

6:40 Like, hear me out. The Pixel is usually considered a pretty good value, right? This year, the Pixel 10 base, 256 gigs, is $900. So, that means this base iPhone has a better screen, a better main camera, a better selfie camera, a better battery life, and a way more powerful chip with more headroom, and and just one less telephoto camera for a hundred bucks less than the equivalent Pixel. That’s kind of crazy. It’s now this like rock solid default phone for most people.

7:15 So, it’s great, but it’s not perfect. No phone’s perfect. It just definitely feels a lot more like the complaints that I have about this phone are more minor where previous generations there were major missing features.

7:27 So, like the new selfie camera, I really want to be able to record the whole square sensor if I want to, but you can’t, at least with the stock camera app. I think it may be possible with some third party apps in the future, but you would think if Apple’s working on a foldable, which will most likely have a large squareish display on the inside, maybe it wouldn’t be insane to let people shoot big square selfies. Something to think about.

7:52 Or there’s also this new dual capture feature in the camera, which lets you shoot out front and back cameras at the same time. And it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but Apple adds this nice little motion blur when you move the front camera feed around the frame, which is cool. Looks smooth, but once you record, it’s baked in.

8:08 And I think it would have been way more cool if you could continue to move that camera feed around after you record. Like maybe you realize you’re blocking an important part of the frame or something, but you can’t.

8:18 Also, USB 2.0 data transfer speeds are still sad for moving big files off of this phone, but since you can’t shoot ProRes videos to the base iPhone, I suppose you probably aren’t doing that nearly as often with this device.

8:30 And no telephoto camera in a price bracket where a lot of phones do actually still have telephoto cameras, which can be very useful.

8:36 And maybe most glaringly obviously, no real improvements to Apple Intelligence still in the last couple months for any of the iPhones.

8:43 But that’s really about it. And a few of those things can be updated with software updates eventually if they want to get to that stuff. But yeah, most of my complaints with the iPhone 17 are minor.

8:53 The design obviously really didn’t change at all since the 16, which means it’s still matte all the way around the back and the sides, which I like. It’s still IP68, water and dust resistant. It also still rocks a bit on a table because of the corner cameras.

9:08 And it still has the camera control button, which Apple was suspiciously quiet about in all of their keynotes and presentations and videos involving the camera. It’s giving me 3D Touch vibes. Like, I actually wouldn’t be totally shocked if it quietly disappeared in 2 years. I kind of hope it doesn’t.

9:25 But yeah, there are also new colors, and it’s one of the nicest lineups as far as colors we’ve seen in a bit.

9:31 But anyway, the effect that I talked about earlier in the video is even more true now than ever before, which is when the base phones in a lineup of phones is really good, when it’s a really good deal, it makes the pros, the more expensive ones, harder to justify. And that’s a problem other smartphones have had to deal with in the past.

9:51 And that’s never been more true about the iPhones. This 17 is really good. Why would you spend $300 extra dollars for a Pro? What are you getting out of that? You get the vapor chamber and the telephoto camera.

10:01 And the more I thought about it, the more I think it actually means the Pro phones are actually appropriately named because the things you’re getting out of those phones now for spending that extra money are a little smaller things that really only pros are going to notice or need.

10:20 Like the Pro chip with the better GPU and improved sustained thermal performance thanks to a vapor chamber. Most regular use of a smartphone is bursty and very on and off. But, you know, the pros might be gaming for a while or recording long video sessions.

10:37 And the Pros also have a LiDAR emitter for autofocus and a telephoto camera and just generally higher quality cameras and more manual and high-touch camera features like ProRes RAW video stuff that regular people aren’t touching.

10:52 So outside of that, if you’re not literally a pro, if you’re not doing a bunch of gaming or a bunch of long video captures, then there are very few convincing reasons to spend the extra $300 on the Pro phone. People will still do it, but I think this is the phone most people should get.

11:11 Yeah, I’m okay with that. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.