Apple truly hit it out of the park with the base iPhone 17, making it one of the companies best value iPhone models in quite some time. With how many incredible upgrades there are on iPhone 17, it actually makes a comparison to last year’s iPhone 16 Pro model more interesting than you’d expect.
Displays
As mentioned in the headline, these two phones both have incredibly similar displays.
iPhone 17 and iPhone 16 Pro both offer 6.3-inch OLED displays with ProMotion, support for an Always-On Display, 1000 nits of typical max brightness, and 1600 nits when viewing HDR content. They also offer the same resolution and contrast ratio.
Where they differ slightly is in outdoor peak brightness. iPhone 16 Pro maxes out at 2000 nits, whereas iPhone 17 can go up to 3000 nits. Outside of that spec, they’re more or less the same display – which is incredible for a base model iPhone.
Chipsets
iPhone 16 Pro offers the A18 Pro chipset, whereas iPhone 17 offers the A19 chipset. Apple doesn’t publish direct comparison numbers for year over year silicon improvements very often, but expect modest gains in the CPU department. Both of these phones have 8GB of memory, and will support the full array of Apple Intelligence capabilities.
The bigger difference is in the GPU department. While the A18 Pro has a 6-core GPU (vs 5 cores on A19), the A19’s GPU cores have built in neural accelerators, which could potentially come in handy later down the road.
iPhone 17 also has the N1 chip, Apple’s first in-house Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread chipset.
Quality of life
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