Apple’s newest iPhone 17 models provide a case study in the value of larger camera sensors and more advanced chips, even though the biggest buzz will be around the brand new thinner, lighter iPhone 17 Air, priced at $999.
“The new iPhone 17 lineup represents the biggest design overhaul since the iPhone X,” which will provide users with a “strong reason to upgrade,” said Franciso Jeronimo, a vice president at IDC. iPhone X debuted in 2017, ten years after the first iPhone.
The iPhone 17 Air replaces the discontinued iPhone Plus variant of recent launches and features a 6.5-inch display with a 48 MP Main Fusion camera (enabling four lenses) and the A19 Pro Chip. It is 2.31 mm thinner than the iPhone 17 and even thinner than the Samsung S25 Edge (which sold a million units in the second quarter). Jeronimo said Apple is betting on the market appeal of industrial design in seeking a market segment that desires aesthetics, in-hand comfort and portability over maximum camera capabilities.
Even so, the front camera, dubbed Center Stage, features a square camera sensor to offer a wide field of view with 18 MP pictures. Users will not have to rotate the iPhone to take a landscape selfie.
The A19 Pro chip has a 6-core CPU, the fastest of any smartphone, according to Apple. There is also a 5-core GPU, with neural accelerators built into each GPU core, bringing up to 3X the peak GPU compute over the previous generation. Also, Apple uses a wireless networking chip called N1 that Apple designed to enable Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread and to improve performance with personal hotspot and AirDrop features. A new cellular modem designed by Apple is the C1X , designed to operate faster and use 30% less energy that the modem in iPhone 16 Pro. All three chips—the A19 Pro, N1 and C1X-- are Apple designed, making iPhone Air “the most power-efficient iPhone ever made,” Apple said in a press release.
Among the other models, the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max will have three rear lenses, each with 48 MP sensors. The front-facing camera is getting a 24 MP sensor, a jump from the 12 MP sensors of prior generations.
More megapixels in sensors means greater flexibility in shooting in all types of environments.
The A19 chip with advanced AI capabilities is also in the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max. With all its capabilities, it is expected to generate more heat than earlier chips and that is why Apple chose to make the phone frame out of aluminum instead of titanium of earlier generations, Jeronimo said. “This shift from titanium to aluminum is essential for maintaining peak performance during intensive tasks like gaming or ProRes video recording,” Jeronimo added. Softer aluminum is better at absorbing and dissipating impact energy when compared to titanium, he added.
The A19 is expected to support Apple Intelligence capabilities in iOS 26, first introduced June 9, 2025.
Sensors for heart rate, more in AirPods, Watch
Sensors in other Apple products include a custom photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor in the new AirPods Pro 3 to measure heart rate. It shines invisible infrared light pulsed at 256 times per second to measure light absorption in blood flow in a user’s ear. Apple uses sensor fusion from AirPods Pro accelerometers, gyroscope, GPS and a new on-device AI model on iPhone to track heart rate and calories burned.
Apple Watch 11 includes an optical heart sensor to track data over 30 day periods that is used to provide insights about hypertension. Apple Watch also has sensor to capture sleep data like heart rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen and respiratory rate.