IPhone

apple-iphone-17-pro-review:-come-for-the-camera,-stay-for-the-battery

Apple iPhone 17 Pro review: Come for the camera, stay for the battery

Apple, Features, IPhone, iphone 17, iPhone 17 Air, iphone 17 pro, Tech / /

a weird-looking phone for taking pretty pictures

If your iPhone is your main or only camera, the iPhone 17 Pro is for you.

The iPhone 17 Pro’s excellent camera is the best reason to buy it instead of the regular iPhone 17. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone 17 Pro’s excellent camera is the best reason to buy it instead of the regular iPhone 17. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple’s “Pro” iPhones usually look and feel a lot like the regular ones, just with some added features stacked on top. They’ve historically had better screens and more flexible cameras, and there has always been a Max option for people who really wanted to blur the lines between a big phone and a small tablet (Apple’s commitment to the cheaper “iPhone Plus” idea has been less steadfast). But the qualitative experience of holding and using one wasn’t all that different compared to the basic aluminum iPhone.

This year’s iPhone 17 Pro looks and feels like more of a departure from the basic iPhone, thanks to a new design that prioritizes function over form. It’s as though Apple anticipated the main complaints about the iPhone Air—why would I want a phone with worse battery and fewer cameras, why don’t they just make the phone thicker so they can fit in more things—and made a version of the iPhone that they could point to and say, “We already make that phone—it’s that one over there.”

Because the regular iPhone 17 is so good, and because it uses the same 6.3-inch OLED ProMotion screen, I think the iPhone 17 Pro is playing to a narrower audience than usual this year. But Apple’s changes and additions are also tailor-made to serve that audience. In other words, fewer people even need to consider the iPhone Pro this time around, but there’s a lot to like here for actual “pros” and people who demand a lot from their phones.

Design

The iPhone 17 drops the titanium frame of the iPhone 15 and 16 Pro in favor of a return to aluminum. But it’s no longer the aluminum-framed glass-sandwich design that the iPhone 17 still uses; it’s a reformulated “aluminum unibody” design that also protects a substantial portion of the phone’s back. It’s the most metal we’ve seen on the back of the iPhone since 2016’s iPhone 7.

But remember that part of the reason the 2017 iPhone 8 and iPhone X switched to the glass sandwich design was wireless charging. The aluminum iPhones always featured some kind of cutouts or gaps in the aluminum to allow Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular signals through. But the addition of wireless charging to the iPhone meant that a substantial portion of the phone’s back now needed to be permeable by wireless signals, and the solution to that problem was simply to embrace it with a full sheet of glass.

The iPhone 17 Pro returns to the cutout approach, and while it might be functional, it leaves me pretty cold, aesthetically. Small stripes on the sides of the phone and running all the way around the “camera plateau” provide gaps between the metal parts so that you can’t mess with your cellular reception by holding the phone wrong; on US versions of the phone with support for mmWave 5G, there’s another long ovular cutout on the top of the phone to allow those signals to pass through.

But the largest and most obvious is the sheet of glass on the back that Apple needed to add to make wireless charging work. The aluminum, the cell signal cutouts, and this sheet of glass are all different shades of the phone’s base color (it’s least noticeable on the Deep Blue phone and most noticeable on the orange one).

The result is something that looks sort of unfinished and prototype-y. There are definitely people who will like or even prefer this aesthetic, which makes it clearer that this piece of technology is a piece of technology rather than trying to hide it—the enduring popularity of clear plastic electronics is a testament to this. But it does feel like a collection of design decisions that Apple was forced into by physics rather than choices it wanted to make.

That also extends to the camera plateau area, a reimagining of the old iPhone camera bump that extends all the way across the top of the phone. It’s a bit less slick-looking than the one on the iPhone Air because of the multiple lenses. And because the camera bumps are still additional protrusions on top of the plateau, the phone wobbles when it’s resting flat on a table instead of resting on the plateau in a way that stabilizes the phone.

Finally, there’s the weight of the phone, which isn’t breaking records but is a step back from a substantial weight reduction that Apple was using as a first-sentence-of-the-press-release selling point just two years ago. The iPhone 17 Pro weighs the same amount as the iPhone 14 Pro, and it has a noticeable heft to it that the iPhone Air (say) does not have. You’ll definitely notice if (like me) your current phone is an iPhone 15 Pro.

Apple sent me one of its $59 “TechWoven” cases with the iPhone 17 Pro, and it solved a lot of what I didn’t like about the design—the inconsistent materials and colors everywhere, and the bump-on-a-bump camera. There’s still a bump on the top, but at least the aperture of a case evens it out so that your phone isn’t tilted by the plateau and wobbling because of the bump.

I liked Apple’s TechWoven case for the iPhone Pro, partly because it papered over some of the things I don’t love about the design. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The original FineWoven cases were (rightly) panned for how quickly and easily they scratched, but the TechWoven case might be my favorite Apple-designed phone case of the ones I’ve used. It doesn’t have the weird soft lint-magnet feel of some of the silicone cases, FineWoven’s worst problems seem solved, and the texture on the sides of the case provides a reassuring grippiness. My main issue is that the opening for the USB-C port on the bottom is relatively narrow. Apple’s cables will fit fine, but I had a few older or thicker USB-C connectors that didn’t.

This isn’t a case review, but I bring it up mainly to say that I stand by my initial assessment of the Pro’s function-over-form design: I am happy I put it in a case, and I think you will be, too, whichever case you choose (when buying for myself or family members, I have defaulted to Smartish cases for years, but your mileage may vary).

On “Scratchgate”

Early reports from Apple’s retail stores indicated that the iPhone 17 Pro’s design was more susceptible to scratches than past iPhones and that some seemed to be showing marks from as simple and routine an activity as connecting and disconnecting a MagSafe charging pad.

Apple says the marks left by its in-store MagSafe chargers weren’t permanent scratches and could be cleaned off. But independent testing from the likes of iFixit has found that the anodization process Apple uses to add color to the iPhone’s aluminum frame is more susceptible to scratching and flaking on non-flat surfaces like the edges of the camera bump.

Like “antennagate” and “bendgate” before it, many factors will determine whether “scratchgate” is actually something you’ll notice. Independent testing shows there is something to the complaints, but it doesn’t show how often this kind of damage will appear in actual day-to-day use over the course of months or years. Do keep it in mind when deciding which iPhone and accessories you want—it’s just one more reason to keep the iPhone 17 Pro in a case, if you ask me—but I wouldn’t say it should keep you from buying this phone if you like everything else about it.

Camera

I have front-loaded my complaints about the iPhone 17 Pro to get them out of the way, but the fun thing about an iPhone in which function follows form is that you get a lot of function.

When I made the jump from the regular iPhone to the Pro (I went from an 11 to a 13 Pro and then to a 15 Pro), I did it mainly for the telephoto lens in the camera. For both kid photos and casual product photography, it was game-changing to be able to access the functional equivalent of optical zoom on my phone.

The iPhone 17 Pro’s telephoto lens in 4x mode. Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone 16 Pro changed the telephoto lens’ zoom level from 3x to 5x, which was useful if you want maximum zoom but which did leave a gap between it and the Fusion Camera-enabled 2x mode. The 17 Pro switches to a 4x zoom by default, closing that gap, and it further maximizes the zooming capabilities by switching to a 48 MP sensor.

Like the main and ultrawide cameras, which had already switched to 48 MP sensors in previous models, the telephoto camera saves 24 MP images when shooting in 4x mode. But it can also crop a 12 MP image out of the center of that sensor to provide a native-resolution 12 MP image at an 8x zoom level, albeit without the image quality improvements from the “pixel binning” process that 4x images get.

You can debate how accurate it is to market this as “optical-quality zoom” as Apple does, but it’s hard to argue with the results. The level of detail you can capture from a distance in 8x mode is consistently impressive, and Apple’s hardware and software image stabilization help keep these details reasonably free of the shake and blur you might see if you were shooting at this zoom level with an actual hardware lens.

It’s my favorite feature of the iPhone 17 Pro, and it’s the thing about the phone that comes closest to being worth the $300 premium over the regular iPhone 17.

The iPhone 17 Pro, main lens, 1x mode. Andrew Cunningham

Apple continues to gate several other camera-related features to the Pro iPhones. All phones can shoot RAW photos in third-party camera apps that support it, but only the Pro iPhones can shoot Apple’s ProRAW format in the first-party camera app (ProRAW performs Apple’s typical image processing for RAW images but retains all the extra information needed for more flexible post-processing).

I don’t spend as much time shooting video on my phone as I do photos, but for the content creator and influencer set (and the “we used phones and also professional lighting and sound equipment to shoot this movie” set) Apple still reserves several video features for the Pro iPhones. That list includes 120 fps 4K Dolby Vision video recording and a four-mic array (both also supported by the iPhone 16 Pro), plus ProRes RAW recording and Genlock support for synchronizing video from multiple sources (both new to the 17 Pro).

The iPhone Pro also remains the only iPhone to support 10 Gbps USB transfer speeds over the USB-C port, making it faster to transfer large video files from the phone to an external drive or a PC or Mac for additional processing and editing. It’s likely that Apple built this capability into the A19 Pro’s USB controller, but both the iPhone Air and the regular iPhone 17 are restricted to the same old 25-year-old 480 Mbps USB 2.0 data transfer speeds.

The iPhone 17 Pro gets the same front camera treatment as the iPhone 17 and the Air: a new square “Center Stage” sensor that crops a 24 MP square image into an 18 MP image, allowing users to capture approximately the same aspect ratios and fields-of-view with the front camera regardless of whether they’re holding the phone in portrait or landscape mode. It’s definitely an image-quality improvement, but it’s the same as what you get with the other new iPhones.

Specs, speeds, and battery

You still need to buy a Pro phone to get a USB-C port with 10 Gbps USB 3 transfer speeds instead of 480 Mbps USB 2.0 speeds. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone 17 Pro uses, by a slim margin, the fastest and most capable version of the A19 Pro chip, partly because it has all of the A19 Pro’s features fully enabled and partly because its thermal management is better than the iPhone Air’s.

The A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro uses two high-performance CPU cores and four smaller high-efficiency CPU cores, plus a fully enabled six-core GPU. Like the iPhone Air, the iPhone Pro also includes 12GB of RAM, up from 8GB in the iPhone 16 Pro and the regular iPhone 17. Apple has added a vapor chamber to the iPhone 17 Pro to help keep it cool rather than relying on metal to conduct heat away from the chips—an infinitesimal amount of water inside a small metal pocket continually boils, evaporates, and condenses inside the closed copper-lined chamber. This spreads the heat evenly over a large area, compared to just using metal to conduct the heat; having the heat spread out over a larger area then allows that heat to be dissipated more quickly.

All phones were tested with Adaptive Power turned off.

We saw in our iPhone 17 review how that phone’s superior thermals helped it outrun the iPhone Air’s version of the A19 Pro in many of our graphics tests; the iPhone Pro’s A19 Pro beats both by a decent margin, thanks to both thermals and the extra hardware.

The performance line graph that 3DMark generates when you run its benchmarks actually gives us a pretty clear look at the difference between how the iPhones act. The graphs for the iPhone 15 Pro, the iPhone 17, and the iPhone 17 Pro all look pretty similar, suggesting that they’re cooled well enough to let the benchmark run for a couple of minutes without significant throttling. The iPhone Air follows a similar performance curve for the first half of the test or so but then drops noticeably lower for the second half—the ups and downs of the line actually look pretty similar to the other phones, but the performance is just a bit lower because the A19 Pro in the iPhone Air is already slowing down to keep itself cool.

The CPU performance of the iPhone 17 Pro is also marginally better than this year’s other phones, but not by enough that it will be user-noticeable.

As for battery, Apple’s own product pages say it lasts for about 10 percent longer than the regular iPhone 17 and between 22 and 36 percent longer than the iPhone Air, depending on what you’re doing.

I found the iPhone Air’s battery life to be tolerable with a little bit of babying and well-timed use of the Low Power Mode feature, and the iPhone 17’s battery was good enough that I didn’t worry about making it through an 18-hour day. But the iPhone 17 Pro’s battery really is a noticeable step up.

One day, I forgot to plug it in overnight and awoke to a phone that still had a 30 percent charge, enough that I could make it through the morning school drop-off routine and plug it in when I got back home. Not only did I not have to think about the iPhone 17 Pro’s battery, but it’s good enough that even a battery with 85-ish percent capacity (where most of my iPhone batteries end up after two years of regular use) should still feel pretty comfortable. After the telephoto camera lens, it’s definitely the second-best thing about the iPhone 17 Pro, and the Pro Max should last for even longer.

Pros only

Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

I’m taken with a lot of things about the iPhone 17 Pro, but the conclusion of our iPhone 17 review still holds: If you’re not tempted by the lightness of the iPhone Air, then the iPhone 17 is the one most people should get.

Even more than most Pro iPhones, the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max will make the most sense for people who actually use their phones professionally, whether that’s for product or event photography, content creation, or some other camera-centric field where extra flexibility and added shooting modes can make a real difference. The same goes for people who want a bigger screen, since there’s no iPhone 17 Plus.

Sure, the 17 Pro also performs a little better than the regular 17, and the battery lasts longer. But the screen was always the most immediately noticeable upgrade for regular people, and the exact same display panel is now available in a phone that costs $300 less.

The benefit of the iPhone Pro becoming a bit more niche is that it’s easier to describe who each of these iPhones is for. The Air is the most pleasant to hold and use, and it’s the one you’ll probably buy if you want people to ask you, “Oh, is that one of the new iPhones?” The Pro is for people whose phones are their most important camera (or for people who want the biggest phone they can get). And the iPhone 17 is for people who just want a good phone but don’t want to think about it all that much.

The good

  • Excellent performance and great battery life
  • It has the most flexible camera in any iPhone, and the telephoto lens in particular is a noticeable step up from a 2-year-old iPhone 15 Pro
  • 12GB of RAM provides extra future-proofing compared to the standard iPhone
  • Not counting the old iPhone 16, it’s Apple’s only iPhone to be available in two screen sizes
  • Extra photography and video features for people who use those features in their everyday lives or even professionally

The bad

  • Clunky, unfinished-looking design
  • More limited color options compared to the regular iPhone
  • Expensive
  • Landscape layouts for apps only work on the Max model

The ugly

  • Increased weight compared to previous models, which actually used their lighter weight as a selling point

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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ios-26-review:-a-practical,-yet-playful,-update

iOS 26 review: A practical, yet playful, update

Apple, Features, iOS, ios 26, IPhone, Reviews, Software, Tech / /

More than just Liquid Glass

Spotlighting the most helpful new features of iOS 26.

The new Clear icons look in iOS 26 can make it hard to identify apps, since they’re all the same color. Credit: Scharon Harding

iOS 26 became publicly available this week, ushering in a new OS naming system and the software’s most overhauled look since 2013. It may take time to get used to the new “Liquid Glass” look, but it’s easier to appreciate the pared-down controls.

Beyond a glassy, bubbly new design, the update’s flashiest new features also include new Apple Intelligence AI integration that varies in usefulness, from fluffy new Genmoji abilities to a nifty live translation feature for Phones, Messages, and FaceTime.

New tech is often bogged down with AI-based features that prove to be overhyped, unreliable, or just not that useful. iOS 26 brings a little of each, so in this review, we’ll home in on the iOS updates that will benefit both mainstream and power users the most.

Table of Contents

Let’s start with Liquid Glass

If we’re talking about changes that you’re going to use a lot, we should start with the new Liquid Glass software design that Apple is applying across all of its operating systems. iOS hasn’t had this much of a makeover since iOS 7. However, where iOS 7 applied a flatter, minimalist effect to windows and icons and their edges, iOS 26 adds a (sometimes frosted) glassy look and a mildly fluid movement to actions such as pulling down menus or long-pressing controls. All the while, windows look like they’re reflecting the content underneath them. When you pull Safari’s menu atop a webpage, for example, blurred colors from the webpage’s images and text are visible on empty parts of the menu.

Liquid Glass is now part of most of Apple’s consumer devices, including Macs and Apple TVs, but the dynamic visuals and motion are especially pronounced as you use your fingers to poke, slide, and swipe across your iPhone’s screen.

For instance, when you use a tinted color theme or the new clear theme for Home Screen icons, colors from the Home Screen’s background look like they’re refracting from under the translucent icons. It’s especially noticeable when you slide to different Home Screen pages. And in Safari, the address bar shrinks down and becomes more translucent as you scroll to read an article.

Because the theme is incorporated throughout the entire OS, the Liquid Glass effect can be cheesy at times. It feels forced in areas such as Settings, where text that just scrolled past looks slightly blurred at the top of the screen.

Liquid Glass makes the top of the Settings menu look blurred.

Liquid Glass makes the top of the Settings menu look blurred.

Credit: Scharon Harding

Liquid Glass makes the top of the Settings menu look blurred. Credit: Scharon Harding

Other times, the effect feels fitting, like when pulling the Control Center down and its icons appear to stretch down to the bottom of the screen and then quickly bounce into their standard size as you release your finger. Another place Liquid Glass flows nicely is in Photos. As you browse your pictures, colors subtly pop through the translucent controls at the bottom of the screen.

This is a matter of appearance, so you may have your own take on whether Liquid Glass looks tasteful or not. But overall, it’s the type of redesign that’s distinct enough to be a fun change, yet mild enough that you can grow accustomed to it if you’re not immediately impressed.

Liquid Glass simplifies navigation (mostly)

There’s more to Liquid Glass than translucency. Part of the redesign is simplifying navigation in some apps by displaying fewer controls.

Opening Photos is now cleaner at launch, bringing you to all of your photos instead of the Collections section, like iOS 18 does. At the bottom are translucent tabs for Library and Collections, plus a Search icon. Once you start browsing, the Library and Collections tabs condense into a single icon, and Years, Months, and All tabs appear, maintaining a translucence that helps keep your focus on your pictures.

You can still bring up more advanced options (such as Flash, Live, Timer) with one tap. And at the top of the camera’s field of view are smaller toggles for night mode and flash. But for when you want to take a quick photo, iOS 26 makes it easier to focus on the necessities while keeping the extraneous within short reach.

Similarly, the initial controls displayed at the bottom of the screen when you open Camera are pared down from six different photo- and video-shooting modes to the two that really matter: Photo and Video.

iOS 26 camera app

If you long-press Photo, options for the Time-Lapse, Slow-Mo, Cinematic, Portrait, Spatial, and Pano modes appear.

Credit: Scharon Harding

If you long-press Photo, options for the Time-Lapse, Slow-Mo, Cinematic, Portrait, Spatial, and Pano modes appear. Credit: Scharon Harding

iOS 26 takes the same approach with Video mode by focusing on the essentials (zoom, resolution, frame rate, and flash) at launch.New layout options for navigating Safari, however, slowed me down. In a new Compact view, the address bar lives at the bottom of the screen without a dedicated toolbar, giving the web page more screen space. But this setup makes accessing common tasks, like opening a new or old tab, viewing bookmarks, or sharing a link, tedious because they’re hidden behind a menu button.

If you tend to have multiple browser tabs open, you’ll want to stick with the classic layout, now called Top (where the address bar is at the top of the screen and the toolbar is at the bottom) or the Bottom layout (where the address bar and toolbar are at the bottom of the screen).

On the more practical side of Safari updates is a new ability to turn any webpage into a web app, making favorite and important URLs accessible quickly and via a dedicated Home Screen icon. This has been an iOS feature for a long time, but until now the pages always opened in Safari. Users can still do this if they like, but by default these sites now open as their own distinct apps, with dedicated icons in the app switcher. Web apps open full-screen, but in my experience, back and forward buttons only come up if you go to a new website. Sliding left and right replaces dedicated back and forward controls, but sliding isn’t as reliable as just tapping a button.

Viewing Ars Technica as a web app.

Viewing Ars Technica as a web app.

Credit: Scharon Harding

Viewing Ars Technica as a web app. Credit: Scharon Harding

iOS 26 remembers that iPhones are telephones

With so much focus on smartphone chips, screens, software, and AI lately, it can be easy to forget that these devices are telephones. iOS 26 doesn’t overlook the core purpose of iPhones, though. Instead, the new operating system adds a lot to the process of making and receiving phone calls, video calls, and text messages, starting with the look of the Phone app.

Continuing the streamlined Liquid Glass redesign, the Phone app on iOS 26 consolidates the bottom controls from Favorites, Recents, Contacts, Keypad, and Voicemail, to Calls (where voicemails also live), Contacts, and Keypad, plus Search.

I’d rather have a Voicemails section at the bottom of the screen than Search, though. The Voicemails section is still accessible by opening a menu at the top-right of the screen, but it’s less prominent, and getting to it requires more screen taps than before.

On Phone’s opening screen, you’ll see the names or numbers of missed calls and voicemails in red. But voicemails also have a blue dot next to the red phone number or name (along with text summarizing or transcribing the voicemail underneath if those settings are active). This setup caused me to overlook missed calls initially. Missed calls with voicemails looked more urgent because of the blue dot. For me, at first glance, it appeared as if the blue dots represented unviewed missed calls and that red numbers/names without a blue dot were missed calls that I had already viewed. It’s taking me time to adjust, but there’s logic behind having all missed phone activity in one place.

Fighting spam calls and messages

For someone like me, whose phone number seems to have made it to every marketer and scammers’ contact lists, it’s empowering to have iOS 26’s screening features help reduce time spent dealing with spam.

The phone can be set to automatically ask callers with unsaved numbers to state their name. As this happens, iOS displays the caller’s response on-screen, so you can decide if you want to answer or not. If you’re not around when the phone rings, you can view the transcript later and then mark the caller as known, if desired. This has been my preferred method of screening calls and reduces the likelihood of missing a call I want to answer.

There are also options for silencing calls and voicemails from unknown numbers and having them only show in a section of the app that’s separate from the Calls tab (and accessible via the aforementioned Phone menu).

iOS 26's new Phone menu

A new Phone menu helps sort important calls from calls that are likely spam.

Credit: Scharon Harding

A new Phone menu helps sort important calls from calls that are likely spam. Credit: Scharon Harding

You could also have iOS direct calls that your cell phone carrier identifies as spam to voicemail and only show the missed calls in the Phone menu’s dedicated Spam list. I found that, while the spam blocker is fairly reliable, silencing calls from unsaved numbers resulted in me missing unexpected calls from, say, an interview source or my bank. And looking through my spam and unknown callers lists sounds like extra work that I’m unlikely to do regularly.

Messages

iOS 26 applies the same approach to Messages. You can now have texts from unknown senders and spam messages automatically placed into folders that are separate from your other texts. It’s helpful for avoiding junk messages, but it can be confusing if you’re waiting for something like a two-factor authentication text, for example.

Elsewhere in Messages is a small but effective change to browsing photos, links, and documents previously exchanged via text. Upon tapping the name of a person in a conversation in Messages, you’ll now see tabs for viewing that conversation’s settings (such as the recipient’s number and a toggle for sending read receipts), as well as separate tabs for photos and links. Previously, this was all under one tab, so if you wanted to find a previously sent link, you had to scroll through the conversation’s settings and photos. Now, you can get to links with a couple of quick taps. Additionally, with iOS 26 you can finally set up custom iMessage backgrounds, including premade ones and ones that you can make from your own photos or by using generative AI. It’s not an essential update but is an easy way to personalize your iPhone by brightening up texts.

Hold Assist

Another time saver is Hold Assist. It makes calling customer service slightly more tolerable by allowing you to hang up during long wait times and have your iPhone ring when someone’s ready to talk to you. It’s a feature that some customer service departments have offered for years already, but it’s handy to always have it available.

You have to be quick to respond, though. One time I answered the phone after using Hold Assist, and the caller informed me that they had said “hello” a few times already. This is despite the fact that iOS is supposed to let the agent know that you’ll be on the phone shortly. If I had waited a couple more seconds to pick up the phone, it’s likely that the customer service rep would have hung up.

Live translations

One of the most novel features that iOS 26 brings to iPhone communication is real-time translations for Spanish, Mandarin, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese. After downloading the necessary language libraries, iOS can translate one of those languages to another in real time when you’re talking on the phone or FaceTime or texting.

The feature worked best in texts, where the software doesn’t have to deal with varying accents, people speaking fast or over one another, stuttering, or background noise. Translated texts and phone calls always show the original text written in the sender’s native language, so you can double-check translations or see things that translations can miss, like acronyms, abbreviations, and slang.

iOS 26 Translating some basic Spanish.

Translating some basic Spanish.

Credit: Scharon Harding

Translating some basic Spanish. Credit: Scharon Harding

During calls or FaceTime, Live Translation sometimes struggled to keep up while it tried to manage the nuances and varying speeds of how different people speak, as well as laughs and other interjections.

However, it’s still remarkable that the iPhone can help remove language barriers without any additional hardware, apps, or fees. It will be even better if Apple can improve reliability and add more languages.

Spatial images on the Home and Lock Screen

The new spatial images feature is definitely on the fluffier side of this iOS update, but it is also a practical way to spice up your Lock Screen, Home Screen, and the Home Screen’s Photos widget.

Basically, it applies a 3D effect to any photo in your library, which is visible as you move your phone around in your hand. Apple says that to do this, iOS 26 uses the same generative AI models that the Apple Vision Pro uses and creates a per-pixel depth map that makes parts of the image appear to pop out as you move the phone within six degrees of freedom.

The 3D effect is more powerful on some images than others, depending on the picture’s composition. It worked well on a photo of my dog sitting in front of some plants and behind a leaf of another plant. I set the display time so that it appears tucked behind her fur, and when I move the phone around, the dog and the leaf in front of her appear to move around, while the background plants stay still.

But in images with few items and sparser backgrounds, the spatial effect looks unnatural. And oftentimes, the spatial effect can be quite subtle.

Still, for those who like personalizing their iPhone with Home and Lock Screen customization, spatial scenes are a simple and harmless way to liven things up. And, if you like the effect enough, a new spatial mode in the Camera app allows you to create new spatial photos.

A note on Apple Intelligence notification summaries

As we’ve already covered in our macOS 26 Tahoe review, Apple Intelligence-based notification summaries haven’t improved much since their 2024 debut in iOS 18 and macOS 15 Sequoia. After problems with showing inaccurate summaries of news notifications, Apple updated the feature to warn users that the summaries may be inaccurate. But it’s still hit or miss when it comes to how easy it is to decipher the summaries.

I did have occasional success with notification summaries in iOS 26. For instance, I understood a summary of a voicemail that said, “Payment may have appeared twice; refunds have been processed.” Because I had already received a similar message via email (a store had accidentally charged me twice for a purchase and then refunded me), I knew I didn’t need to open that voicemail.

Vague summaries sometimes tipped me off as to whether a notification was important. A summary reading “Townhall meeting was hosted; call [real phone number] to discuss issues” was enough for me to know that I had a voicemail about a meeting that I never expressed interest in. It wasn’t the most informative summary, but in this case, I didn’t need a lot of information.

However, most of the time, it was still easier to just open the notification than try to decipher what Apple Intelligence was trying to tell me. Summaries aren’t really helpful and don’t save time if you can’t fully trust their accuracy or depth.

Playful, yet practical

With iOS 26, iPhones get a playful new design that’s noticeable and effective but not so drastically different that it will offend or distract those who are happy with the way iOS 18 works. It’s exciting to experience one of iOS’s biggest redesigns, but what really stands out are the thoughtful tweaks that bring practical improvements to core features, like making and receiving phone calls and taking pictures.

Some additions and changes are superfluous, but the update generally succeeds at improving functionality without introducing jarring changes that isolate users or force them to relearn how to use their phone.

I can’t guarantee that you’ll like the Liquid Glass design, but other updates should make it simpler to do some of the most important tasks with iPhones, and it should be a welcome improvement for long-time users.

Photo of Scharon Harding

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

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hands-on-with-apple’s-new-iphones:-beauty-and-the-beast-and-the-regular-looking-one

Hands-on with Apple’s new iPhones: Beauty and the beast and the regular-looking one

Apple, IPhone, iphone 17, iphone 17 pro, iphone air, Tech / /

i have touched the new phones

A new form-vs.-function spectrum emerges as Apple’s phone designs diverge.

The iPhone Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

CUPERTINO, Calif.—We’re a long way from the days when a new iPhone launch just meant one new phone. It shifted to “basically the same phone in two sizes” a decade or so ago, and then to a version of “one lineup of regular phones and one lineup of Pro phones” in 2017 when the iPhone 8 was introduced next to the iPhone X.

But thanks to Apple’s newly introduced iPhone Air, the iPhone 17 lineup gives new phone buyers more choices and trade-offs than they’ve ever had before. Apple’s phones are now available in a spectrum of sizes, weights, speeds, costs, and camera configurations. And while options are great to have, it also means you need to know more about which one to pick.

We’ve gone hands-on with all four of Apple’s new phones, and while more extensive tire-kicking will be required, we can at least try to nail down exactly what kind of person each of these phones is for.

The iPhone Air: Designed for first impressions

There’s no more iPhone mini, and there’s no more iPhone Plus. Now we have an iPhone Air, and it is very much its own thing.

The phone is just over two-thirds the thickness of the iPhone 17, not counting what Apple now calls a “camera plateau” that stretches across the top of the device. It’s 0.22 inches thick and weighs 5.82 ounces, compared to 0.31 inches thick and 6.24 ounces for the iPhone 17. You have to go back to the iPhone 12 (5.78 ounces) to find a full-size iPhone that’s equally light, and that one had a 6.1-inch screen instead of the Air’s more expansive 6.5 inches.

Those don’t look like huge numbers on paper, but when you’re holding the iPhone Air, it does make a substantial difference. While the camera plateau makes it look top-heavy in photos, in reality, it’s light, and that weight is distributed evenly enough that it feels as well-balanced as any of the other iPhones.

The combination of a large-ish screen and light weight created a strong perception of lightness, compared to the iPhone 17 or especially the 7.27-ounce iPhone 17 Pro. I also found that the shiny titanium frame, while a fingerprint magnet, did slide around in my hand less than an aluminum finish.

It’s a phone built to make a strong first impression, whether you’re holding it in an Apple Store or just after an Apple event in a throng of YouTubers who are all throwing elbows so that they can film each individual phone in the hands-on area for 20 minutes apiece. But I do worry that living with the Air would be frustrating in the long haul, specifically because of battery life.

Again, on paper, the numbers Apple is quoting aren’t so far apart. The Air is rated for 27 hours of local video playback, compared to 30 hours for the iPhone 17 and 33 hours for the 17 Pro. But there’s a bigger gap between the numbers for streaming video—22 hours, 27 hours, and 30 hours for the Air, 17, and 17 Pro, respectively—that suggests that any activity that’s actively using the A19 Pro chip or wireless communication is going to drain the battery even faster.

Extrapolate that out two years, when your battery is going to be operating at somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of its original capacity, and a midday charge starts to sound like an inevitability. It’s telling that a thickness-and-weight-increasing external battery accessory was announced in the same breath as the iPhone Air.

The iPhone Air’s $99 MagSafe battery accessory. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple’s official acknowledgement of and solution to the battery life issue is a $99 external battery that attaches with MagSafe and charges the phone wirelessly; by Apple’s estimates, it adds roughly 13 hours of runtime on top of what you get from the internal battery.

Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of having an iPhone Air, I hear you asking? Maybe so! But it is at least a better aesthetic match for the iPhone than a chunky third-party brick, and one that’s pretty easy to detach and put away once it has done its job and charged your phone. It has its own separate USB-C port for charging, and a small status light (orange when charging, green when charged) below the Apple logo. The magnetic connection feels sturdy enough that it would be hard to dislodge the battery by accident, but I can’t say that it absolutely couldn’t fall off if you were trying to jam the phone into a pocket or bag and caught the battery on something.

I can say that the iPhone Air probably isn’t for me, because the main things I want from a phone are more battery life and better cameras—I can appreciate something smaller and lighter, but only if it doesn’t compromise that other stuff (I got exactly this kind of upgrade when I jumped from an iPhone 13 Pro to a 15 Pro). That’s fine—when you introduce four phones at once, you don’t need to appeal to every iPhone user with every one of them. But I do wonder whether people will find the Air more convincing than they apparently found the now-departed iPhone mini and iPhone Plus.

The iPhone 17 Pro: Industrial design

If you look at the iPhone Air and you say, “I would actually take a thicker, heavier phone if it had a bigger battery in it,” Apple does already make that phone for you.

The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are more of a design departure from the standard iPhones than they have been in years past, with a distinctive aluminum unibody design and a gigantic camera plateau that replaces the old (and already substantial) three-lens camera bump on the older Pros.

Frankly, I’m not in love with the look of this new design—the aluminum unibody design may be good for durability, but it requires Apple to leave cutouts for other wireless-permeable materials all over the phone’s body, and the result is a two-tone design and a lumpy profile that gives the impression that form follows function on this one. It’s the iPhone equivalent of a polished concrete floor—utilitarian with a trendy veneer. It’s a phone I would be happy to put in a case.

It’s also a bit disappointing that the iPhone 17 Pro continues the Pro phones’ drift back upward in weight—we went from 7.27 ounces to 6.6 ounces from the iPhone 14 Pro to the 15 Pro, then to 7.03 ounces for the 16 Pro, and now right back to 7.27 ounces again. But weight is obviously incidental to other features for many Pro users, and the 17 Pro does at least do cool things that make the increased weight worth it.

The two-toned design, festooned with cutouts, makes the phone look a bit uneven to me. Andrew Cunningham

The one feature that’s easy to wrap your arms around in just a few minutes with the new phone is the upgraded telephoto camera lens, which shifts to a 48MP sensor that enables Apple’s Fusion Camera functionality for telephoto shots for the first time.

If you don’t know, the Fusion Camera system shoots 48MP images and then shrinks them to 12 or 24MP, depending on the phone you’re using—benefiting from the extra detail captured by the 48MP sensor, but keeping photo sizes manageable. To create “optical zoom,” the camera instead crops a native-resolution 12MP image out of the center of that sensor. Quality is reduced somewhat because you lose the benefits of the “pixel binning” process that is used to turn 48MP shots into 12MP or 24MP shots, but you’re still capturing native-resolution images without digital zoom.

Adding that to the telephoto lens for the first time doubles the amount of zoom Apple can offer—it starts at 4x zoom, and can go as high as 8x before you start relying on digital zoom.

Standard lens, iPhone 15 Pro. Andrew Cunningham

We were able to do a bit of shooting with the iPhone 17 Pro’s telephoto camera on the Apple Park campus. Compared to my iPhone 15 Pro and its 3x telephoto lens, the default 4x zoom on the iPhone 17 Pro already gets us a little closer, and the 8x zoom option gets you a lot closer. Zoom all the way in to the orange “hello” and you’ll notice some fuzziness and less-than-tack-sharp details, but for photo prints or sharing digitally the results are impressive.

The extra weight and unfinished look of the iPhone 17 Pro don’t make as good a first impression as the iPhone Air did, but I suspect iPhone Pro users (myself included) will find its larger battery and better camera to be acceptable trade-offs. It will be the easier phone to live with in the long term, in other words.

The iPhone 17: Still the default

The iPhone 17: It’s an iPhone! Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In between the industrial chic aesthetic of the iPhone 17 Pro and the lightness of the iPhone Air is the regular iPhone, which looks a whole lot like last year’s but might actually get the most noticeable functional upgrades of all three of them.

I’m mainly talking about the ProMotion screen, a 120 Hz OLED display panel with a dynamic refresh rate that can go as low as 1 Hz when the phone isn’t being used. Both ProMotion and the always-on screen feature that it enables have been exclusive to the iPhone Pro for years, even as higher-refresh-rate screens have spread through midrange and budget Android phones.

That extra smoothness is tough to give up once you’ve gotten used to it, and it pairs especially well with the extra motion and bounciness present in Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface. Fitting 6.3 inches of screen into a phone the same size as the 6.1-inch iPhone 16 also heightens the edge-to-edge screen effect. And both ProMotion and the larger screen help put some space between the iPhone 17 and the iPhone 16e, Apple’s current “budget” offering that comes in at just $200 under the price of the regular iPhone.

From the back: Still an iPhone! Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The other major functional upgrade for people who just walk into the store (or log on to their carrier’s website) and buy the default iPhone is that the base model has been bumped up to 256GB of storage, a reasonably generous allotment that should keep you from having too much trouble with gigantic movie files or years-old gigabytes-large iMessage conversations that you just can’t bear to delete.

This looks like an iPhone, and it feels like an iPhone, and there’s not a lot to convey from a quick hands-on session other than that. In this case, a lack of surprises is a good thing.

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

Hands-on with Apple’s new iPhones: Beauty and the beast and the regular-looking one Read More »

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What to expect (and not expect) from yet another September Apple event

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An all-new iPhone variant, plus a long list of useful (if predictable) upgrades.

Apple’s next product announcement is coming soon. Credit: Apple

Apple’s next product announcement is coming soon. Credit: Apple

Apple’s next product event is happening on September 9, and while the company hasn’t technically dropped any hints about what’s coming, anyone with a working memory and a sense of object permanence can tell you that an Apple event in the month of September means next-generation iPhones.

Apple’s flagship phones have changed in mostly subtle ways since 2022’s iPhone 14 Pro added the Dynamic Island and 2023’s refreshes switched from Lightning to USB-C. Chips get gradually faster, cameras get gradually better, but Apple hasn’t done a seismic iPhone X-style rethinking of its phones since, well, 2017’s iPhone X.

The rumor mill thinks that Apple is working on a foldable iPhone—and such a device would certainly benefit from years of investment in the iPad—but if it’s coming, it probably won’t be this year. That doesn’t mean Apple is totally done iterating on the iPhone X-style design, though. Let’s run down what the most reliable rumors have said we’re getting.

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 supposedly 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 48 MP 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 12 MP sensor for the telephoto zoom lens to a 48 MP 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 48 MP photo down to 12 MP when you’re in the regular shooting mode, binning pixels to improve image quality. For zoomed-in photos, it can just take a 12 MP section out of the middle of the 48 MP 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 shrink the amount of screen space dedicated to the Dynamic Island.

New Apple Watches

Apple Watch Series 10

The Apple Watch Series 10 from 2024. Credit: Apple

New iPhone announcements are usually paired with new Apple Watch announcements, though if anything, the Watch has changed even less than the iPhone has over the last few years.

The Apple Watch Series 11 won’t be getting a screen size increase—the Series 10 bumped things up a smidge just last year, from 41 and 45 mm to 42 and 46 mm. But the screen will apparently have a higher maximum brightness—always useful for outdoor visibility—and there will be a modestly improved Apple S11 chip on the inside.

The entry-level Apple Watch SE is also apparently due for an upgrade. The current second-generation SE still uses an Apple S8 chip, and Apple Watch Series 4-era 40 and 44 mm screens that don’t support always-on operation. In other words, there’s plenty that Apple could upgrade here without cannibalizing sales of the mainstream Series 11 watch.

Finally, after missing out on an update last year, Apple also reportedly plans to deliver a new Apple Watch Ultra, with the larger 46 mm screen from the Series 10/11 watches and the same updated S11 chip as the regular Apple Watch. The current Apple Watch Ultra 2 already has a brighter screen than the Series 10—3,000 nits, up from 2,000—so it’s not clear whether the Apple Watch Ultra 3’s screen would also get brighter or if the Series 11’s screen is just getting a brightness boost to match what the Ultra can do.

Smart home, TV, and audio

Though iPhones and Apple Watches are usually a lock for a September event, other products and accessory updates are also possible.

Of these, the most high-profile is probably a refresh for the Apple TV 4K streaming box, which would be its first update in three years. Rumors suggest that the main upgrade for a new model would be an Apple A17 Pro chip, introduced for the iPhone 15 Pro and also used in the iPad mini 7. The A17 Pro is paired with 8GB of RAM, which makes it Apple’s smallest and cheapest chip that’s capable of Apple Intelligence. Apple hasn’t done anything with Apple Intelligence on the Apple TV directly, but to date, that has been partly because none of the hardware is capable of it.

Also in the “possible but not guaranteed” column: new high-end AirPods Pro, the first-ever internal update to 2020’s HomePod Mini speaker, a new AirTag location tracker, and a straightforward internals-only refresh of the Vision Pro headset. Any, all, or none of these could break cover at the event next week, but Gurman claims they’re all “coming soon.”

New software updates

Devices running Apple’s latest beta operating systems. Credit: Apple

We know most of what there is to know about iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and Apple’s other software updates this year, thanks to a three-month-old WWDC presentation and months of public beta testing. There might be a feature or two exclusive to the newest iPhones, but that sort of thing is usually camera-related and usually pretty minor.

The main thing to expect will be release dates for the final versions of all of the updates. Apple usually releases a near-final release candidate build on the day of the presentation, gives developers a week or so to finalize and submit their updated apps for App Review, and then releases the updates after that. Expect to see them rolled out to everyone sometime the week of September 15th (though an earlier release is always a possibility).

What’s probably not happening

We’d be surprised to see anything related to the Mac or the iPad at the event next week, even though several models are in a window where the timing is about right for an Apple M5 refresh.

Macs and iPads have shared the stage with the iPhone before, but in more recent years, Apple has held these refreshes back for another, smaller event later in October or November. If Apple has new MacBook Pro or iPad Pro models slated for 2025, we’d expect to see them in a month or two.

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

What to expect (and not expect) from yet another September Apple event Read More »

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Apple brings OpenAI’s GPT-5 to iOS and macOS

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OpenAI’s GPT-5 model went live for most ChatGPT users this week, but lots of people use ChatGPT not through OpenAI’s interface but through other platforms or tools. One of the largest deployments is iOS, the iPhone operating system, which allows users to make certain queries via GPT-4o. It turns out those users won’t have to wait long for the latest model: Apple will switch to GPT-5 in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe 26, according to 9to5Mac.

Apple has not officially announced when those OS updates will be released to users’ devices, but these major releases have typically been released in September in recent years.

The new model had already rolled out on some other platforms, like the coding tool GitHub Copilot via public preview, as well as Microsoft’s general-purpose Copilot.

GPT-5 purports to hallucinate 80 percent less and heralds a major rework of how OpenAI positions its models; for example, GPT-5 by default automatically chooses whether to use a reasoning-optimized model based on the nature of the user’s prompt. Free users will have to accept whatever the choice is, while paid ChatGPT accounts allow manually picking which model to use on a prompt-by-prompt basis. It’s unclear how that will work in iOS; will it stick to GPT-5’s non-reasoning mode all the time, or will it utilize GPT-5 “(with thinking)”? And if it supports the latter, will paid ChatGPT users be able to manually pick like they can in the ChatGPT app, or will they be limited to whatever ChatGPT deems appropriate, like free users? We don’t know yet.

Apple brings OpenAI’s GPT-5 to iOS and macOS Read More »

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New “AppleCare One” plan bundles three extended warranties for $20 a month

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AppleCare One can also be extended to other Apple products you own “that are up to four years old” (or one year old for headphones) and “in good condition,” even if they’re outside of the typical 60-day grace period for subscribing to AppleCare+. Apple says that the condition of these devices may need to be verified “using a customer’s iPhone or iPad, or at an Apple Store” before they can be added to the plan, presumably to reduce the number of people who opt in after the fact to avoid pricey repairs to already damaged devices.

While the potential savings are the best argument in favor of the new plan, it also adds a handful of new benefits for some devices. For example, AppleCare One covers theft for both iPads and Apple Watches, something that isn’t covered for these devices under a standard AppleCare+ subscription. The subscription can also simplify the trade-in process, removing a traded-in device from your AppleCare One plan and replacing it with an upgraded device automatically.

If you haven’t subscribed to AppleCare+ before, it functions both as an extended warranty and an insurance program. If your device breaks suddenly for reasons outside of your control, repairs and replacements are generally free of additional charge; for accidental damage, theft and loss, or battery replacements, users are charged additional flat service fees for repairs and replacements, rather than Apple’s hefty parts and labor costs. Battery replacements are also free when your battery drops below 80 percent of its original capacity.

AppleCare One plans will go on sale starting tomorrow, July 24.

New “AppleCare One” plan bundles three extended warranties for $20 a month Read More »

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Trump Mobile launches, hyping $499 US-made phone amid Apple threats

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Donald Trump’s image will soon be used to sell smartphones, the Trump Organization confirmed after unveiling a new wireless service, Trump Mobile, on Monday.

According to the press release, Trump Mobile’s “flagship” wireless plan will be “The 47 Plan,” which references Trump’s current term as the United States’ 47th president.

The Trump Organization says the plan offers an “unbeatable value”—costing $47.45 per month—and “transformational” cellular service. But the price seems to be on par with other major carriers’ “best phone plans,” according to a recent CNET roundup, and the service simply plugs into the 5G network through “all three major carriers,” the press release noted.

The main selling point, then, appears to be the Trump name, with the Trump Mobile website saying it’s “the only mobile service aligned with your values and built on reliability, freedom, and American pride.” CNBC noted that the Trump Organization’s “foray into telecommunications mainly comprises a licensing agreement” rather than representing some bold new offering in the market.

The Trump Mobile agreement is seemingly no different from other deals for Trump-branded products that raked in more than $8 million for the president last year, including watches, perfumes, a Bible, a memecoin, and a guitar. And it’s just as likely to be criticized as those deals, The Hill reported, by “those who see Trump’s family as excessively monetizing his time in office.”

Trump-branded smartphone will be made in the USA

Next on the product list is a Trump-branded “T1 Phone,” which would come just as Trump lobs criticism at Apple and threatens the tech giant with tariffs for failing to build its iPhones in the US. The Trump Organization’s press release seemed to take a shot at Apple, describing Trump’s competing product as “a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier.”

A product image of the Donald Trump-branded T1 Phone. Credit: via Trump Mobile

The T1 Phone is due out later this fall—it’s unclear exactly when, as the press release says August, but the website says September—but it can be preordered now for $499. That’s less than the cost of an iPhone 16, which costs $799 today but could cost at least 25 percent more if Apple pivots manufacturing to the US, analysts have suggested. There may be some issues, however, as 404 Media reported that its attempt to preorder the phone triggered a page load failure and charged its credit card the wrong amount.

Trump Mobile launches, hyping $499 US-made phone amid Apple threats Read More »

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Trump has “a little problem” with Apple’s plan to ship iPhones from India

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Analysts estimate it would cost tens of billions of dollars and take years for Apple to increase iPhone manufacturing in the US, where it at present makes only a very limited number of products.

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last month that Cook had told him the US would need “robotic arms” to replicate the “scale and precision” of iPhone manufacturing in China.

“He’s going to build it here,” Lutnick told CNBC. “And Americans are going to be the technicians who drive those factories. They’re not going to be the ones screwing it in.”

Lutnick added that his previous comments that an “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America” had been taken out of context.

“Americans are going to work in factories just like this on great, high-paying jobs,” he added.

For Narendra Modi’s government, the shift by some Apple suppliers into India is the highest-profile success of a drive to boost local manufacturing and attract companies seeking to diversify away from China.

Mobile phones are now one of India’s top exports, with the country selling more than $7 billion worth of them to the US in the 2024-25 financial year, up from $4.7 billion the previous year. The majority of these were iPhones, which Apple’s suppliers Foxconn and Tata Electronics make at plants in southern India’s Tamil Nadu and Karnataka states.

Modi and Trump are ideologically aligned and personally friendly, but India’s high tariffs are a point of friction and Washington has threatened to hit it with a 26 percent tariff.

India and the US—its biggest trading partner—are negotiating a bilateral trade agreement, the first tranche of which they say they will be agreed by autumn.

“India’s one of the highest-tariff nations in the world, it’s very hard to sell into India,” Trump also said in Qatar on Thursday. “They’ve offered us a deal where basically they’re willing to literally charge us no tariff… they’re the highest and now they’re saying no tariff.”

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Apple silent as Trump promises “impossible” US-made iPhones

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How does Apple solve a problem like Trump’s trade war?

Despite a recent pause on some tariffs, Apple remains in a particularly thorny spot as Donald Trump’s trade war spikes costs in the tech company’s iPhone manufacturing hub, China.

Analysts predict that Apple has no clear short-term options to shake up its supply chain to avoid tariffs entirely, and even if Trump grants Apple an exemption, iPhone prices may increase not just in the US but globally.

The US Trade Representative, which has previously granted Apple an exemption on a particular product, did not respond to Ars’ request to comment on whether any requests for exemptions have been submitted in 2025.

Currently, the US imposes a 145 percent tariff on Chinese imports, while China has raised tariffs on US imports to 125 percent.

Neither side seems ready to back down, and Trump’s TikTok deal—which must be approved by the Chinese government—risks further delays the longer negotiations and retaliations drag on. Trump has faced criticism for delaying the TikTok deal, with Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) telling The Verge last week that the delay was “against the law” and threatened US national security. Meanwhile, China seems to expect more business to flow into China rather than into the US as a result of Trump’s tough stance on global trade.

With the economy and national security at risk, Trump is claiming that tariffs will drive manufacturing into the US, create jobs, and benefit the economy. Getting the world’s most valuable company, Apple, to manufacture its most popular product, the iPhone, in the US, is clearly part of Trump’s vision. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters this week that Apple’s commitment to invest $500 billion in the US over the next four years was supposedly a clear indicator that Apple believed it was feasible to build iPhones here, Bloomberg reported.

“If Apple didn’t think the United States could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change,” Leavitt said.

Apple did not respond to Ars’ request to comment, and so far, it has been silent on how tariffs are impacting its business.

iPhone price increases expected globally

For Apple, even if it can build products for the US market in India, where tariffs remain lower, Trump’s negotiations with China “remain the most important variable for Apple” to retain its global dominance.

Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, told CNBC that “Apple could be set back many years by these tariffs.” Although Apple reportedly stockpiled phones to sell in the US market, that supply will likely dwindle fast as customers move to purchase phones before prices spike. In the medium-term, consultancy firm Omdia forecasted, Apple will likely “focus on increasing iPhone production and exports from India” rather than pushing its business into the US, as Trump desires.

But Apple will still incur additional costs from tariffs on India until that country tries to negotiate a more favorable trade deal. And any exemption that Apple may secure due to its investment promise in the US or moderation of China tariffs that could spare Apple some pain “may not be enough for Apple to avoid adverse business effects,” co-founder and senior analyst at equity research publisher MoffettNathanson, Craig Moffett, suggested to CNBC.

And if Apple is forced to increase prices, it likely won’t be limited to just the US, Bank of America Securities analyst Wamsi Mohan suggested, as reported by The Guardian. To ensure that Apple’s largest market isn’t the hardest hit, Apple may increase prices “across the board geographically,” he forecasted.

“While Apple has not commented on this, we expect prices will be changed globally to prevent arbitrage,” Mohan said.

Apple may even choose to increase prices everywhere but the US, vice president at Forrester Research, Dipanjan Chatterjee, explained in The Guardian’s report.

“If there is a cost impact in the US for certain products,” Chatterjee said, Apple may not increase US prices because “the market is far more competitive there.” Instead, “the company may choose to keep prices flat in the US while recovering the lost margin elsewhere in its global portfolio,” Chatterjee said.

Trump’s US-made iPhone may be an impossible dream

Analysts have said that Trump’s dream that a “made-in-the-USA” iPhone could be coming soon is divorced from reality. Not only do analysts estimate that more than 80 percent of Apple products are currently made in China, but so are many individual parts. So even if Apple built an iPhone factory in the US, it would still have to pay tariffs on individual parts, unless Trump agreed to a seemingly wide range of exemptions. Mohan estimated it would “likely take many years” to move the “entire iPhone supply chain,” if that’s “even possible.”

Further, Apple’s $500 billion commitment covered “building servers for its artificial intelligence products, Apple TV productions and 20,000 new jobs in research and development—not a promise to make the iPhone stateside,” The Guardian noted.

For Apple, it would likely take years to build a US factory and attract talent, all without knowing how tariffs might change. A former Apple manufacturing engineer, Matthew Moore, told Bloomberg that “there are millions of people employed by the Apple supply chain in China,” and Apple has long insisted that the US talent pool is too small to easily replace them.

“What city in America is going to put everything down and build only iPhones?” Moore said. “Boston is over 500,000 people. The whole city would need to stop everything and start assembling iPhones.”

In a CBS interview, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that the “army of millions and millions of human beings” could be automated, Bloomberg reported. But China has never been able to make low-cost automation work, so it’s unclear how the US could achieve that goal without serious investment.

“That’s not yet realistic,” people who have worked on Apple’s product manufacturing told Bloomberg, especially since each new iPhone model requires retooling of assembly, which typically requires manual labor. Other analysts agreed, CNBC reported, concluding that “the idea of an American-made iPhone is impossible at worst and highly expensive at best.”

For consumers, CNBC noted, a US-made iPhone would cost anywhere from 25 percent more than the $1,199 price point today, increasing to about $1,500 at least, to potentially $3,500 at most, Wall Street analysts have forecasted.

It took Apple a decade to build its factory in India, which Apple reportedly intends to use to avoid tariffs where possible. That factory “only began producing Apple’s top-of-the-line Pro and Pro Max iPhone models for the first time last year,” CNBC reported.

Analysts told CNBC that it would take years to launch a similar manufacturing process in the US, while “there’s no guarantee that US trade policy might not change yet again in a way to make the factory less useful.”

Apple CEO’s potential game plan to navigate tariffs

It appears that there’s not much Apple can do to avoid maximum pain through US-China negotiations. But Apple’s CEO Tim Cook—who is considered “a supply chain whisperer”—may be “uniquely suited” to navigate Trump’s trade war, Fortune reported.

After Cook arrived at Apple in 1998, he “redesigned Apple’s sprawling supply chain” and perhaps is game to do that again, Fortune reported. Jeremy Friedman, associate professor of business and geopolitics at Harvard Business School, told Fortune that rather than being stuck in the middle, Cook may turn out to be a key intermediary, helping the US and China iron out a deal.

During Trump’s last term, Cook raised a successful “charm offensive” that secured tariff exemptions without caving to Trump’s demand to build iPhones in the US, CNBC reported, and he’s likely betting that Apple’s recent $500 billion commitment will lead to similar outcomes, even if Apple never delivers a US-made iPhone.

Back in 2017, Trump announced that Apple partner Foxconn would be building three “big beautiful plants” in the US and claimed that they would be Apple plants, CNBC reported. But the pandemic disrupted construction, and most of those plans were abandoned, with one facility only briefly serving to make face masks, not Apple products. In 2019, Apple committed to building a Texas factory that Trump toured. While Trump insisted that a US-made iPhone was on the horizon due to Apple moving some business into the US, that factory only committed to assembling the MacBook Pro, CNBC noted.

Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring suggested that Apple may “commit to some small-volume production in the US (HomePod? AirTags?)” to secure an exemption in 2025, rather than committing to building iPhones, CNBC reported.

Although this perhaps sounds like a tried-and-true game plan, for Cook, Apple’s logistics have likely never been so complicated. However, analysts told Fortune that experienced logistics masterminds understand that flexibility is the priority, and Cook has already shown that he can anticipate Trump’s moves by stockpiling iPhones and redirecting US-bound iPhones through its factory in India.

While Trump negotiates with China, Apple hopes that an estimated 35 million iPhones it makes annually in India can “cover a large portion of its needs in the US,” Bloomberg reported. These moves, analysts said, prove that Cook may be the man for the job when it comes to steering Apple through the trade war chaos.

But to keep up with global demand—selling more than 220 million iPhones annually—Apple will struggle to quickly distance itself from China, where there’s abundant talent to scale production that Apple says just doesn’t exist in the US. For example, CNBC noted that Foxconn hired 50,000 additional workers last fall at its largest China plant just to build enough iPhones to meet demand during the latest September launches.

As Apple remains dependent on China, Cook will likely need to remain at the table, seeking friendlier terms on both sides to ensure its business isn’t upended for years.

“One can imagine, if there is some sort of grand bargain between US and China coming in the next year or two,” Friedman said, “Tim Cook might as soon as anybody play an intermediary role.”

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Apple updates all its operating systems, brings Apple Intelligence to Vision Pro

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Apple dropped a big batch of medium-size software updates for nearly all of its products this afternoon. The iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, macOS 15.4, tvOS 18.4, and visionOS 2.4 updates are all currently available to download, and each adds a small handful of new features for their respective platforms.

A watchOS 11.4 update was also published briefly, but it’s currently unavailable.

For iPhones and iPads that support Apple Intelligence, the flagship feature in 18.4 is Priority Notifications, which attempts to separate time-sensitive or potentially important notifications from the rest of them so you can see them more easily. The update also brings along the handful of new Unicode 16.0 emoji, a separate app for managing a Vision Pro headset (similar to the companion app for the Apple Watch), and a grab bag of other fixes and minor enhancements.

The Mac picks up two major features in the Sequoia 15.4 update. Users of the Mail app now get the same (optional) automated inbox sorting that Apple introduced for iPhones and iPads in an earlier update, attempting to tame overgrown inboxes using Apple Intelligence language models.

The Mac is also getting a long-standing Quick Start setup feature from the Apple Watch, Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad. On those devices, you can activate them and sign in to your Apple ID by holding another compatible Apple phone or tablet in close proximity. Macs running the 15.4 update finally support the same feature (though it won’t work Mac-to-Mac, since a rear-facing camera is a requirement).

Apple updates all its operating systems, brings Apple Intelligence to Vision Pro Read More »

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RCS texting updates will bring end-to-end encryption to green bubble chats

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One of the best mostly invisible updates in iOS 18 was Apple’s decision to finally implement the Rich Communications Services (RCS) communication protocol, something that is slowly helping to fix the generally miserable experience of texting non-iPhone users with an iPhone. The initial iOS 18 update brought RCS support to most major carriers in the US, and the upcoming iOS 18.4 update is turning it on for a bunch of smaller prepaid carriers like Google Fi and Mint Mobile.

Now that Apple is on board, iPhones and their users can also benefit from continued improvements to the RCS standard. And one major update was announced today: RCS will now support end-to-end encryption using the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, a standard finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 2023.

“RCS will be the first large-scale messaging service to support interoperable E2EE between client implementations from different providers,” writes GSMA Technical Director Tom Van Pelt in the post announcing the updates. “Together with other unique security features such as SIM-based authentication, E2EE will provide RCS users with the highest level of privacy and security for stronger protection from scams, fraud and other security and privacy threats. ”

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Apple patches 0-day exploited in “extremely sophisticated attack”

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Apple on Tuesday patched a critical zero-day vulnerability in virtually all iPhones and iPad models it supports and said it may have been exploited in “an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals” using older versions of iOS.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-24201, resides in Webkit, the browser engine driving Safari and all other browsers developed for iPhones and iPads. Devices affected include the iPhone XS and later, iPad Pro 13-inch, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 3rd generation and later, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 7th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later. The vulnerability stems from a bug that wrote to out-of-bounds memory locations.

Supplementary fix

“Impact: Maliciously crafted web content may be able to break out of Web Content sandbox,” Apple wrote in a bare-bones advisory. “This is a supplementary fix for an attack that was blocked in iOS 17.2. (Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on versions of iOS before iOS 17.2.)”

The advisory didn’t say if the vulnerability was discovered by one of its researchers or by someone outside the company. This attribution often provides clues about who carried out the attacks and who the attacks targeted. The advisory also didn’t say when the attacks began or how long they lasted.

The update brings the latest versions of both iOS and iPadOS to 18.3.2. Users facing the biggest threat are likely those who are targets of well-funded law enforcement agencies or nation-state spies. They should install the update immediately. While there’s no indication that the vulnerability is being opportunistically exploited against a broader set of users, it’s a good practice to install updates within 36 hours of becoming available.

Apple patches 0-day exploited in “extremely sophisticated attack” Read More »