Apple iPhone 17 vs. iPhone 16: Clear Winner

Apple didn’t discontinue the iPhone 16 when the iPhone 17 came out — it discounted its price.

That makes for a simple decision: Save some money and get something tried-and-true, or spend $100 more on a collection of upgrades that significantly improve day-to-day use. Having tested and compared both, there’s no fuzziness around the result: the iPhone 17 earns that premium with superior display tech, extended battery life, more capable cameras (including greater dependence on its new sensors), faster silicon and more storage out of the box.

Price and storage: finding value in the details

The iPhone 16 now costs $699 for the base model with 128 gigabytes of storage. The iPhone 17 starts at $799 and constitutes a base storage amount that is doubled to 256GB — for $999 you can enjoy the phone with 512GB of space, too. Over the average ownership cycle, that extra local space decreases dependence on paid cloud tiers and enables large games and offline media to be maintained on-device. If you’re OK with 128GB, the iPhone 16 costs less. If you’ve ever hit a wall on storage, then well, just the iPhone 17 baseline — you’d be working yourself up about enough to pay for the difference right there.

Display and durability: a genuine quality-of-life leap

Both models sport 460 ppi Super Retina XDR OLED panels, but the iPhone 17’s screen is on another level. For your trouble, you’ll get a 6.3-inch panel with ProMotion (1–120 Hz), an always-on mode that can stretch to the full display area, a maximum brightness of 3,000 nits and a new anti-reflective coating that should make it easier to read in bright light. The iPhone 16 rocks a 6.1-inch bright and sharp display, though with limited capabilities of up to 60 Hz, peaking at 2,000 nits without always-on functionality.

Apple also switched from Ceramic Shield to Ceramic Shield 2 glass on the iPhone 17. Scratch resistance, per Apple’s materials team, is about three times the level of the previous generation. Both phones retain the IP68 rating and aluminum frame, though tougher glass and lower reflectivity on the iPhone 17 meant it felt more premium day to day.

Performance and AI headroom: A19 gets the nod

On the inside, the iPhone 17 is powered by Apple’s A19 with a six-core CPU, five-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine, along with 8GB of RAM. The iPhone 16 features an A18 featuring a similar core layout but with less headroom for advanced workloads. Though the iPhone 17 fared slightly better in more synthetic tests that reviewers recognized, where it netted approximately 3,653 (single-core) and 9,246 (multi-core) in Geekbench 6 — as against scores of 3,267 and 8,004 for the iPhone 16. On AnTuTu, the chasm was wider, with about 2.22 million for the iPhone 17 to approximately 1.54 million for the iPhone 16 — nearly a half-generation leap. 3DMark runs queuing was visibly bolstered too (27.4 fps vs 23.2 fps).

What are those numbers, in human terms? Beyond snappier app displays and smoother mobile games, the A19’s neural throughput gives on-device AI features Apple is increasingly pushing across the ecosystem more elbow room. And if you expect to hold on to your phone for several years, that added margin counts.

Cameras: ultrawide, selfie updates that matter

The main 48MP Fusion camera is common to both, delivering huge 24MP shots by default, but dropping to a 12MP 2x optical-quality crop when you require some reach.

The big cutout is for the ultrawide and front camera. The iPhone 17 gets a 48MP ultrawide camera with a fast f/1.2 aperture and a 120-degree field of view, which clearly means much crisper edge-to-edge images and also more flexibility in cropping. The iPhone 16’s 12MP ultrawide is competitive in bright conditions, but (in the image above) can’t quite keep up with the iPhone 17’s detail retention at frame edges or when faced by tricky indoor scenes.

Up front, the 18MP camera in iPhone 17 also adds Center Stage-style subject tracking and a juicy square sensor that’ll capture vertical or horizontal video (as seen below) regardless of how you hold the phone.

Content-friendly bonuses like stabilized selfie video and dual-capture (front and rear cams at the same time) will delight vloggers and live-streamers. The iPhone 17 supports both 4K60 video and Apple’s powerful stabilization pipeline, but creators will enjoy that it’s finally become so flexible.

Battery life: physical improvements, not peripheral changes

That said, it’s really the everyday win for iPhone 17 that is all about battery life. This compares to Apple’s own guidance of up to 30 hours local video playback (27 streaming) against 22 and 18 hours on the iPhone 16. On the same 1080p streaming-based rundown at maximum brightness, the iPhone 17 lasted a very strong 24 hours and 31 minutes compared to the iPhone 16’s relatively weak near-17-hours-and-47-minutes result. That is nearly a 40 percent advantage — enough to turn an anxiety-producing long travel day into something unremarkable.

Design, size and colors: Business as usual but polished

These are clearly sibling phones: flat aluminum rails, Dynamic Island up top and a clean dual-camera module on the back. The iPhone 17 is a little bit taller and heavier than the iPhone 16, but it really doesn’t make enough difference when you’re holding them. Both maintain IP68 protection and muted colorways: the iPhone 17 comes in Black, Mist Blue, Lavender, Sage and White, while the iPhone 16 sticks with Black, Pink, Teal, Ultramarine and White.

The bottom line: spend the extra $100 for iPhone 17

If your main concern is value for the least amount of money for a modern iPhone, you still can’t go wrong with an iPhone 16. But for most people, the iPhone 17 is the clear winner: a larger and significantly superior screen, sturdier glass, a genuinely faster chip, higher-resolution external cameras — not to mention night-and-day improvements in battery life and base storage. Tangible improvements across all the stuff you actually notice — screen smoothness, outdoor visibility, camera versatility, endurance — make it an easy call.

Simply put, the iPhone 17 isn’t simply newer; it’s meaningfully superior in the ways that matter. For an additional $100, that’s the no-brainer option.