Apple did something different with this year’s iPhone 17 series, and it’s not just a bold design or a cosmic orange colorway. The ESIM-only variants of the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max got bigger batteries compared to the models with a physical nano-SIM tray. This marks the first time that Apple is selling the same device with different battery capacities depending on the region.
Nano SIM vs SIM iPhone 17 Pro Battery Size
iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max sold out Bahrain, Canada, Guam, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, United States, and US Virgin Islands Get bigger batteries. During its September keynote, Apple demonstrated how it used the space occupied by the Nano SIM tray to fit a larger battery on ESIM variants.
Apple iPhone 17 Pro
According to Apple, the ESIM 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max should provide 2 additional hours of video playback compared to their physical SIM counterparts. But what about web browsing, calls and gaming?
We recently got our hands on the SIM iPhone 17 Pro and went straight to the battery test following our usual procedure.
With a 6.35% larger capacity battery, we were expecting some modest gains and to a large extent, the ESIM iPhone 17 Pro delivered. Without further ado, here’s what our battery life test revealed.
The ESIM iPhone 17 Pro (A3256) is equipped with a 4,252mAH battery and achieved an active usage score of 16:12 hours. That’s 49 minutes more than its Nano SIM counterpart (A3523), which packs a 3,998 mAh cell.
Breaking down the category, we achieved 24:01 hours in our call test, a 3% improvement. iPhones have traditionally struggled in this part of our tests, so the extra 47 minutes of talk time is a welcome improvement.
We saw the biggest advantage during our web test, where the ESIM iPhone 17 Pro managed an impressive 13:41 hours — an hour longer than its Nano SIM counterpart.
Interestingly, we didn’t see any improvement in the video streaming department, where the ESIM model scored 22:40 hours compared to the Nano SIM version’s 22:47 hours. We made sure to repeat the test several times, but we never got the two extra hours of playback Apple claims.
The larger battery capacity on the ESIM model showed up in the gaming test, where it managed 10:58 hours of endurance. That’s a healthy 44 minutes longer than what we got on our physical SIM model.
To recap, the SIM iPhone 17 Pro improved its Active Usage score by 5.3 percent in the Nano SIM variant. The gains were most noticeable in the web and game portions of our battery life test, with slightly better call test scores and no improvement on the video streaming front.
Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see if Apple decides to ditch physical SIMs altogether and bring the same battery capacity to its iPhones across all regions. Implementing Silicon Carbon tech would be another logical move, but there’s not much indication that will happen anytime soon in iPhone land.
