Apple has a long history of taking things out of the iPhone. The headphone jack disappeared. The charger vanished from the box. The SIM card tray started disappearing in the U.S. with the iPhone 14.
Usually, Apple pulls something out, insists it’s the future, and you’re left buying more accessories.
The iPhone 17 Pro is where that story flips. The missing SIM tray is finally doing something useful: it’s making room for a bigger battery.
Regulatory filings in China suggest the smaller 17 Pro will ship with a 4,252 mAh cell, which is nearly 20 percent larger than the iPhone 16 Pro’s battery.
That’s a huge jump for Apple, a company that usually counts improvements in vague “up to two hours longer” slides.
Combine that with the new A19 Pro chip’s expected efficiency gains, and we might finally see the smaller Pro model start to rival the Max in endurance.
If that happens, it changes the lineup in a big way. For years, the Pro Max has been the obvious pick if you cared about battery life.
The regular Pro was a compromise: all the features, less staying power. This year, that gap might narrow, and suddenly the smaller Pro looks like the better balance of portability and performance.
There’s also a bigger picture here. Apple is expected to push eSIM-only models into Europe this year, which means no tray, more space, and bigger batteries for more people.
China will still get SIM slots because of local rules, but for much of the world, Apple is turning what looked like a regulatory headache into a hardware upgrade.
Do you think the iPhone 17 Pro finally beats the Pro Max in daily use? Share your thoughts in the comments.
