Apple did something different with this year’s iPhone 17 series, and it’s not just the bold redesign or Cosmic Orange colorway. The eSIM-only variants of the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max got larger batteries compared to the models with the physical Nano SIM tray. This marks the first time Apple is selling the same device with different battery capacities depending on the region.
Nano SIM vs eSIM iPhone 17 Pro battery size
The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max sold in Bahrain, Canada, Guam, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the U.S., and the U.S. Virgin Islands get the larger batteries. During its September keynote, Apple showed how it actually used the space occupied by the Nano SIM tray to fit a larger battery on the eSIM variants.
Apple iPhone 17 Pro
According to Apple, the eSIM 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max should deliver 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 an eSIM iPhone 17 Pro and went straight to a battery test following our usual methodology.
With a 6.35% larger capacity battery, we were expecting some minor gains and sure enough, the eSIM iPhone 17 Pro delivered. Without further ado, here’s what our battery life test revealed.
The eSIM iPhone 17 Pro (A3256) is armed with a 4,252mAh battery and earned an Active Use 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 categories, we achieved 24:01 hours in our call test, which is a 3% improvement. iPhones have traditionally struggled in this portion of our test, so the added 47 minutes of talk time is a welcome improvement.
We saw the biggest gain during our web test, where the eSIM iPhone 17 Pro managed an impressive 13:41 hours – over an hour more than its Nano SIM counterpart.
Interestingly enough, we did not see any improvement in the video streaming department, where the eSIM model scored 22:40 hours compared to 22:47 hours for the Nano SIM version. We made sure to repeat the test several times, but we never got Apple’s claimed two additional hours of playback.
The larger battery capacity on the eSIM model did show up in the gaming test, where it achieved 10:58 hours endurance – a healthy 44 minutes longer running time than what we got on the physical SIM model.
To recap, the eSIM iPhone 17 Pro scored a 5.3% improvement in its Active Use Score over the Nano SIM variant. The gains were most prominent in the web and game portions of our battery life test, with a slightly better call test score and no improvements on the video streaming front.
Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see when Apple decides to abandon physical SIMs altogether and bring the same battery capacity to its iPhones across all regions. Implementing silicon-carbon tech would be another logical step, but there’s not much indication that it will happen anytime soon in iPhone land.
