One of this year’s hottest upcoming phone series is set to debut shortly. Yes, it’s time for the iPhone 17, which is set to appear alongside the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max. And there’s also a super-thin iPhone Air as well. Like the Galaxy S25 Edge, that will likely have a smaller battery but sleeker finish.
You can read more about the iPhone 17 in our dedicated piece – but when will it actually be out?
We now know iPhone 17 pre-orders start on Friday 12 September with the general iPhone 17 release date on Friday 19 September.
How much will the iPhone 17 series cost?
The iPhone 17 starts at $799/£799 for 256GB of storage. You can get a 512GB model, too, but larger than that and you need to go Pro or get the iPhone Air. The Air is expensive in comparison, starting at $999/£999 for 256GB and it’s also available in 512GB and 1TB.
The iPhone 17 Pro starts at $1099/£1099, with 256GB of storage as standard. Again it’s also available in 512GB and 1TB versions, while the Pro Max (starting at $1199/£1199 for 256GB) can also be purchased with a crazy high 2TB of storage on board in addition to the 512GB and 1TB versions.
Apple tries to avoid year-on-year price increases for its phone range, instead waiting several generations before demanding a little extra cash. This year seemed like it would be the exception – Jefferies analyst Edison Lee suggested a $50 increase might be incoming back in July while Jong Wook Lee, senior research at Samsung Securities Research Center suggested last year that a price hike is inevitable to counteract a reduction in profit margin. However, the hike didn’t happen.
What happened on previous iPhone release dates?
The iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro were introduced to the world on September 9 2024, exactly a year before the iPhone 17. You could pre-order the iPhone 16 on Friday September 13 and they were then fully available on Friday September 20. Even though the 2024 launch was held on a Monday instead of Apple’s preferred Tuesday, the firm stuck to its usual pattern of a pre-order on the next Friday and availability the following Friday.
I do wonder if the Monday date was chosen simply because it enabled Apple to dominate the whole of the week’s tech news cycle, but there may have been a more practical reason, of course and it hasn’t continued the trend in 2025.
While 2024’s Monday reveal was out of the ordinary, it wasn’t the first Apple event that broke with tradition. 2022’s iPhone 14 launch took place on a Wednesday and was a week earlier than usual. In 2020 the global situation meant later availability for some handsets. And going back to 2017, the fresh-start iPhone X didn’t make it out the gate until November 2017.
When has the iPhone launch event taken place in the past?
The original iPhone came out in January 2007 (though the UK launch was towards the end of that year) with some launches taking place in June and even October after that. But since the iPhone 5, things have settled in the September slot.
The exception to this was in 2020, when the delay to the iPhone 12 lineup was caused by the global slowdown in production due to the pandemic. The iPhone 13 series returned to normal and the iPhone 14 launch was earlier than the launch 12 months before it.
- iPhone 5 – 12 September 2012
- iPhone 5S / 5C – 10 September 2013
- iPhone 6 / 6 Plus – 9 September 2014
- iPhone 6S / 6S Plus – 9 September 2015
- iPhone 7 / 7 Plus – 7 September 2016
- iPhone 8 / 8 Plus / X – 12 September 2017
- iPhone XS / XS Max / XR – 12 September 2018
- iPhone 11 – 10 September 10 2019
- iPhone 12 – 13 October 13 2020 (later due to manufacturing delays with the pandemic)
- iPhone 13 – 14 September 2021
- iPhone 14 – 7 September 2022
- iPhone 15 – 12 September 2023
- iPhone 16 – 9 September 2024
- iPhone 17 – 9 September 2025
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