Name: iPhone 13 Pro vs iPhone 17 Pro: Watch This Before You BUY or UPGRADE
Uploaded: 2025-11-11T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 9 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This phone in this graphite color was my daily driver for a solid two years.

Adverbs of degree

It's been an incredible device and honestly, even now in 2025, it's still an amazing iPhone for most daily casual tasks.

And this, this is the brand new iPhone 17 Pro.

and probably the reason you're here, is after four years,

is this the upgrade we've actually been waiting for?

In this video, we're going to break that down side by side.

This is for anyone still holding onto a 13 Pro or maybe even an 11 or 12 Pro,

and you're wondering if now is the time to make that big jump.

I skipped the 14 Pro, went with the iPhone 15 Pro,

and then skipped the 16 Pro because for me the upgrades felt a bit, you know, incremental.

So today we're looking at a true four generation leap.

We'll compare everything from the design and display to the performance and battery.

Alright, let's start with how these phones look and feel.

A surgical grade stainless steel frame with these sharp flat edges.

It has this heft, this dense premium feel that honestly still feels top tier today.

The display is a 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR screen.

And this was the phone that first brought us promotion.

That super smooth 120 Hz adaptive refresh rate was a genuine game changer back in 2021.

And it still makes scrolling feel incredibly fluid.

Instead of stainless steel, we have a unibody aluminum design.

And I know what you might be thinking, aluminum, isn't that a downgrade?

And yeah, when you hold them side by side, the 13 Pro feels denser.

The more rounded edges feel great in the hand and it's surprisingly light.

The screen is also a bit bigger at 6.3 inches.

But because the bezels are so much thinner, the overall size difference isn't that dramatic.

And this display is ridiculously bright, hitting 3000 nits peak outdoor brightness.

But with this new aluminum design, there is something really important to consider.

Early reviews and durability tests like from JerryRigEverything showed that the anodized coating on the aluminum can chip,

especially on the sharp corners of this new camera plateau.

It seems to be most noticeable on the colored models like Cosmic Orange and Deep Blue.

That's honestly why I went with this silver model.

It should hide any potential nicks a lot better.

So if you're going caseless, that's definitely something to keep in mind.

Honestly, for most things, the iPhone 13 Pro is still fantastic.

The A15 bionic chip in here is no slouch.

I ran Geekbench 6 on it and it pulled a 2417 on single core and 5766 on multicore.

For day-to-day stuff, opening apps, swiping around, multitasking, it's still incredibly smooth.

A big reason for that is the six gigabytes of ram, which really helps keep apps from reloading in the background.

It even handles the new liquid glass design language in iOS 26 really well,

which is pretty resource heavy with all its new fluid animations.

But the iPhone 17 Pro is just an absolute monster.

It's got the new A19 Pro chip and my Geekbench 6 scores were just insane.

3822 for single core and 9848 for multi core.

For context, that multi core score is faster than an M2 iPad Pro.

It also has 12 gigabytes of RAM, double the 13 Pro.

But here's the real magic, how it handles that power.

For the first time, Apple put a vapor chamber cooling system in an iPhone.

When I was setting this phone up, which is usually when iPhones get pretty warm, this stayed noticeably cool.

This is a huge deal for sustained performance, especially for gaming.

And this is where that move to aluminum makes perfect sense.

The vapor chamber pulls heat away from the chip,

and the aluminum body acts like a big radiator to get rid of that heat, which it does way better than titanium or steel.

My iPhone 13 Pro's battery health is down to 71%.

And at this point, it's... it's pretty bad.

I mean, if I try to use this as my main phone for a day, I'm charging it two, sometimes three times.

The standby drain is also way faster than it used to be.

A quick look at forums shows tons of users saying the same thing.

Once the battery health drops below 80%, the daily endurance just falls off a cliff.

The A15 chip is still so capable, it makes the failing battery feel even more frustrating.

The iPhone 17 Pro, on the other hand, is a massive leap forward.

and that's partly thanks to the new unibody design that made room for a larger battery.

Paired with the more efficient A19 Pro chip, it's a night and day difference.

This is one of the most significant real world upgrades you'll feel coming from a 13 Pro.

Okay, let's talk about the biggest upgrade of all.

This is where the four years really, really show.

The iPhone 13 Pro has a fantastic triple 12 megapixel system.

You get a 3x optical zoom and the digital zoom goes up to 15x.

It also introduced cinematic mode, which was mind blowing at the time, letting you create that rack focus effect in video.

Though it was limited to 1080p for a day-to-day or quick photo for social media, it's still solid.

But this is where you feel the age the most.

With the iPhone 17 Pro, we're going from a triple 12 megapixel system to a triple 48 megapixel system.

The detail from the new larger sensors is just on another level,

On the 17 Pro, because of those 48 megapixel sensors, you get incredible quality at more in 5x, 1x, a 2x crop, a 4x optical zoom,

It's like having a whole bag of lenses in your pocket.

And you can push the digital zoom all the way to 40x.

For video, you can now shoot in 4K at 120 FPS for some truly cinematic slow motion.

A big step up from 4K at 60 on the 13 Pro.

And the front camera is this wild new 18 megapixel center stage camera that can shoot landscape video even when you're holding the phone vertically.