News · 16 Jun 2026 · James Pemberton
If you walked into a UK shop today and asked me which iPhone to buy, I wouldn’t hesitate: the standard iPhone 17 at £799 (256GB) is the one I’d hand to almost everyone. That’s the conclusion I reached in my 2026 best-iPhone buying guide, and after another few months living with the line-up, nothing has shifted my thinking. It gets you a ProMotion display, the A19 chip and dual 48MP cameras — the bits that actually matter day to day — without the Pro tax.
But “best for most people” isn’t the same as “best for you”, and the 2026 range finally gives UK buyers three genuinely distinct choices rather than three flavours of the same phone. So let me walk through who each one is actually for, and where I’d spend my own money.
Why the £799 iPhone 17 is the one I keep recommending (best iPhone)
The thing that used to annoy me about the standard iPhone was the display. For years Apple reserved its smooth 120Hz ProMotion screen for the Pro models, which meant the phone most people bought was the one with the most obviously dated bit of hardware. That’s gone. The iPhone 17 has ProMotion, it has the A19, and it has the dual 48MP camera set-up that, frankly, covers what the overwhelming majority of people photograph.
At £799 for the 256GB model, it’s the sweet spot. You’re not paying for an 8x zoom you’ll use twice a year, and you’re not compromising on the stuff you touch every single time you pick the phone up. The folks at MendMyiPhone reached much the same verdict in their 2026 buying advice — for the money, this is the iPhone that makes sense.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max is a want, not a need
I’m not going to pretend the £1,199 iPhone 17 Pro Max isn’t a lovely thing. The 6.9-inch display is enormous and gorgeous, the 8x optical zoom is genuinely useful if you shoot a lot of distant subjects, and the A19 Pro chip has headroom the standard A19 doesn’t. If you’re a heavy user — someone editing video on the device, gaming hard, or leaning on that long zoom — this is the flagship to get, and my buying guide puts it at the top of the pile for exactly those people. A 2026 UK iPhone comparison from CompareElectronic lines up the same Pro Max advantages.
The bit that would stop me, though, is the £400 gap. That’s a lot of money for features that, for a typical buyer, sit unused. Unless you can point to a specific thing you’ll do with the zoom or the bigger screen, I’d struggle to justify it over the standard 17.
The £599 iPhone 17e changes the budget conversation
The newest piece of the puzzle is the iPhone 17e, which launched in March 2026 at £599 for the 256GB model. It supports Apple Intelligence, which is the headline — you’re no longer locked out of Apple’s AI features just because you bought the cheap one.
What you give up is worth knowing before you buy. There’s no ProMotion, so you’re back to a 60Hz display, and there’s no MagSafe, which rules out the whole ecosystem of magnetic chargers and accessories. Neither is a dealbreaker, but both are the kind of thing you notice. For a first iPhone, a child’s phone, or anyone who simply wants a modern Apple device for as little as possible, the 17e is a smart buy. I just wouldn’t pretend it feels like the £799 model — that £200 buys you a noticeably nicer phone to use.
Should you wait for a discount? Don’t hold your breath
The question I get most often is whether to hang on for a price drop. My honest answer for June 2026: I wouldn’t. Apple’s current iPhones are simply too new to attract meaningful savings — they haven’t been on sale anywhere near long enough to see the deep discounts you find on older models, and I’d be surprised if that changed before the autumn. I dug into the buy-now-or-wait question in more detail in a separate piece on the iPhone 17 and Prime Day, and the short version hasn’t changed: waiting for a meaningful cut on the current range is mostly a way to spend the summer phoneless.
If you want the most up-to-date official line on pricing and availability, Apple’s own UK Newsroom is the place to check before you commit.
What I’d actually do with my own £799
Here’s where I land. If you’ve got £799, buy the standard iPhone 17 and don’t overthink it — it’s the phone that gets the important things right and skips the expensive extras most of us never touch. Stretch to the £1,199 Pro Max only if you can name the specific feature pulling you there, because otherwise that £400 is better off in your pocket. And if £599 is your ceiling, the 17e is a perfectly good iPhone as long as you go in clear-eyed about the missing ProMotion and MagSafe.
The one thing I wouldn’t do is wait for a sale that the evidence says isn’t coming. Buy the one that fits your budget now, and get on with using it.
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