Xiaomi 17 Ultra VS iPhone 17 Pro
▸ WHICH ONE HOLDS UP BETTER
iPhone 17 Pro holds up better here: it's rated BUY THE HYPE, while Xiaomi 17 Ultra is QUESTION IT.
Verdict🟡 QUESTION IT🟢 BUY THE HYPE
The RealityDxOMark's independent lab testing gave the 17 Ultra a combined camera score of 166 (170 photo / 157 video) -- a strong result that beats the Honor Magic 8 Pro, but one that lands the phone 6th overall, behind the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra, the Vivo X300 Pro, and a tie between the Oppo Find X8 Ultra and Apple iPhone 17 Pro, according to DxOMark's own ranking as covered by Gizmochina and Phandroid. Android Central's hands-on review was more enthusiastic, calling the imaging system an upgrade that 'makes the Galaxy S26 Ultra obsolete,' and multiple outlets including PetaPixel, CineD and LeicaRumors independently confirmed the headline claim: this is the first Leica APO-certified lens on any smartphone.IEEE Spectrum's engineering teardown confirmed the vapor chamber is a real, functional heat-spreading change, not just a marketing term, and testers found it does reduce throttling under sustained load. Independent demos on Hacker News and Reddit's r/LocalLLaMA showed the phone genuinely running a 400B-parameter LLM and other local models at usable speeds, which lines up with the sustained-performance claim rather than contradicting it.
SHORT ANSWER
Xiaomi 17 Ultra: Mostly true but oversold. The Xiaomi 17 Ultra genuinely is the first smartphone with a Leica APO-certified telephoto lens, and its camera is excellent, but independent DxOMark testing ranks it 6th overall, behind rivals like the Vivo X300 Pro, not the outright best camera phone the marketing implies.
iPhone 17 Pro: Yes — the iPhone 17 Pro's vapor chamber cooling claim is real and independently verified, and the phone genuinely runs large local AI models well, matching Apple's marketing.