Orange is going to be the main thing I remember about 2025 – specifically the ‘cosmic’ orange of the iPhone 17 Pro. From September onwards, it was everywhere: billboards, buses, backpockets, and even businesses.
Every other video in my Instagram feed featured an orange iPhone 17; it was all over social media. I saw it in cinema adverts, and YouTube videos that weren’t even tech-related – absolutely everywhere.
There was also a standard iPhone 17 and an iPhone Air, which briefly had some attention, but both were completely overshadowed by the sheer charisma of the orange iPhone 17 Pro. It says a lot about the power of marketing and the talent at Apple that they can keep a nearly 20-year-old brand at the top of a competitive market by simply selecting a certain shade of orange.
And, in an annoyingly ironic turn of events, I see the iPhone 17 everywhere, but I can’t get a review unit from anyone – come on, Apple, help a guy out! We covered both the M4 and M5 MacBook Pro this year, as well as the M5 iPad Pro and the adorable M4 Mac Mini… we just need an iPhone 17 to complete the full business round-up of Apple offerings.
We have reached a point where employers don’t necessarily offer work phones but, intentionally or not, they utilize the fact that most of their employees have one. Apple literally uses this fact in its marketing, suggesting businesses should buy Mac as it syncs with your employees’ device of choice. Reportedly, there are over a billion active iPhones in use.
And this is one of the reasons why ITPro will be reviewing smartphones again. Whether they’re personal or business devices, you will undoubtedly need them for office work. How can you work in an office these days, with a company-issue laptop, and not have a smartphone? It seems impossible. The bare minimum for multifactor authentication is a dumb or feature phone. You can still verify yourself on a Nokia 3210 via a text message. But there are now multiple features and use cases, not just security, where your personal device can aid your work computer (and your job, in general).
However, there are also too many acronyms for smartphone business strategies: BYOD, CYOD, COPE, COBO, COSU… the list might well go on and on. These are just what I know or have heard of. But do any of them really help you and your business? My Pixel 8a will ask me to verify it's me logging into my work-issue M1 MacBook Pro, but no one from IT told me this was part of the process. Am I contractually obliged to have a smartphone? What if I want to do a digital detox in my private life? Seems like that is not really an option.
Avoiding the orange glow of the iPhone 17 Pro was also not an option – if only we could get a review unit.
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