iPhone 17 Pro surfaces early in shock sighting

With the iPhone 17 lineup announcement coming up this fall, iPhone 17 Pro, which shouldn’t launch until September, seems to have made a public appearance in an early, as yet unconfirmed, sighting, so the mysterious device could still be something completely different.

As it happens, X account Skyfops has shared two photographs of a man carrying what could be an iPhone 17 Pro, and Bloomberg’s Managing Editor Mark Gurman reshared the post, which said “I just spotted a test development iPhone in the wild,” on July 28.

In one of the images, the man is wearing reflective sunglasses and holding what might be an iPhone inside of a thick black protective case, potentially an attempt to disguise the design. He also appears to have an iPhone 16 Pro in his other hand, with a sticker on its back, possibly hiding a data matrix code that allows Apple to track internal iPhones used by its employees.

Purported images of the iPhone 17 Pro

What made many believe that this truly is the upcoming iPhone 17 Pro is the fact that the back of the device appears to contain circular openings in the top-right corner for what might be the LED flash and LiDAR Scanner. This is in line with the rumored features of the device, which will supposedly have a rectangular camera bump, with the LED flash, rear microphone, and LiDAR Scanner vertically aligned on the right side of the bump.

Furthermore, Skyfops also made a claim in the comments that the other man in the second photo “was security and trying to go in front of the iPhone to hide it.” The sighting possibly took place in Los Angeles, considering that this is where the user is located according to their X bio.

Meanwhile, some iPhone models currently sold in the United States include OLED displays supplied by Chinese display maker BOE, which is facing a ban after the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) declared it had infringed on Samsung Display’s confidential OLED technology, and the ban might affect the devices carrying BOE-made displays.