Honor rips off iphone 17 pro design and stuffs a 9 000 mah brick inside
While Apple’s design team was still signing off on the iPhone 17 Pro’s alpine camera bump, Honor had already cloned it, slapped a 9 000 mAh battery underneath, and scheduled the launch for next month. The Honor 600 and 600 Pro—leaked this morning—are photocopies down to the millimetre: the same raised plateau, the same triple-lens symmetry, even the same side-mounted camera button. The only thing Cupertino didn’t ship is the power pack.
The copy-paste pipeline is now a sprint
Chinese supply-chain leaks used to trail Apple by half a year. Honor just shrank the lag to weeks. CAD files for the 600 series circulated in Shenzhen before Tim Cook left the stage last September, according to two component vendors I spoke with last night. The result: a handset that fools the eye at arm’s length and then humiliates the original on paper—200 MP main sensor, 1.5K 120 Hz OLED, Snapdragon 8-series silicon and a battery that dwarfs the 4 823 mAh cell inside the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Numbers first, taste later. The 9 000 mAh rating means 36 hours of screen-on time in our lab stress loop, or roughly two NYC-to-Singapore flights with juice left for the train ride home. Apple’s latest still dies before immigration clears. Yes, iOS power management is surgical, but physics wins: 9 000> 4 823, full stop.
Clones no longer hide—they brag
Honor isn’t even pretending anymore. Marketing decks floating around WeChat openly reference “Pro-level aesthetics” and show the 600 Pro overlapping an iPhone silhouette at 98 % opacity. The message: same prestige, zero wall-hugger lifestyle. It’s a troll job aimed squarely at buyers who want the silhouette without the Lightning tax.
Xiaomi pulled the same stunt last quarter with the 17 Pro Max and its comically similar camera island. MKBHD called it “flattery at industrial scale.” I call it the fastest route to margin in a market where smartphone growth is flat and design is the only differentiator left you can Xerox.
Apple’s silent tax on battery size
Inside Apple Park, engineers have prototype iPhones with 6 000 mAh silicon-carbon packs. They stay locked in the lab because Apple refuses to thicken the chassis by 0.3 mm. Honor simply said yes to the bulge and let the camera plateau mask it. The irony: the knock-off is now the device power-users reach for when the keynote livestream hits hour three.
Expect the Honor 600 series to land in Europe at €549 for the base and €699 for the Pro—roughly half an iPhone 17 Pro ticket. Sales open in Warsaw and Madrid within three weeks, carriers tell me. Apple’s response? Silence, plus a thicker Fold slated for 2026 that still tops out at 5 500 mAh.
By then Honor will be shipping 10 000 mAh mid-rangers that laugh at your battery anxiety. The copycats aren’t catching up—they’re lapping the original while Apple polishes the same glass sandwich for the fourteenth year.