It’s that time of year again – the new iPhone generation is upon us, and while the foldable iPhone Duo stole the spotlight this year, the iPhone 18 Pro series is still hard to ignore. So while we are waiting on the iPhone Duo to arrive, we are kickstarting the iPhone 18 Pro review process.
iPhone 18 Pro vs. 18 Pro Max
Aside from the new hero Burgundy color, the 18 Pro also comes in Glacier, Black and Silver colorways. The one we have right here is the Glacier paint job.
A subtle change to the appearance is the smaller Dynamic Island, which can now display up to three live activities at once, up from two. The rest of the design and build remain identical to the outgoing model.
Hardware-wise, the iPhone 18 Pro now comes with a more powerful and more efficient Apple A20 Pro chip. Apple highlights a new GPU core and a second neural engine used for AI-related tasks. We also expect better thermals this year as Apple has improved the passive cooling system of the new iPhone 18 Pro series.
The battery has also made some gains this year, offering 4,056 mAh capacity with a physical nanoSIM slot and 4,288 mAh for the eSIM-only model. That’s quite the modest upgrade over the previous 17 Pro, which has 3,998 mAh and 4,252 mAh, respectively. We doubt that the upgrade will make any difference, unless the SoC is significantly more efficient than before.
Even though Apple doesn’t share exact charging power numbers, it does advertise slightly faster charging, so we can’t wait to test that one out.
Finally, the camera system on the new model remains largely unchanged – it gets the same 48MP trio of cameras on the back with a 5x telephoto unit, but the aperture is now variable, meaning it can be adjusted from f/1.5 to f/4.0. We have our doubts about the variable aperture’s impact on real-world performance, as this is not the first phone to have it, but we will make sure to put that to the test.
iPhone 18 Pro series’ variable aperture
Stay tuned for the full review!