iPhone 18 Pro Reviews Showcase Its Four Apertures Behind Familiar Glass

Photo credit: MKBHD
Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro keeps last year’s aluminum frame, 8.75 mm thickness, and camera plateau almost unchanged, so first glance will fool most people into thinking nothing moved. Engineers did color-match the rear glass to the frame, killing the two-tone look that marked the 17 Pro. Burgundy shifts between deep red and purple with the light and has become the color most reviewers mention first. Glacier is a quieter light blue, Silver finally looks clean, and Black is the darkest Pro finish Apple has offered.

The weight of the phones has increased slightly. The 6.3-inch model now weighs 211 grams, while the 6.9-inch Pro Max weighs 249 grams, which is roughly the limit of how much you’d want to carry around every day. Some people believe the smaller one is still treatable, however the larger one is a borderline situation. However, the phone’s footprint has not changed, so if you already have a case, you can continue to use it without issue. The front of the phone is now covered with Ceramic Shield 2, the IP68 rating remains, and the sides are still aluminum, albeit they appear to pick up nicks more quickly than the old titanium frames did.

Since Apple relocated the Face ID camera beneath the screen, Dynamic Island has reduced by almost a quarter. That means the pill can now store three Live activities at once, rather than just two, and you can notice the extra space when you’re viewing movies or playing video games. The display sizes remain same at 6.3 and 6.9 inches, as do the 120 Hz ProMotion panel, Always-On mode, and 3,000-nit outdoor peak brightness.

The 48-megapixel primary camera now has six laser-cut polymer blades within that are thinner than a human hair. These blades can open to f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8, and f/4.0. When they’re wide open at f/1.48, they can gather around half a stop more light than the 17 Pro’s fixed f/1.78, resulting in approximately 50% more light on the same sized 1/1.28-inch sensor. When you snap a shot in nite mode, the exposures are shorter, the ISO is lower, and blurring from holding the phone is less prevalent. As the blades are stopped down to f/4, a group or a close subject can stay sharp from front to back without having to rely on software blur, and if the blades close in, starbursts appear around streetlights as well as string lights. Most of the time, the auto mode keeps the blades at f/1.8 or switches to f/1.48 when it gets dark.

According to one reviewer, the sharpness peaks at f/2.8 and remains fine at f/1.8 before becoming somewhat weaker at either end, most likely due to edge fall-off or diffraction. What’s remarkable is that at f/1.48, you get true optical bokeh on close subjects, despite the fact that Portrait mode still overlays its own depth map and looks very identical to last year’s model. Low-light crops from both the center and the edges appeared to outperform the 17 Pro in side-by-side tests, and video benefits as well, with nearly four stops of range, smoother motion if you slow down the shutter, and a slew of post-capture effects that you can apply later. Autofocus is also fairly dependable, keeping the subject in focus even when it moves out of frame.

Pro Controls have now been included into the default camera app. With a single swipe, you can adjust the aperture, shutter speed (from 1/6000 to one second), white balance, and even a live histogram, and third-party apps such as Halide can also access the same iris. Photographic Styles 3 has added a few texture sliders, giving you greater control over things like Soft Skin, Glow, and Film grain. Reviewers found this was pleasant and tasteful, rather than going overboard. The 48-megapixel ultrawide and 4x/8x telephoto cameras retain their fixed apertures, while the front-facing camera remains the 18-megapixel Center Stage module.

A20 Pro is the world’s first two-nanometer chip to appear in a smartphone. Memory is given its own real estate right next to the Silicon rather than being piled on top, a tactic adopted from the M-series Macs, and there’s a vapor chamber with more than triple the surface area of last year’s version, which does an excellent job of keeping things cool. The CPU scores are 22 to 27 percent higher than the A19 Pro in terms of speed, the GPU is 40 percent higher, and the dual 16 core Neural Engine is doubling down on AI processing capacity. More amazingly, testers reported virtually no throttling during marathon video or gaming sessions, and the phone remained cool, in a positive way, even after hours of use. MKBHD referred to the chip as the unsung hero of what was essentially an S-year update.

The battery life stats were what drew everyone’s attention because they exceeded the usual yearly rise. Apple claims 36 hours of video playback on the regular Pro model and 45 on the Pro Max, and independent web-browsing tests came close with 16 hours and 17 minutes on the smaller phone and slightly less than 18 hours and 27 minutes on the Pro Max, both of which are about an hour longer than their 17-series counterparts. In the real world, a typical day of mixed usage will provide you with one full day of hands-on time from the Pro and one and a half day for the Pro Max. Then there’s wired charging, which provides a 50% boost in just 15 minutes if you have a charger with a 40 watt rating or greater.