iPhone 18 Pro review – forget the Duo, this is a serious professional tool

The iPhone 18 Pro is another step forward for Apple in terms of performance, with a new A20 Pro chip and upgrades to its battery, thermal management and camera system. It sits as the pinnacle of the company’s phone technology, though this year it has a shiny new stablemate that is in danger of stealing the limelight.

It’s perhaps no accident that there is a month between the on-sale dates of the iPhone 18 Pro / Pro Max and the new foldable iPhone Duo. That time gives those looking for a replacement a chance to properly consider the Pro models, as on paper at least, it’s the better phone.

While the Duo offers the spectacle of a folding screen, revealing a 7.6-inch display from its passport-sized form, the iPhone 18 Pro and larger 18 Pro Max offer better battery life and a better camera system – complete with full Pro camera features.

This year, more than ever, the 18 Pro and Pro Max feel like professional tools, with their ProRAW, Spatial video, ProRes RAW and variable aperture on the main 48MP camera. With the Pro Max, you get a generous 6.9-inch display for that big-screen playback, while the smaller iPhone 18 Pro still offers a 6.3-inch display and sits easily in your pocket, weighing less and being both thinner and narrower than the Duo.

I upgraded from the cosmic orange iPhone 17 Pro to the classier burgundy iPhone 18 Pro to see how the new model performs and to see how much of an improvement it is for those annual upgraders.

How much is the iPhone 18 Pro?

The iPhone 18 Pro was first announced on 9 September 2026 and went on sale on 18 September. Prices start from £1199 / $1199 in the UK and US, respectively. In Europe, it starts from €1449 and in Australia from A$2099. Alternatively, the larger iPhone 18 Pro Max starts from £1299 / $1299 / €1599 / A$2299.

This year, there are four colours to choose from, including Glacier Blue and Burgundy in addition to silver and black options. Capacities start from 256GB for the base model and go up to 2TB for both the Pro and Pro Max, which takes the price up to £2399 / $2399 for the Pro or £2499 / $2499 for the Pro Max.

Design and build

From the outside, very little has changed with the iPhone 18 Pro, compared to the 17 Pro. The dimensions are identical, as are the button placements and camera bump, meaning that cases for the 17 Pro will fit the 18 Pro, and the same for the Max models.

The only real difference is the weight, with the new Pro model being 7 grams (0.24 oz) heavier, or 18g (0.63 oz) in the case of the Pro Max. It’s not enough of a difference to feel in the hand, but it is at least a distinction.

The iPhone 17 Pro was defined by its bold Cosmic Orange colour, which divided opinion among buyers. This year, Burgundy is the main marketed colour, and projects a calmer, classier feel. It’s a deep colour with all elements of the phone perfectly colour-matched, including the camera bump.

Notably, there was no black option in last year’s 17 Pro and Pro Max, so it’s nice to see that return here. The black also feels much darker than previous black iPhones, thanks to the paintwork's matte effect. It reminds me much more of the midnight black used on MacBook Pro models.

New Features

The real change comes inside the 18 Pro. It features a brand new A20 Pro chip, with huge performance upgrades over the previous A19 Pro, including a new CPU and a GPU with an additional core.

To keep the phone, and specifically the chip, cool, the 18 Pro has a larger vapour chamber, with three times the surface area. With this thermal management, the A20 Pro chip is able to sustain high performance for longer.

Then there’s the battery. Not only is this a new integrated design, but it’s also larger in capacity. According to energy labels required for European sales, the Pro and Pro Max models sold here feature a 4,056 mAh and 5,391 mAh capacity, respectively, which is 1.45% and 11.8% greater than the 17 Pro models. The US model, which doesn’t feature a physical SIM slot, has a larger battery, still.

On the display, there’s a redesigned Dynamic Island, which is 25% smaller than the previous version. This has been achieved by placing the IR camera, used for Face ID, under the screen.

There’s improvement on the camera side too, with a new variable aperture on the main camera, giving real depth-of-field control to the iPhone for the first time – more on that shortly.

Display

The Super Retina XDR Display on the iPhone 18 Pro is a 6.3-inch OLED display with 2622 x 1206 pixel resolution. The Pro Max has the larger 6.9-inch display with 2868 x 1320 pixels. Both feature ProMotion technology, which provides an adaptive refresh rate, going up to 120Hz and as low as 1Hz for that lock screen.

With a typical peak brightness of 1,000 nits, it also offers a peak HDR brightness of 1,600 nits and an outdoor mode that pushes it up to 3,000 nits. For nighttime use, it will also go as low as 1 nit minimum, should you need it.

While these are the same specs as last year’s models, it’s a fantastic screen. It delivers great detail and colour, whether you’re watching movies, browsing images, gaming or just browsing the web.

On a bright sunny day, the auto setting turns the brightness to full while outside, and the screen is just as clear as when inside at 50% brightness. I also really like the low brightness settings when looking at your phone first thing in the morning or last thing at night, without flooding the whole room with light.

The smaller Dynamic Island on the 18 Pro is a notable improvement here. Though still more than just a punch hole, when not showing extra information, it takes up a lot less of that top bar. As this space doesn’t sit under videos or most games, you wouldn’t notice otherwise, but it gives the top bar more breathing room.

It also provides more space for the Dynamic Island to show information, adding small symbols and numbers for anything from music playback to sports scores and Uber pick ups. It can then expand for those full live activities.

I watched a range of different content on the iPhone 18 Pro, from The Last First: Winter K2 documentary and the latest series of Slow Horses on Apple TV, through to Taylor Swift music videos on the YouTube app. The one thing that hit me, besides the image quality, was the sound, especially in landscape mode.

Like the 17 Pro models, the 18 Pro supports Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos playback from its stereo speakers, with vents on the bottom and top of the phone. So while it sounds good while holding the phone in portrait mode, moving to a landscape position gives you that full separation.

Rear cameras

Principally, the camera system on the iPhone 18 Pro (and Pro Max) remains unchanged from the 17 Pro series, with one exception. The 48 million-pixel main camera now features a variable aperture.

This is a first for the iPhone, though other brands have tried it before, as far back as 2018, when the Samsung Galaxy S9 offered a dual aperture option on its camera. The iPhone aperture is a six blade design with four aperture settings: f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8 and f/4. These can be selected manually from the new pro controls menu in the camera, or set to auto.

Advantages of a variable aperture are three-fold. In bright conditions, it allows you to reduce the light intake for creative control, while in low-light conditions you can increase the amount of light for better results. The most visual result though is in the depth of field.

Typically, with a fixed aperture, smart phones are designed to let in the maximum amount of light while maintaining a large depth of field – meaning that everything in the image stays in focus. In recent generations, Apple has offered a digital blurring effect in its portrait mode and cinematic video, to replicate a shallow depth of field, but it always looked a bit processed.

The main camera on the iPhone 17 Pro had a maximum aperture of f/1.78, so the f/1.48 option on the 18 Pro is two thirds of a stop wider, with 2.3 stops the other way to give greater depth of field. These changes are small compared to a DSLR lens, which may offer as much as a six-stop range from f/2.8 to f/22, but with a phone camera sensor being that much smaller, the changes appear as large.

The variable aperture works with all the zoom settings that the main camera offers, which is 1x (24mm equivalent), 2x (48mm equivalent) as well as the 1.2x (28mm) and 1.5x (35mm) settings. It’s also worth noting that you are only getting a full 48-million-pixel image at the 1x setting, with a standard 4:3 aspect ratio. All other ratios and zoom lengths will give you a cropped in image with less pixels.

By default, the iPhone uses a 24MP setting anyway, which uses two pixels for everyone to optimise the image. However, this is reduced to 12MP for a 2x crop, or if you use the studio lighting effects or portrait mode to create the fake depth of field. This isn’t always clear unless you check the image information after.

The longer telephoto camera works much the same way, but with a fixed f/2.8 aperture rather than a variable one. It provides a 4x zoom (100m equivalent) at 48 million pixels or 24 million pixels, as well as an 8x (200mm equivalent) at 12 million pixels.

The third camera is the ultra-wide, which provides a fixed f/2.2 aperture and a 0.5x zoom (13mm equivalent) for 120-degree images at either 24MP or 48MP. This is reduced to 12MP though for Macro shooting.

Front camera

The front camera saw a massive upgrade on the iPhone 17 Pro models and is the same here on the 18 Pros. It uses a square format sensor which can deliver 18-million-pixel images in either portrait or landscape format without having to turn the phone on its side.

This camera also includes Apple’s Centre Stage technology for photos and for video calls, allowing it to zoom in and out to keep either you centred or expand to include a group of people. This means that by default, it will take a cropped 7MP image, but you can zoom out to use the full sensor.

The results are so much sharper than the old 12MP front cameras that feature in the iPhone 16 and older, so if you’re upgrading from a phone more than a year old, you’ll notice a significant difference.

Video

It’s not just still images where the iPhone 18 offers professional level specs. For video, you can shoot in 4K at up to 120fps using the main rear camera, or 60fps using the ultra-wide or telephoto cameras. The front camera also provides 4K at up to 60fps.

For professionals, you can record using the ProRes format in 4K 120fps, and record straight to an external hard drive. There’s also Apple Log 2 and Academy Colour Encoding, to get the most colour information out of your video, and ensure consistency across your cameras.

For on-camera effects, there’s also Apple’s Cinematic mode, which creates a pro-looking shallow focus effect and can still record in 4K at up to 60fps. The beauty of this is that you can actually adjust the focus point after shooting. The variable aperture also works for video, so you can make use of the real aperture effects here too.

There’s also dual capture mode, which uses both the front and rear camera to create a picture-in-picture effect, action mode for ultra-steady shooting in 2.8K at 60fps, slow motion at up to 240fps (1080p) or 120fps in 4K, timelapse recording in 4K and Spatial video recording in 1080p at 60fps for immersive 3D.

Video also benefits from the iPhone 18 Pro’s four-mic array, allowing you to capture Spatial Audio sound or stereo recording. Apple’s new audio mix tool then allows you to edit the recorded sound to separate voice and music from background noise.

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Image quality

What I think impressed me most about the image quality on the iPhone 18 Pro, is how much more photographic the results feel. One of my favourite images was during my aperture test, placing a thistle in the foreground and a house in the background to see how the variable aperture changes the image.

I underexposed the original shot and pulled it back using Adobe Lightroom. Though the aperture was set to f/1.8, which is achievable on the iPhone 17 Pro, the slight stop-down of the aperture ring gives the out-of-focus areas a natural bokeh while the main thistle really stands out.

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You can see the change in depth of field quite clearly between the f/1.4 and the f/4 settings, though the effect isn’t quite as extreme as on a DSLR or mirrorless camera. The one interesting feature is the way the aperture reacts to having the sun in the shot. With the aperture even slightly closed, you get a real starburst effect on the highlight, which looks quite impressive – and goes away when the aperture is fully open.

Apple has clearly focused its imaging efforts on colour and exposure over detail, with results straight from the camera looking absolutely stunning. To opt for the most detail, you often have to override the camera, picking the RAW capture and the 48MP mode. This is sensible, as most don’t need an image that large, and the option is still there if you need it.

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Many were hoping that we might see the iPhone 18 Pro go beyond the 48MP sensor resolution, to match the 200MP sensors now offered by Samsung and Oppo. Personally, I would rather have seen a larger sensor on the main camera, which in turn would have made the aperture changes more prominent. The current main sensor is 1/1.128 inches, which is the same as the iPhone 17 Pro.

Oppo, Xiaomi and Huawei have all offered 1-inch sensors for some time on their phones, which has a significant advantage over a smaller sensor. However, this would require bigger lenses to cover it. The perfect set up would be where smartphones can use a single sensor for all of its rear cameras and simply have a variable optic, but it seems we’re still some way off that.

Battery and performance

Apple’s new system-on-a-chip (SoC) is the A20 Pro, and it’s used on the iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max and the upcoming iPhone Duo. It has a 6-core CPU, which is 20% faster than the A19 Pro, and a 7-core GPU, which is 40% faster. It also offers a new dual 16-core neural engine for those on-device Apple Intelligence features.

The vapour chamber, which was first introduced to the iPhone last year, has been tripled in size to keep that new chip running cooler. This results in a 40% gain in sustained performance, so you can game and run those AI features for longer without any impact on performance.

To see exactly how that performance stacks up, I ran the Geekbench 6 benchmarking app on the iPhone 18 Pro. The CPU test delivered a multi-core score of 12,543 (4678 single core), which is a marked increase on the iPhone 17 Pro’s 9014. Meanwhile, on the graphics (GPU) test, it scored 63,551, which is also an increase over the 44950 from the 17 Pro.

What’s also interesting is how this compares to the M-series chips used in iPad and Mac devices. The CPU multi-core score is higher than the M3 results and closing in on the M4, while on the GPU it beats all but the latest M5 iPad Pro models.

Considering the MacBook Neo runs on an older A18 Pro, the potential for future MacBooks and iPads to run on the A20 Pro chip are huge, and offer potential space saving and battery efficiency improvements.

On the battery side, the iPhone 18 Pro now offers up to 34 hours of video playback compared to 31 hours on the 17 Pro. The 18 Pro Max is even better with up to 43 hours, compared to 37 hours on the 17 Pro Max. Apple also now quotes a typical usage figure, which is meant to give a more realistic estimation of overall battery life. For this it gives the 18 Pro 24 hours per charge and the Pro Max 30 hours per charge.

Those typical numbers certainly feel close to what I have been getting from the 18 Pro. Once all of my data had fully migrated over from my old phone and things were running normally, I would typically end my day with between 20% and 30% battery left.

The only caveat was that when shooting video, the battery still drains much faster, and with heavier use, you are likely to need a charge before the day is done.

Should I buy the iPhone 18 Pro?

The iPhone 18 Pro is without doubt the most powerful and best-performing iPhone to date. While the 18 Pro Max has the bigger screen and better battery life, both provide the same upgrade in power and performance, as well as the new camera system.

Aside from the battery improvements, which feel negligible in real terms, the biggest change for me is the camera system. This is a big step forward for the iPhone, and while the effects can seem subtle at times compared to the digital depth-of-field options, it feels a lot more real.

If you’re upgrading from an iPhone 16 Pro or older, you’ll notice significant upgrades across the board with the iPhone 18 Pro. If camera performance really matters to you, this is the iPhone to go for this year.