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iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
Apple (video, MacRumors, Hacker News, Slashdot):
Apple today announced iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, delivering the most advanced pro camera system in an iPhone, and huge leaps in battery life and performance. The new 48MP Fusion Main camera, now with variable aperture, brings creative control that wasn’t possible before, and new Pro controls let users customize their experience in the Camera app. Both models feature a smaller and even more useful Dynamic Island, as well as A20 Pro and a next-generation vapor chamber that together deliver the highest sustained performance in iPhone history.
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Pro controls is a new customizable experience in the Camera app for iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max that makes it easier than ever for users to access their most used settings and introduces new options for manual control.
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When a photo is taken in the new Reference mode, the camera captures signed sensor data that Private Cloud Compute develops into an unalterable reference image.
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The upgraded Dynamic Island can now show three Live Activities at once[…]
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eSIM-only models deliver up to 36 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro and up to 45 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro Max.
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iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will be available in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB storage capacities. Available in burgundy, glacier, silver, and black, iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 or $49.95 per month, and iPhone 18 Pro Max starts at $1,299 or $54.12 per month for 24 months.
What I’m most happy to see is the ability to increase the depth of field. I don’t understand what Apple Reference Image is doing that it needs to be uploaded/offloaded to Private Cloud Compute.
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Update (2026-09-11): Hartley Charlton:
Pro Controls is built around the variable aperture on the new Main camera. Six laser-cut blades move smoothly between four aperture settings, and the Camera app can adjust aperture automatically based on depth of field and lighting, or users can take manual control themselves for what Apple calls “truly unique shots that weren’t possible before” on an iPhone.
Pro Controls works across both photo and video capture. It also introduces Smart Focus Tracking, which uses on-device AI models to lock onto a subject and maintain focus even if that subject briefly leaves the frame and comes back into view.
Update (2026-09-17): Joe Rossignol:
Apple now says the iPhone 18 Pro has a C2 modem worldwide, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses the chip in every country except for the U.S.
To the layman’s eye, though, the 18 Pro just looks like it comes in new colors. That’s not a complaint, just a fact. Oh, but the Face ID infrared camera is now underneath pixels on the display, so the Dynamic Island cutout is now smaller. So the part of the Dynamic Island that is always black is smaller, but because there are now more display pixels next to it, the 18 Pro Dynamic Island can now show three active Live Activities, up from two. Apple is getting closer and closer each year to achieving a no-notch / no-cutout display.
The first iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max reviews have been published today by selected tech websites and YouTube channels, ahead of the devices beginning to arrive to customers and launching in stores this Friday, September 18.
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Update (2026-09-18): Austin Mann:
I'm here at the beautiful Dunton River Camp in southwest Colorado, where I've spent the last week testing the new camera and features on the iPhone 18 Pro.
I’m not saying iPhone camera hardware won’t continue to improve after that — I’m sure it will — but I suspect variable aperture is the last remaining “easy win”. I think every camera gain after this will be more incremental.
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I suspect that for sustained use cases, it would be more performant to have the 18 Pro’s new thermal system running the 17 Pro’s A19 Pro chip than to have the new A20 Pro chip running with the 17 Pro’s first-generation vapor chamber. But with the iPhone 18 Pro, you get both: you get the faster and more efficient A20 Pro chip and the second-generation vapor chamber thermal system.
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The 18 Pro is the third generation with the Camera Control button. But that button hasn’t changed at all since the 16 Pro, the phone on which it debuted. At some point in the last year, I gave up on using the Camera Control button as anything other than a simple button. I went into Settings and turned off all the features where you can soft-press it and slide your finger back and forth to adjust camera features while using Apple’s Camera app. What I found is that I kept changing things inadvertently and undesirably. It’s too prone to accidental half-presses that put it into slide-to-adjust for some setting, and because it’s an accident, my finger would start changing things. I turned that all off and I’m much happier for it.
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There’s a minor tradeoff with this design. Even my middle-aged eyes can see that the pixels on top of the Face ID sensor aren’t quite as sharp as those on the rest of the screen. The time of day in the status bar looks like it’s just a tad fuzzy, like the text isn’t anti-aliased correctly.
Update (2026-09-23): DXOMARK (Hacker News):
The Apple iPhone 18 Pro camera performance is evaluated across photo, zoom, and video use cases using DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses to assess imaging performance across common shooting conditions. This article provides a structured summary of DXOMARK’s lab measurements and perceptual analyses to describe the device’s imaging performance.
Apple’s new Texture and Grain controls for Photographic Styles are not available on iPhones other than the latest iPhone 18 Pro models and upcoming iPhone Duo, despite the company’s original wording suggesting otherwise.
Update (2026-09-25): Joe Rossignol:
Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac’s Benjamin Mayo that it plans to release a software update early next week with a fix for a Face ID issue affecting some iPhone 18 Pro users.
A subset of iPhone 18 Pro Max users in the U.S. are experiencing issues with AT&T cellular connectivity and/or eSIM provisioning, according to complaints across the MacRumors Forums, Reddit, and the Apple Support Community.
Update (2026-10-02): Ben Lovejoy:
Apple needed to create gaps between the pixels large enough to allow the IR light to pass between them, but without any visible degradation in the display. To do so, the company’s engineers set out to design a different pixel layout with larger gaps without visibly impacting what can be displayed on those pixels.
iFixit used a microscope to show this pixel pattern, with Apple confirming to me me that the overall pixel density over the module is reduced by half. This would potentially have created a second problem: half the pixel density might have created a visibly dimmer section of the display, so Apple increases the brightness of these pixels to compensate. There also appears to be an IR pass filter to block visible light from passing through the gaps, further hiding the components.
AT&T said that customers should immediately update to iOS 27.0.1, despite the fact that many affected users have said that the update does not resolve the issues. There are now at least thousands of users that have experienced this problem, according to discussion topics across the Apple Support Community, Reddit, and MacRumors Forums.
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