iPhone 18 Pro Review

The A20 Pro is the first 2 nm chip to ship in a phone, a six core part with two performance cores and four efficiency cores behind a seven core graphics block Apple puts at 40 percent quicker than the A19 Pro. What that buys is headroom rather than a benchmark line: the 18 Pro holds a frame rate through a long session where last year's Pro slowly gave one up.

The camera is where the generation actually moves. The 48 megapixel main sensor gained a variable aperture running from f/1.5 to f/4.0, the first time an iPhone has been able to choose its own depth of field instead of approximating it in software. Stopped down, a close portrait keeps the whole face sharp; wide open it gathers light the 17 Pro could not. The periscope holds its 4x reach at 100 mm and the ultra wide stays at 48 megapixels, so every rear sensor now resolves the same.

The 6.3 inch panel is unchanged from the 17 Pro at 2622 by 1206 and 3000 nits outdoors, which is no criticism of either. The eSIM battery grew from 4252 to 4288 mAh and the quoted video figure to 36 hours, the longest an iPhone of this size has managed. Ceramic Shield 2 covers both faces. iOS 27 reads as a tidying of iOS 26 rather than a rethink of it.

The complaint is the price. $1,199 for 256GB is a hundred dollars above where the 17 Pro started, and a 2TB tier now exists for the first time.