The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max have arrived as successors to the iPhone 17 Pro, which launched last September. The latest models are built around the new A20 Pro chip, a 48-megapixel Fusion Main camera with variable aperture, a redesigned vapour chamber, and a smaller Dynamic Island.
Last year’s iPhone 17 Pro delivered one of the most significant design overhauls in years, moving from a titanium frame and glass back to an aluminium unibody with Ceramic Shield 2. With that redesign already behind it, the 2026 update concentrates on internal improvements rather than a fresh look, prioritising the chip, camera, and battery. The iPhone 18 Pro Max shares nearly all of these upgrades and also receives its own battery capacity increase, delivering the largest jump in battery life in the iPhone’s history.
Pricing has risen this generation. The iPhone 18 Pro starts at roughly £950 for the 256GB model, up from the iPhone 17 Pro’s starting price of around £870.
Chip, Performance and Connectivity
The A20 Pro is built using TSMC’s N2 process, making it Apple’s first 2nm smartphone chip, compared with the 3nm N3P process of the A19 Pro. The six-core CPU now pairs two super cores with four efficiency cores, and memory bandwidth increases by 50% over the A19 Pro. The GPU moves from six to seven cores with Neural Accelerators, offering up to 40% faster performance, while the Neural Engine doubles to a dual 16-core configuration totalling 32 cores.
Cooling has also been overhauled. The next-generation vapour chamber provides three times more surface area than the iPhone 17 Pro’s, enabling up to 40% higher sustained performance. New chip packaging places the silicon die beside the memory, allowing it to attach directly to the vapour chamber. On connectivity, Apple replaces the Qualcomm X80 modem with its own C2 modem.
Rear Camera and Video
The headline camera change is a variable-aperture 48-megapixel Fusion Main camera with four stops: ƒ/1.48, ƒ/1.8, ƒ/2.8 and ƒ/4.0, using six laser-cut blades. This replaces the fixed ƒ/1.78 aperture of the iPhone 17 Pro. Developers gain an API to control the aperture range within their own apps, and Night mode is faster thanks to the new lens.
The Camera app adds Pro controls, including manual lens aperture, shutter speed, white balance and a histogram. A new sensor and computational imaging pipeline deliver around 50% better low-light performance and greater detail at the back of group photos. Photographic Styles moves to version 3, adding texture and grain controls alongside tone and colour, and smart focus tracking is introduced.
Cinematic mode now records up to 4K Dolby Vision at 60 fps, up from 30 fps, with effects that can be applied after capture. Time-lapse video gains stabilisation up to 4K Dolby Vision, while
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Image: macrumors.com
