The iPhone 18 Pro’s big camera update is all about the small gains - The Verge

The Pro camera’s major upgrade offers minor image quality improvements — whether or not you know what an f-stop is.

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Photography by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

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Last week, Apple announced an iPhone unlike any it has made in the past. An iPhone that has seemingly already led several other phone manufacturers to pursue entirely different designs for their flagship products. A remarkably distinct device with the kind of “I can’t believe they did that” software touches that Apple sometimes pulls off when it’s at the top of its game.

That phone is not the iPhone 18 Pro.

The 18 Pro and Pro Max are in the unusual position of being the second-most interesting iPhones that Apple is launching this year. The foldable iPhone Duo stole the show at Apple’s launch event, but it’s not arriving until next month. In the meantime, the 18 Pro cometh, and it is extremely familiar even with a totally new hardware feature in the camera.

It is so similar to the iPhone 17 Pro that it can use the same cases. Have you used an iPhone 17 Pro? Great, you now know what it’s like to use the 18 Pro. There are no surprises, and unless you’re a truly committed smartphone photographer, no hugely compelling reason to pick an 18 Pro over a 17 Pro if you can find one on sale. It’s what we’ve come to expect from what was the flagship iPhone: excellent and utterly iterative.

Manual exposure controls in the native camera app, finally Marginal improvements to image quality Photographing sunstars with a smartphone camera rules

$100 more expensive than last year Manual exposure controls are tiny Higher storage tiers are quite pricey

Manual exposure controls in the native camera app, finally Marginal improvements to image quality Photographing sunstars with a smartphone camera rules

$100 more expensive than last year Manual exposure controls are tiny Higher storage tiers are quite pricey

Inside, the iPhone 18 Pro has a revamped thermal management design that allows its new A20 Pro chip to sustain full performance for longer, but the biggest truly new idea is inside the main camera, where Apple has added a moving aperture to control how much light hits the sensor. This is a big deal, and also a small deal, which I promise makes sense.

With a few exceptions, phone cameras have fixed apertures. Their sensors and lenses are so small that most of your scene is in focus even when you’re shooting wide open, and it’s usually best to get as much light as you can on that tiny sensor anyway. But there are some edge cases where a narrower aperture is helpful, even on a phone camera. It could also be helpful in other situations, particularly in low light, to open up the aperture even further than the iPhone’s traditional f/1.8. So Apple seems to have said, “Screw it. Let’s have it both ways,” and put in a variable aperture.

So there are really two separate things happening here. The maximum aperture is now bigger, at f/1.48 vs. f/1.8, and has the ability to get smaller, with stops available at f/1.8, f/2.8, and f/4. And while both the larger and smaller apertures do offer marginal improvements to photo quality in some cases, the differences are generally marginal.

One of the reasons photographers like a wider aperture is for its ability to throw more of the background of a photo out of focus. But the small lens and sensor on a smartphone camera don’t allow for the same kind of soft background blur you get from a bigger camera system. At the iPhone’s old maximum aperture of f/1.8, most things are in focus most of the time, and going to the slightly wider f/1.48 doesn’t make a huge difference.

A bigger aperture does offer an advantage for low light photography. On a traditional camera, letting in more light allows the system to keep noise down by using a faster shutter speed, a lower ISO, or both. It’s not quite the same on a smartphone camera that’s combining multiple frames at different exposures to create the final image, but broadly the concept of “more light = better photo” holds.

Maybe because phones are already so good at coping with low light through these computational methods, the low light gains in the 18 Pro look pretty minor. If I look closely at the detail in a shot at f/1.48 versus f/1.8, I can see a difference, but it’s subtle.

The biggest advantage might be for Night Mode. At f/1.48, the system can use a slightly shorter Night Mode capture time compared to f/1.8. That’s less time you have to try and keep your hand still and less noise that the system needs to try and process out.

On the other side of the dial, a smaller aperture is useful for extending depth of field and keeping more stuff in focus, particularly if your subject is close to the camera. If you’re taking a close-up photo of a statue, at f/1.48 or f/1.8 the back part of it might look a bit soft. Stopping down to f/4 sharpens up the part in the background.

That’s helpful! But once again, you’ll find these benefits on the margins. That’s because the iPhone’s new f/1.48 maximum aperture actually equates to about f/5 on full frame in terms of depth of field, which already puts a lot of the stuff in front of and behind your subject in focus. Unless you’re really close to your subject, most things are in focus or close enough when you photograph them with a smartphone camera.

If you don’t know or care about f-stops, you’ll still get along just fine with this updated camera. By default the aperture is set to automatically adjust based on lighting conditions, and it seems to stay at f/1.8 most of the time in good lighting. The aperture does open up to f/1.48 in dim light automatically, and will close down to f/4 when taking a group photo with someone who’s standing further back. And I saw it consistently dropping down to f/4 when I was taking a photo of some close-up text. That’s a situation where f/4 will help you get more in focus and make for a potentially more usable photo. But that’s an awfully narrow set of use cases, whether you’re the kind of person who wants to take manual control over the aperture or not.

That’s the big update, and the effect is a relatively small one. But it’s not the only camera update. Friends, in the year of our Lord 2026, you can finally change the exposure controls by yourself in the iPhone camera app. Apple has added pro controls for the aforementioned aperture as well as shutter speed, white balance, and focus. There’s also the exposure compensation control that existed before, though no direct ISO adjustment, which someone coming from a traditional camera system would probably look for. But there’s enough control here for anyone who is so inclined to get a little more creative and hands-on with the stock app than ever before.

I noticed that when I was using a manual shutter speed, the results appeared to have been less processed. Apple spokesperson Stephanie Ng confirmed that the camera is indeed capturing a single frame rather than using the typical multi-frame processing. That means you lose a bit of dynamic range, though the final image will still include a gain map if there are highlights bright enough to warrant it. That’s not ideal if you’re trying to capture detail in both highlights and shadows, but on the other hand, this is one way to get the less-processed iPhone photo that some folks have been clamoring for. It’s a bit hidden, but it’s finally here.

On top of that, there’s a new set of texture controls for Photographic Styles, with the ability to add a film-inspired glow to highlight areas of your photo, overlay film grain, or soften skin. It’s another first for Apple: the ability to make your photos a little bit worse. But you know, tastefully, Film simulation modes for digital cameras are as popular as ever, and Apple is trying to catch that wave. The recently released Pixel 11 series includes so many ways to customize the look of your photos that their camera team had an escalation meeting about it. Likewise, Samsung has added any number of ways you can restyle your photo into what you envisioned it would be. After basically a decade of pushing the technological envelope year after year, the major phone manufacturers seem to be opening up to other definitions of image quality.

If you put all these updates together alongside the less-important but completely underrated addition of a first-party wrist strap (!) accessory for Apple’s own 18 Pro cases, maybe there’s something more camera than phone here. When I got my hands on the 18 Pro last week, I wondered if I could convince myself that the iPhone is a camera camera now.

I will go so far as to say that I had a better time shooting with the 18 Pro than I’ve ever had using an iPhone camera in the past. I shot sunstars peeking out behind some leaves in Battery Park. I took it to the US Open and documented the excitement of a night match at Arthur Ashe Stadium. I took a video of a sizzling fajita plate and converted it to a cinematic masterpiece* after capture. But I never forgot I was using a phone. The pro control icons are pretty small on the 18 Pro’s screen, and I had to focus just to hit them properly. I had to dismiss a spam call in the middle of a shoot. And after a morning of battery-draining photo and video shooting, it became really important to top the battery off so as not to lose my lifeline to the rest of the world. It’s a step closer, and the moving aperture is a bit closer to that dream of a phone that’s also a camera. But it’s still a phone.

*I use the term masterpiece loosely.

Apple, Google, and Samsung have each achieved their own kind of excellence in shaping what a smartphone camera can be. So it’s interesting watching them pivot to flexibility and embracing some of the flaws that are turning people on to old digital cameras. But taking photos with one of their flagship phones still feels like using a phone, whether there are moving aperture blades inside or not. One of the reasons I found the wrist strap so appealing was that it made the process of handling the phone as a camera feel more like, well, a camera. I’m hoping for the day when one of the few phone makers who sell devices in the US at scale tries something like the Xiaomi photography kits or Vivo’s telephoto lenses. That would feel like a whole new camera experience.

Apple is also using the 18 Pro to introduce something it calls Reference Image, which is a method the company has developed for verifying the authenticity of a photo taken on the iPhone. Apple will start using Google’s SynthID standard to tag photos with AI edits, but Reference Image comes at the problem from the other direction: helping people to identify which photos are real. Apple designed a new main camera sensor for the 18 Pro and Pro Max that adds encrypted data to the images it produces, so it’s limited to photos taken with the main camera on those two models. It’s complicated and clunky right now, but it also seems to be a pretty robust system with a lot of room to grow.

You need to enable it as a camera mode in the settings app in order to use it, and then actively switch the camera app to Reference mode to capture a Reference Image. The resulting image file contains the encrypted data from the main sensor, which means it’s bigger than a normal photo — a standard 4MB image I shot of a city street is an 8MB file when I shoot it in reference mode. If you send a Reference Image to someone who wants to verify that a Reference Image hasn’t been tampered with, they can push a button to send it to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, where that encrypted data will be “developed” showing the image basically as it came off the sensor. (Apple’s metaphor here is having the original negative of a traditional film photograph.)

It’s hard to use at the moment, but the idea is that it’s almost impossible to tamper with. Apple is releasing an API for third-party developers to add an option to view reference photos when they’re attached to an image, and the company seems eager to push this into the wider ecosystem now that all of this has been announced.

There are some meaningful updates on the video side of the aisle, too. There’s updated focus tracking that uses AI to stick to a subject. It’ll even pick them up if they leave the frame briefly and come back, but in my brief testing it seems to forget about someone if they’re gone for more than a few seconds. You can also convert video footage from the main camera to Cinematic after the fact, in the same way that you can convert regular photos to portrait mode after you take them. I often wish I’d taken video in cinematic mode but I never remember to in the moment, so this is a nice update. Video files don’t appear to be vastly bigger compared to similar clips from the 17 Pro, so this doesn’t come at a big cost to your storage space, either.

And that’s no small thing. The 18 Pro and Pro Max are each $100 more this year, with the 18 Pro starting at $1,199 with 256GB of storage. But each jump in storage tier will cost you dearly — all the way up to a $2,399 version for 2TB. Likewise, the Pro Max starts at $1,299.99 with 256GB of storage and goes all the way up to $2,499 for the 2TB version.

You’re not getting nothing for that price hike. There’s a new chipset, the A20 Pro, plus an updated vapor chamber that’s supposed to move heat away from the chipset more effectively to help with sustained performance compared to the 17 Pro. I noted the phone getting pretty warm on my first few days of using it, which are usually pretty taxing as you’re going through setup, app downloads, and data indexing, but haven’t noticed it as a consistent problem.

Battery life is the eternally impossible question to answer about a phone after a week of using it. I haven’t experienced anything like a “normal day” for the past week, but I haven’t seen any surprising battery drain from the 18 Pro in my downtime, either. It survived a day of intense use during a video shoot without a recharge at any point, which is no small feat. Apple quotes a modest gain in battery life for the smaller Pro model — 36 hours of video playback, up from 33 hours on the 17 Pro. The 18 Pro Max offers a bigger increase: 45 hours of video playback compared to 39 on the 17 Pro Max. Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel has been testing the Pro Max, and he says it’s been lasting more than a day, although he also noted the same early setup vibes. He also points out his 17 Pro Max battery was a champ when it was new and now can’t make it through a day after a year of heavy use, so the real test here is going to come much later in this phone’s life cycle.

The real test here is going to come much later in this phone’s life cycle

The 18 Pro I’m testing uses Apple’s new in-house C2 modem, marking the first time that a Pro iPhone has shipped with an Apple-made cellular chip. It seems that the homegrown stuff has finally cleared Apple’s quality bar for inclusion at the very high end, and I can’t say I’ve found any reason to fault it over the past week. The C2 is paired with the N1 wireless networking chip, and the system overall seems quick to jump off a Wi-Fi signal when I’m in an elevator and just as eager to pick up a cell signal when I step out. Here’s hoping it’s just as quick to ditch my home Wi-Fi when I’m in the carport outside of my house trying to start GPS navigation — truly, the dream.

One other notable update here is that the Dynamic Island is smaller. On the 17 Pro, the black bar encompassed the Face ID sensor in addition to the front-facing camera. On the 18 Pro, the Face ID sensor is hidden under the regular part of the screen until that real estate is needed by the Dynamic Island. Apple went to great lengths to disguise the sensor under a unique pixel pattern that uses black pixels to allow the IR signals necessary for Face ID to pass through. Pretty cool, though I can’t say I noticed the Dynamic Island’s smaller size even a single time as I was using the phone, and jumping back to the 17 Pro’s larger Dynamic Island hasn’t bothered me. And I have yet to need three items in the Dynamic Island at one time, rather than two, but this is a new capability that exists on the 18 Pro.

Possibly an even bigger deal than the launch of a new $1,200 phone is the release of iOS 27, and with it the new-new AI Siri. We previewed it in detail earlier this summer, and it continues to impress me. Particularly, its ability to search across email and messages all at once — this keeps feeling more and more like a superpower the longer I use it. We also noted when it debuted that Siri as an AI chatbot is much less chatty and eager to keep you engaged than the likes of Gemini or ChatGPT, which is something I also appreciate the more I use it. iOS 27 has just gone fully public this week, and it will be interesting to see how people take to the new Siri. It has a lot of work to do to earn the trust of the public that it can do anything more complex than setting a timer reliably, but Siri seems to be on the right track at least. Finally.

Unlike Siri, the 18 Pro’s big hardware update is much less visible. The aperture is hard to see without the right light and the help of a macro lens. It’s as small as my thumbnail, and it’s under layers of optical glass. Most people who buy this phone probably won’t go looking for it, and that’s fine. It’s the kind of feature that can live in the background and just jump in to help here and there, unseen, when you need it. You don’t need to know what it is or how it works. Which is kind of the point of personal technology, anyway.

So why make a big deal out of such a small thing? Is the defining feature of Apple’s new phones really an iris as thin as a human hair that most people will never see? I think two things are true at once: Adding a major new hardware feature to the world’s most popular camera is notable to those of us who pay attention to such things. But it’s also beside the point.

The iPhone camera’s most important job is to always take a usable photo, by default, no matter what. This new aperture mechanism provides some benefits to that end, and on top of that, allows a more hands-on photographer access to camera controls that weren’t there before. But the first part of that mission is the most important, and the 18 Pro upholds that mandate. Most people who use this phone will never touch the aperture control, and that’s fine. They might get a picture of a menu that’s fully in focus thanks to the camera dropping down to f/4, or a night shot that’s a little more detailed thanks to a brighter maximum aperture. Otherwise, it will feel like the same camera they’ve come to expect from a Pro iPhone.

As long as you don’t expect a revolutionary new camera experience, then the 18 Pro is what it should be: a little better than the version that came before it.