iPhone 18 Pro review: the biggest upgrade Apple’s made in years, hiding in plain sight

While all the attention is on Apple’s new foldable form factor smartphone the iPhone Duo - we’ve got a month to wait to see that one in stores, so in the meantime orders will be flooding in for the upgraded Pro level phones - the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max.

Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro looks almost identical to last year’s model.

Same size, same shape, my old 17 Pro Max case fits perfectly, with the only listed physical difference being an extra 7 grams in weight.

The real change this year is colour.

Apple's gone with a deep purple it's calling Burgundy, following the trend other brands like Samsung and Motorola have leaned into with bold highlight shades.

It doesn't pop quite as hard as last year's orange, but it's still a statement.

Classic black also makes a comeback for anyone after something simpler, while my pick of the range is the Glacier Blue.

But don't let the familiar design fool you.

This is one of the most significant internal upgrades Apple has made in years, and it's the camera doing the heavy lifting.

The headline feature is a genuine variable aperture, something no iPhone has ever had before.

Six laser-cut blades, thinner than a human hair, physically move via a tiny rotor to give four discrete aperture settings on the main lens, from f/1.48 through to f/4.0.

That means better low-light performance, more control over depth of field, and some genuinely nice creative effects, like a starry look on point lights when shooting wide open.

It's worth noting this only applies to the main camera, not the ultra-wide or zoom lenses.

I put it through its paces at Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park and in Times Square, and the results are outstanding, even in tricky, high-contrast lighting.

Shots under the stadium lights held their detail impressively, and in Times Square at night nothing looked blown out or washed out, which is often where phone cameras struggle.

There's a new Smart Focus Tracking feature too, letting you double-tap a subject to keep it locked in focus as it or the camera moves through the frame.

Cinematic mode's shallow focus effect, previously something you had to choose before filming, can now be applied after the fact to any video shot on the main camera, which makes the standalone Cinematic mode feel almost redundant.

Apple's also introducing an opt-in reference image feature designed to combat AI fakes, creating a securely timestamped image using dedicated hardware and Apple's Private Cloud Compute.

It's a smart idea in principle, though exactly how and when you're meant to use it isn't entirely clear to me yet.

Under the hood, the new A20 Pro chip brings 20 per cent faster Super Cores, 40 per cent quicker graphics, and a 50 per cent boost to memory bandwidth.

Apple's also expanded the thermal management zone, which should help anyone editing 4K video or gaming for extended stretches without the phone heating up the way older Pro models have.

It's not perfect.

On my review unit, some 4K video played back on the iPhone 18 Pro itself, footage shot on the 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max or even the iPhone Air, shows strange green gridlines across the screen.

The same files look fine on every other device, so it appears to be a playback bug rather than an issue with the video itself.

I've reported it to Apple and expect it's a software fix away from being resolved, or could be an issue unique to my sample device

Pricing starts at $2,099 for the iPhone 18 Pro, just $100 more than last year, climbing to $2,499 for 512GB, $3,299 for 1TB and topping out at $4,499 for the 2TB model.

The Pro Max starts at $2,299 and runs up to $4,699 for the top storage tier. Storage is clearly where Apple is making its margin this year.

My verdict: if you're on an iPhone 15 Pro or older, particularly anything including and before the 14 Pro that misses out on Apple Intelligence altogether, this is the first genuinely compelling reason in years to upgrade.

Battery life is improved, the phone is built to last another five to seven years of software updates, and the camera alone justifies the jump.