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.
Previously:
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.
Previously:
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.
Previously:
12 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
It’s awful they’re releasing only expensive iPhones for the Christmas season. And cheap iPhones will be released by March. Very much dumb idea.
I think for image provenance parts in the Apple Reference Image feature, it would need to be cryptographically signed? I would expect that is the Private Cloud Compute portion?
@David Maybe? The phone must be signing the data in such a way that PCC trusts it’s authentic, but somehow that’s not good enough for the phone to sign the final image directly? The “develops” part makes it sound like it’s doing image processing, too.
the private compute server probably signs/encodes it (the image?) with a timestamped private key and sends that back to you. Perhaps it watermarks the image as well.
@Someone else Seems like if it were just about the timestamp the phone could send a checksum and get back a signed blob to embed in the image. Hopefully there will be a whitepaper or something.
> I don’t understand what Apple Reference Image is doing that it needs to be uploaded/offloaded to Private Cloud Compute.
Compiles Stasi archive probably.
Aye, I'm being uncharitably pessimistic.
I don't understand how this works:
"Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image, like a digital negative, to visually compare the two assets and determine if any edits were made."
First, why do I have to "visually compare the two assets" to "determine if any edits were made"? If the photo has been altered, why does it not just say that?
Second, where does the displayed "reference image" come from? Does this feature require an upload because the reference image will come from Apple's servers?
I'm assuming Apple will explain this in more detail soon, but as it stands, it's a bit odd to announce this feature with such a weird description of how it works.
> "The phone must be signing the data in such a way that PCC trusts it’s authentic, but somehow that’s not good enough for the phone to sign the final image directly?"
Sounds like a way to create a "digital negative" along with a "certificate of authenticity", with Apple PCC acting as a third party co-signer. If the original image's authenticity were only verifiable by the device, perhaps that would make it easier for the user or a third party to circumvent the feature, especially as it becomes more widely adopted by other devices and software.
I'm curious where Apple draws the line on labeling the "original negative". Will that version of the image be saved before the camera performs any of its internal processing, like a RAW image? How will that affect image storage sizes?
In any case, this doesn't sound like a feature for most people, intended more for journalists, insurance claim adjusters, and such who must be able to verify the authenticity of the original captured image. It will not be enabled by default.
Was torn this year on which phone to get. Had been thinking I want a smaller phone for a while as I've had the Pro Max for a few years now, but holding my wife's Pro phone it doesn't actually seem enough smaller to actually really help so ended up getting the Pro Max again.
They’ve published a paper on Apple Reference Image. The PCC is getting inserted as a trusted third party in my reading
That explains the "upload to server" part. Apple wants to sign the photograph before any software touches it. So the locally signed photograph is basically just raw sensor data, and there needs to be a trusted entity outside of the phone that turns it into a photograph that's actual usable by humans.
It seems to me that something similar to this could be done locally, but I get how the server component makes it easier.
I still don't understand the description quoted above:
"Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image, like a digital negative, to visually compare the two assets and determine if any edits were made."
It seems to contradict what this document says:
"On the client side, whenever the reference image is displayed, the client verifies the final signature on the JPEG and confirms its photo GUID doesn't appear on the current revocation list before showing the image."
Does the former text explain what happens when I make additional changes to the photo and am unsure what I changed compared to the original signed image?
@Plume I think the first part is talking about the reference image vs. the regular image (which you might have modified, or your phone or iCloud was compromised), and the second part is talking about the developed JPEG data that’s part of the reference image itself.
