Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max at its event on Wednesday. The 18 Pro and Pro Max come in deep black, silver, “glacier,” and burgundy, with color-matched back glass. They also have a new A20 Pro chip and purportedly the longest battery in an iPhone. The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 for 256GB, a $100 increase over the iPhone 17 Pro, while the 18 Pro Max starts at $1,299, also for 256GB. Both models will be offered in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB configurations. Preorders begin on September 12th ahead of availability on September 18th.
During Wednesday’s presentation, Apple highlighted how the new phones are well-equipped to work with Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, including Siri AI’s more expressive voices.
The A20 Pro has a “brand new architecture” built on 2nm technology, like Apple’s M6 chip. It has a 6 core CPU with 2 “desktop-class” super cores and 4 efficiency cores. It also has a “significantly advanced” GPU with a 7 core design that enables a “40 percent” increase in performance, according to Sribalan Santhanam, VP of Apple’s silicon engineering group. Apple has also added a second neural engine for a total of 32 NPU cores.
In addition, the iPhone 18 Pro has a “next-generation vapor chamber” with three times the surface area as the one in the 17 Pro to help cool the phone. The iPhone 18 Pro has all-day battery life comparable to the iPhone 17 Pro Max, according to Rich Dinh, VP of hardware engineering. Video playback is 36 hours for the iPhone 18 Pro, and the 18 Pro Max gets 45 hours. Apple says just 15 minutes of wired charging provides 50 percent charge for the iPhone 18 Pro, and for the 18 Pro Max, five minutes of wired charging gets you seven hours of video playback.
The iPhone 18 Pro also offers the “biggest camera improvement in years,” including a 48 megapixel variable-aperture main camera with 6 blades “thinner than a human hair” and a new sensor. In darker environments, the aperture opens up to let in more light, which means that night mode captures will be faster with better quality, Apple says. As for video, you can now take 4K resolution time-lapse videos in Dolby Vision HDR.
Apple is also offering “pro controls” to give you more manual control over your camera, like changing shutter speed to tweak motion blur. Pro controls are available for both photos and videos. There are improvements to photographic styles, offering texture and grain control. And Apple will support Google’s SynthID content authenticity protocol, as well as a new “Apple Reference Image” standard that cryptographically signs images at capture, creating an unalterable “digital negative.”
A smaller Dynamic Island on the iPhone 18 Pro line can now show three Live Activities. There are updated accessories as well, including a revised clear case. The iPhone 18 Pro line is also Apple’s first set of phones with a new C2 cellular modem, which supports mmWave 5G and “delivers meaningfully faster uploads when compared to C1X while consuming 15 percent less energy,” Apple says.
The new phones follow a major redesign introduced with the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max in 2025. That redesign dropped titanium in favor of an aluminum body, introduced a vapor chamber to help keep the phone cool, and added a camera bar (which Apple calls the “plateau”) that stretches across the back. The 17 Pro line also launched in a bold orange color that was good and well timed, a nice silver, and a great deep blue. And last fall’s iPhone refresh brought the 18-megapixel Center Stage front camera that lets you take wide selfies even when you’re holding the phone in portrait mode.
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