The Apple iPhone 18 Pro is the coolest iPhone ever thanks to its new vapor chamber – but it's the variable aperture that's the real hot topic

The new foldable iPhone Duo may have grabbed the world's attention, but the Apple iPhone 18 Pro is very much worth our time. Not least because it has a genuinely exciting upgrade to its camera system and an unbelievably long battery life. But also because it's still, even after 19 years, the big draw in the smartphone market.

Apple quite explicitly targets small businesses with its marketing and aftercare services (AppleCare+), but it doesn't necessarily offer business deals, so prices start at $1,199 (£1,199) for the base model of the iPhone 18 Pro. You can get one with up to 12GB of RAM and even 2TB of storage. But there is no real difference between purchasing it as a consumer or a business.

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Apple iPhone 18 Pro: Design

At face value, the iPhone 18 Pro has largely the same design as the iPhone 17 Pro. Although there's no orange this year, just black, silver, blue, and a rather fetching burgundy. As a business-focused publication, we have a review unit in the more professional black.

It is noticeably heavy; it feels like a very dense handset that is more likely to crack the ground than its screen. I still have the iPhone 17e here, and the weight difference, on feel, is massive. Compared to the 17 Pro, the 18 Pro has gained 5g (206g to 211g), which might not sound like much, but you can feel the difference in the hand.

Without much change to the outward design, and the fact that it has the same dimensions as the 17 Pro (150 x 71.9 x 8.8mm), we can safely assume the extra weight is inside: here you have a new chipset, the A20 Pro, a bigger battery (3998mAh to 4o56mAh), and some additional hardware on the main camera to control shutter speed. There's also a new vapour chamber, which is arguably where the extra weight is. It remains a beautiful device, but it is a bit of a chunk.

Apple iPhone 18 Pro: Display

The 6.3in LTPO Super Retina XDR OLED display looks almost like for like with the iPhone 17 Pro. So you get a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, HDR10 capabilities, and some thin bezels.

Most of the new elements are to do with the smaller Dynamic Island, which is the cut-out at the top of the screen where the selfie camera and sensors are housed. It's smaller because Apple has managed to move the IR camera underneath the OLED panel with a tweak to the way it presents pixels in that section of the display. Essentially, it's created more space between the pixels there so that more infrared light can pass through – you don't see any difference because the pixels in that area compensate by operating at twice the brightness.

It's a clever way of improving the way the Dynamic Island sits on the screen, one that doesn't really hamper the overall performance of the display. In our tests, the iPhone 18 Pro hit a peak brightness of 432.50cd/m2 and showcased 97.2% for sRGB gamut color coverage (97.8% volume). If we're comparing these scores to a rival, they're actually higher than the S26 Ultra on all counts, but only slightly.

Apple iPhone 18 Pro: Specs and performance

Another generation of iPhone almost always means a new chipset; for the 18 Pro, we have the Apple A20 Pro – a 2nm developed processor with a hexa-core architecture. This is matched with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, though you can go up to 2TB if you have the cash.

Benchmarking for iPhones, and indeed MacBooks and Mac Minis and so on, has gotten a little silly. The results are inevitably impressive on paper, but they don't really tell the full story; just that it's strong in single- and multithreaded workloads. So in Geekbench 7, the 18 Pro came back with 4,720 for single and 12,629 for multi-threaded.

On-device AI tools and capabilities are starting to become a good way to showcase a phone's power. Though we don't really have a straightforward way of expressing it. But if we take the way the processor optimizes other areas of the phone, such as the battery, you can almost see what I mean. In our looped video test, the 18 Pro lasted 26hrs 58mins – which is frankly marvelous. But in real life, with the day-to-day use of the phone, I genuinely went at least two days before needing a charge.

You may have seen the joke doing the rounds that this is the coolest iPhone ever, because of a new internal layout; there are some changes to the placement of components, but much of the cooling is handled by a new, larger vapor chamber which disperses heat more evenly throughout the handset. I did feel it heating up during the initial setup, but nothing during our tests. So it is indeed cool.

Apple iPhone 18 Pro: Cameras

Resolution-wise, you have nearly the same triple camera setup as the 17 Pro, with three 48MP lenses that shoot wide, ultrawide, and telephoto. You get a 4 x optical zoom on the 100mm periscope telephoto lens, and a 3D sensor shift to help steady zoomed-in shots.

The big addition this year is the shutter controls – there's even a little shutter mechanism on the main lens – with Apple looking to give its users more agency over their photography. You can still use the automated settings for point-and-shoot, but the more 'professional' settings offer that DSLR-style approach to photography.

These 'pro' controls are all in the menu with the six spots, and they can also be customised to the user's preferences. Much like an actual DSLR, you mainly need to worry about 3 of them – shutter speed, aperture, and ISO ('Exposure' is where you can set ISO level). Though iPhones tend to have a 4:3 aspect ratio by default, so I did have to change that a lot. There's also a particularly useful focus slider.

One point of note: the variable aperture is only available on the main lens, and you can sometimes get lost in the many options the Pro mode offers. You may also notice more grain in some shots; I had trouble in low-light settings and indoors, where the grain is noticeable, and no amount of fiddling with the controls fixed it.

However, the overall experience is good. I got some great shots outside, in mixed weather conditions. I enjoyed playing around with the variable aperture; I captured loads of terrible images where I was trying to get blur and movement. That's the joy of it really; it's like discovering photography again. When you do finally get that sweet, sweet shot, it's a great feeling. The aperture control gives you so much more flexibility, and if you can grasp the daunting options in Pro mode, you will undoubtedly produce some stellar photography.

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This also translates to video, to a degree. You can shoot at 4K up to 120fps, and you have some great stabilization work going on in the background. However, you don't have as low a shutter speed with the video; you cannot go below 1/24, which is a shame, because otherwise it's superb.

Apple iPhone 18 Pro: Features

Features on the iPhone 18 Pro include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0. You get two extra physical buttons in addition to the power and volume ones. There's a flat indented one down the right-hand side that quickly launches the camera. And then there is the smaller 'Action' button, which can be customised with a small selection of apps and functions, such as silent mode or the touch.

You can also add your ChatGPT account to Siri to make it even more knowledgeable. Though, as a business application, I would like it to work with more third-party apps, maybe the ability to send messages in Slack, as it does with WhatsApp.

The smaller Dynamic Island is the same as before, works well with certain third-party apps, and you can use it to search and customise quick launch apps. After a few days, it actually populated with the apps I use the most, which is a nice organic way of having it set up for you.

Apple iPhone 18 Pro: Is it worth it?

For a phone that looks largely the same as the year before, there was actually a lot to discuss on the iPhone 17 Pro. From its intuitive A20 Pro chip to its new thermal chamber, there's a lot going on inside.

And we were left very impressed by the upgrades to the camera and the variable aperture – particularly the dilating ring on the lens. This is by no means a replacement for a proper professional camera, but it's both a great smartphone camera and a good entry-level option for people to learn traditional camera controls.

As a business phone, it's a solid choice, packed with useful features and apps. It has great battery life and useful capabilities when synchronised with a MacBook. All in all, an iPhone worthy of more attention.

Apple iPhone 18 Pro specifications