Apple’s Latest iPhone Is a Pro Forma Upgrade

Apple made a pretty big technical and design change with the iPhone 17 Pro last year, adding a thick camera bar, vapor-chamber cooling, and a bold orange color. Next year, for the iPhone’s 20th anniversary, Apple is reportedly planning its biggest redesign since the iPhone X, with a more glass-centric look. And, to start the celebrations early, this year brought the announcement of Apple’s first folding phone, the Duo.All of this leaves the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max in the doldrums, looking much like the 17 Pro but far less exciting than the Duo, or last year’s iPhone Air, which is my favorite phone ever made. The new Pro phones just seem like another iterative take on a Pro iPhone — and having tested both sizes, that’s pretty much exactly what they are.The biggest upgrade is to performance; iPhone chips have long been far more powerful than most users will ever need, but with the A20 Pro — the first iPhone chip built on a 2-nanometer process — the leap is theoretically substantial. It’s not just significantly more powerful, but far more power-efficient, too, and Apple helps it out by redesigning the vapor chamber, dissipating far more heat away from the chip. In real-world use, it feels fast, but not perceptibly more than the 17 Pro, and the battery life is great, but iPhones have a habit of losing a decent amount of that in your year of ownership, so it’s hard to tell whether that will hold up by the time the next Pro comes out. In my experience though, the 18 Pro Max — the main phone I have been testing so far — never gets warm to the touch, even with sustained video shooting or gaming, and I have yet to see any performance hiccups. That is, until I got a bug where the touch screen stopped working properly, with parts of the screen being entirely unresponsive until I restarted the phone. This was just an early release bug, though, and iOS 27.0.1 was quickly issued with a fix for it. iOS 27 is a solid upgrade — which you can read about here — but you can install it on any modern iPhone.The other flashy upgrade is to the cameras — but the changes to the app are actually cooler than to the hardware. The rear system uses three 48-megapixel sensors: the main lens at a 24-millimeter equivalent, an ultrawide at 13 millimeters, and a telephoto at 100 millimeters. But that main camera has up to six laser-cut blades that give it a variable aperture, stopping the lens down from f/1.48 to f/4. It is the first time Apple has added aperture control to an iPhone. And… it’s fine? With a narrower apperture, you get more depth of field — more of the photo is in focus — but the difference is so subtle that most people won’t notice it, and even an experienced photographer like myself struggles to meaningfully make use of it. If Apple introduces larger, 1-inch-type sensors, as some Android phones have, this would be a boon — helping to manage the naturally shallow depth of field of those sensors — but until then, this is a gimmick. It does make for cool nighttime shots, though, with distinctive star-shaped light blooms.The Camera app upgrades are really nice. Namely, you not only can choose shutter speed, white balance, and — courtesy of the new camera — aperture, and all kinds of other normal camera settings, but you can pin often-used settings to a bar at the top of the screen. That’s not as handy as if they were on a floating bar closer to your fingers — particularly on the 18 Pro Max — but still! Similarly, Apple has upgraded Photographic Styles to make them more distinct, with new grain and ‘glow’ functions, but if you weren’t using them before, this isn’t going to convert you, and the photos still look like highly processed, conspicuously digital iPhone photos.The phones come in four colors this year, with my review units in the fingerprint–magnet-black and the gorgeous light blue color, glacier. It’s one of the prettiest colors ever put on a phone, and I expect it to be this year’s bestseller. The 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max start at $1,199 and $1,299, respectively, or $100 more than the models they replace, which they are very similar to. If you’re upgrading from an iPhone 15 generation or earlier, this is a real improvement, but so would it be if you bought a refurbished 17 Pro. And if you have a 17 Pro, unless you just love blue or maroon, it is not worth the upgrade.

Apple’s Latest iPhone Is a Pro Forma Upgrade

Apple’s Latest iPhone Is a Pro Forma Upgrade

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