Review: The iPhone 18 Pro is Apple's coolest phone, but only literally

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro shipped in September, and Ars Technica's Samuel Axon reviewed it against last year's model. His take: an absurdly fast, fully loaded handset that may be overshadowed by the iPhone Duo, but no worse than the iPhone 17 Pro.

Design: the same body, a smaller Dynamic Island

Visually, little changed: the 18 Pro keeps the 17 Pro's shape and materials, and the new burgundy color is appealing. The one visible tweak is a smaller Dynamic Island, achieved by moving the infrared camera under the OLED panel in the screen's top-left corner; those pixels run at twice the brightness, so the display looks almost untouched. The smaller cutout also lets the Dynamic Island show up to three Live Activities at once instead of one, though Axon says that alone is not worth an upgrade.

A20 Pro: 2 nm and better thermals

Most changes are internal. The A20 Pro moves from the A19 Pro's 3-nanometer process to 2 nm, keeps a 7-core GPU with a Neural Accelerator in every core, and adds hardware ray tracing, a dual 16-core Neural Engine, and 50 percent more memory bandwidth.

Heat management is the main story. New chip packaging places the system-on-a-chip next to the memory instead of on top of it, and the vapor chamber from the 17 Pro is larger. Apple promises up to 40 percent better sustained performance than the 17 Pro and up to 100 percent better than the iPhone 16 Pro. Extreme heat tests were impossible in a cool Chicago week, but Axon reports a noticeable day-to-day improvement.

Battery and cameras

Battery life improves too: Apple rates the iPhone 18 Pro at up to 36 hours of offline video playback on one charge, against 33 for the 17 Pro. The company's own C2 modem uses less energy than the Qualcomm modem in the 17 Pro, and wireless charging runs at up to 25 W.

The camera hardware is unchanged: a triple 48 MP rear system and an 18 MP front camera. The headline addition is a variable aperture, settable from f/1.48 to f/4 or left on automatic, plus Photographic Styles 3 with four textures: film, glow, soft skin, and standard.

The verdict

For Axon, the Pro line is no longer the flashy one: Apple is saving bolder design ideas for the iPhone Air and Duo, while the Pro phones are workhorses for demanding users. The 18 Pro is the quintessential iPhone of the Tim Cook era: practical, pricey and feature-packed, if not bold.

Owners of an iPhone 17 Pro have little reason to upgrade, and Axon is skipping this generation from his iPhone 16 Pro. Anyone who wants something new and flashy should wait for the iPhone Duo next month.