GoKawiilLast week, Apple announced an iPhone unlike any it has made in the past. An iPhone that has seemingly already led several other phone manufacturers to pursue entirely different designs for their flagship products. A remarkably distinct device with the kind of “I can’t believe they did that” software touches that Apple sometimes pulls off when it’s at the top of its game.
That phone is not the iPhone 18 Pro.
The 18 Pro and Pro Max are in the unusual position of being the second-most interesting iPhones that Apple is launching this year. The foldable iPhone Duo stole the show at Apple’s launch event, but it’s not arriving until next month. In the meantime, the 18 Pro cometh, and it is extremely familiar even with a totally new hardware feature in the camera.
It is so similar to the iPhone 17 Pro that it can use the same cases. Have you used an iPhone 17 Pro? Great, you now know what it’s like to use the 18 Pro. There are no surprises, and unless you’re a truly committed smartphone photographer, no hugely compelling reason to pick an 18 Pro over a 17 Pro if you can find one on sale. It’s what we’ve come to expect from what was the flagship iPhone: excellent and utterly iterative.
Inside, the iPhone 18 Pro has a revamped thermal management design that allows its new A20 Pro chip to sustain full performance for longer, but the biggest truly new idea is inside the main camera, where Apple has added a moving aperture to control how much light hits the sensor. This is a big deal, and also a small deal, which I promise makes sense.
With a few exceptions, phone cameras have fixed apertures. Their sensors and lenses are so small that most of your scene is in focus even when you’re shooting wide open, and it’s usually best to get as much light as you can on that tiny sensor anyway. But there are some edge cases where a narrower aperture is helpful, even on a phone camera. It could also be helpful in other situations, particularly in low light, to open up the aperture even further than the iPhone’s traditional f/1.8. So Apple seems to have said, “Screw it. Let’s have it both ways,” and put in a variable aperture.
With the right lighting and the help of a macro lens you can see those aperture blades.
So there are really two separate things happening here. The maximum aperture is now bigger, at f/1.48 vs. f/1.8, and has the ability to get smaller, with stops available at f/1.8, f/2.8, and f/4. And while both the larger and smaller apertures do offer marginal improvements to photo quality in some cases, the differences are generally marginal.
One of the reasons photographers like a wider aperture is for its ability to throw more of the background of a photo out of focus. But the small lens and sensor on a smartphone camera don’t allow for the same kind of soft background blur you get from a bigger camera system. At the iPhone’s old maximum aperture of f/1.8, most things are in focus most of the time, and going to the slightly wider f/1.48 doesn’t make a huge difference.
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