Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max go on sale Friday, September 18, a week after preorders opened on Saturday, September 12. The phones headlined Apple’s “Surprise and Shine” keynote on September 9. It was the first product event run by new chief executive John Ternus, after Tim Cook handed him the role the week before.
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As expected, Apple did not announce a standard iPhone 18 at the event, and Ternus said nothing about Vision Pro, iPads or Macs either. His focus was the Pro and Pro Max, Apple’s first folding handset, and updates to the Apple Watch and AirPods.
What’s new on the iPhone 18 Pro
The Pro models look close to their predecessors: 6.3 inches for the Pro, 6.9 for the Pro Max, in black, silver, glacier and a new burgundy. Apple’s A20 Pro is the first 2-nanometre chip for the iPhone, with two “super-core” processors Apple says run up to 20 percent faster and a seven-core graphics chip up to 40 percent quicker.
The camera carries the bigger change. The 48-megapixel main sensor now opens and closes its aperture mechanically, through six thin blades, to help low-light shots and give real, optical control of depth of field. New Pro Controls let a photographer set white balance, shutter speed, aperture and a histogram by hand. Apple has also shrunk the Dynamic Island and repackaged the chip against a redesigned vapour chamber to keep the phone cooler under load. Wireless charging now reaches 50 percent battery in 15 minutes, and the Pro Max is rated for up to 45 hours of video playback.
Pricing rose alongside the hardware: $1,199 buys the iPhone 18 Pro, and $1,299 the Pro Max, both $100 above last year’s models.
What the iPhone Duo brings
Apple’s bigger news was its first folding phone. The iPhone Duo opens like a book, with a 7.6-inch inner screen and a 5.4-inch outer display, and works with the Apple Pencil Pro stylus. Closed, it is close to passport-sized, and open, it is the thinnest iPhone yet. It weighs 254 grams and runs the same A20 Pro chip and C2 modem as the Pro line. It swaps Face ID for a Touch ID sensor built into the power button, probably to free up room for a bigger battery.
On the back sit two 48-megapixel cameras, a standard lens and an ultrawide with 2x optical zoom, on a hinge built from more than 100 parts in Grade 5 aluminium. Apple rates the battery at up to 31 hours of video on the inner screen and 44 hours on the outer one.
The Duo starts at $1,999 for 256GB of storage, rising to $3,199 for 2 terabytes. Buyers wait longer for it than for the Pro models: preorders open October 16, with the phone reaching shops October 23, five weeks after the Pro launch.
What Apple hasn’t announced yet
Siri AI, Apple’s redesigned assistant, is live in English now, in beta, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish due in October. The standard iPhone 18 still has no date, though WIRED expects the base models early next year.
