Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max Are Coming on September 18 With a $1,199 Starting Price

Apple’s first iPhone event under the leadership of John Ternus, the new CEO of the company, marks a significant change for the iPhone release cycle: Apple only introduced the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max today alongside its foldable iPhone Duo, and the regular iPhone 18 will reportedly have to wait until Spring 2027.

The new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max look very similar to the previous models, though there are important performance and battery life improvements thanks to Apple’s brand-new A20 Pro chip, which uses a new 2nm manufacturing process. The camera system on the new Pro iPhones also takes a leap forward thanks to a variable aperture system and new computational imaging pipeline.

“With iPhone 18 Pro, we’ve made advancements to the areas our users care about most: camera, performance, battery, and intelligence. And we didn’t just make incremental improvements in these areas — we took huge leaps forward to create the best Pro iPhone we’ve ever made,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iPhone 18 Pro makes it easy for anyone to capture stunning photos and videos using variable aperture, while providing more versatility for creators and more control for pros. Paired with impactful upgrades to Photographic Styles and powerful video capabilities, iPhone 18 Pro unlocks entirely new ways for users to express themselves.”

Apple’s new A20 Pro chip, which also powers the new iPhone Duo, offers 50% more memory bandwidth and 40% faster graphics performance than the A19 Pro. Apple also imagined a new thermal management system where the A20 Pro is attached directly to a next-generation vapor chamber, which “dramatically improves sustained performance and enables up to a 40 percent gain over the previous generation.”

With its Dual 16-core Neural Engine, the new chip will be able to run Apple’s latest in-house AI models locally. The new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max also come with Apple’s new C2 modem, which consumes 15% less energy than the previous C1X model while adding support for 5G mmWave in the US. Apple said that eSIM-only iPhone 18 Pro models, which come with a larger battery, will offer up to 36 hours of video playback, with iPhone 18 Pro Max bumping that up to 45 hours. Apple’s latest iPhone Pro models can also charge up to 50 percent in around 15 minutes.

The most visible change on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max will probably be the smaller Dynamic Island, which can now show up to three Live Activities at once. Otherwise, the new Camera plateau that made its debut last year is still there, but there’s a new 48MP Fusion Main camera with a variable aperture system. It uses six laser-cut blades and a new rotor mechanism to intelligently transition between different apertures depending on light conditions.

“Combined with a new sensor that improves image quality, the result is better low-light photography, crisper detail in the back of group photos, and more unique shots. Variable aperture also provides more control for creative pros by giving them the ability to manually adjust any of the four aperture settings in the Camera app, and an API is available to developers for even more control across the aperture range in their apps,” Apple said today.

In the Camera app, there are new Pro controls with manual options for adjusting shutter speed, white balance, aperture, and more. Apple is also introducing Apple Reference Image, a new feature that will provide an unalterable version of a photo captured on an iPhone 18 Pro to use as a “digital negative” in comparisons with edited photos. Apple also said that SynthID, the industry standard for identifying images edited with AI, will become available on iOS 27 in a software update later this year. This will make AI-edited images easier to identify on iPhones.

The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max will ship with iOS 27 and the new Siri AI, which will be available in beta in English. Support for French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish is coming in October. iOS 27 will be released on Monday, September 14, four days before the release of the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max on September 18.

The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 and the Pro Max at $1,299. Both models will be available for pre-order on September 12, with shipments starting in 65 markets on September 18. 20 additional markets will follow on September 25.