The iPhone camera is a lot of things to a whole lot of people. We use it to take video of our kids, photograph our vacations, and just generally document the world around us. So, when the world's most popular camera gets a big update, it's a huge deal. Even when it's something so small you can barely see it.
The iPhone 18 Pro's big camera update really is that tiny. Inside the main camera lens, Apple has added a moving aperture. It has six blades, each the width of a human hair, and it opens up and closes down just like the iris on a traditional camera lens. Phone cameras pretty much exclusively have fixed apertures that don't move. They're less complex, and you usually want as much light as possible hitting the sensor anyway. And even though I love a new meaty camera feature, I don't think this one is that useful.
To understand why, let's get into the sciency stuff. You might associate aperture numbers or f-stops with something known as bokeh. That's the blurred background you might see in a portrait taken with a bigger camera, like all this behind me. It's the effect your phone mimics in portrait mode. On a camera with a large sensor, a portrait taken at a wide aperture like f1.8 usually won't have a lot in focus behind the subject. And a portrait taken with a smaller aperture, something like f6 or f5.6 like you see here, will lose the bokeh and have a lot more in focus behind them. But that changes on a smaller camera. If you take that same picture at the same f1.8 on a camera with a smaller sensor and a smaller lens, it's going to put a lot more in focus. That's because while the f-stops are consistent numbers across different lenses and cameras, the depth of field you get from those numbers is relative to the size of the lens and sensor you're using. Shooting at f1.8 on a smartphone camera is actually closer to something like f5.6 on a full-frame, which is why you don't see that dreamy background blur, even though it was technically taken at f1.8. At that aperture, there's already a lot in focus. All that is to say, changing the aperture on a really tiny lens doesn't make a huge difference in terms of background blur. It's easier to see if you're really close to your subject and you want to keep things in the background sharp, but even then, it's a pretty subtle difference.
Both the iPhone 18 Pro and the 18 Pro Max have this new adjustable aperture in the main camera, and it opens up as far as f1.48. That's more than a third of a stop brighter than the fixed f/1.8 aperture the iPhone has had for years.
That's helpful for low light photography. More light means the system can use a lower ISO and shots will look slightly crisper. Take a look at these shots taken in the studio. These were taken without night mode. And at f1.8 the system has been able to use a higher ISO to get the same exposure as the f1.48 shot. So it's a tiny bit noisier. For reference, it is very dark in here. So, we are pushing this kind of to the best of its abilities, but the gains in detail are pretty minor, and smartphones are already so good at dealing with low light subjects thanks to night mode. There is an advantage to getting away with shorter night mode captures and faster shutter speeds if you're outside of a studio and your subject might be moving around more. Still, I think it's a pretty minor improvement in the amount of detail it captures over the 17 Pro.
There's another thing. Portrait mode still exists. You can still tap the F icon to give your portraits that soft background look via software. It's weird that there's now like a software aperture and a hardware one, but if you're looking for a way to beat the physical limitations of the small camera system, then there you go. There's software for that.
Apple isn't the first company to try this variable aperture thing. Samsung, Sony, and Xiaomi have all tinkered with this concept in previous smartphone cameras, and they have all dropped it since then. I kind of wonder if it's a matter of a feature that adds too much complexity for too little benefit. I'm not sure how committed Apple will be to this. I think it's nice, but I wouldn't be heartbroken if it went away. I am also not partial to the camera control, which is still here, but I can't say I used it much. It's also not possible to adjust the physical aperture with the control, just the portrait mode depth effect.
There's one other camera update on the 18 Pro that might actually be a bigger deal. Manual controls. For the first time, you can actually adjust shutter speed, focus, and white balance in the camera app itself. You can't change the ISO and the control icons are really tiny on the screen and a little bit hard to hit, but they're here finally. And the ability to stop down to f4 means you can get real sun stars in your photos thanks to those aperture blades, which I personally had a lot of fun with. You don't need to know or care about exposure controls or equivalent apertures to benefit from the updated camera system. Everything is still automatic by default. And the aperture adjusts automatically in response to different lighting conditions. Actually, most of the time it seems to stick to f1.8, which is the same as the old fixed aperture. In low light, it will open up to f1.48. And if it recognizes you're taking a picture of something with text on it, like a note sitting on a table, it'll drop down to f4 to get more of the writing in focus. That's pretty nice. But other than that, this is going to feel a lot like the same camera system we've seen the past few years on the Pro iPhone.
There are a couple of totally new photo features in iOS 27, Apple's AI editing tools. I think this is going to be nightmare fuel. I don't think it's going to go well. Reframe and extend help you adjust your shot post capture by letting you change the framing and fill in the gaps using AI. Like I wish I had positioned the tower a little lower in the frame here so I could use extend to add some blue sky back to the top. I'm not a huge fan, but it does a passable job if you're into that kind of thing.
And it makes me feel a little icky making it look like I took a photo from a different angle than I actually did, even if it's subtle. What if I bring this as evidence to a court of law and say I was on a different plane than I actually was? I'm just not a huge fan of big Gen AI edits on any phone, but maybe that's a me thing. To that point, Apple is adding support for SynthID later this year, and it will tag photos with these kinds of edits to note that AI tools were used. But they're also introducing a new process on the 18 Pro designed to help identify which photos are real, something it calls reference image. Basically, it's a way of preserving the image the way it came off of the sensor so you can prove that it wasn't made with AI. In Apple's keynote, they compared it to a digital negative. You have to enable it as a photo mode in settings, and you can only use it with the main camera sensor, which is able to cryptographically sign images at the pixel level. Once you take a photo in this mode, you then need to send it up to Apple's private cloud compute server. Then your reference image is saved with the regular photo. When a reference image exists, you can view it in the photos app and check what the original photo looked like before any edits were made. It's all kind of clunky, but it's a lot more robust than something like a metadata tag, which is easily added, but also easily stripped right out. Right now, it feels like a niche feature that might be useful for photojournalists, but it'll be interesting to see if Apple can get other companies on board with this concept.
Outside of AI photo edits, the 18 Pro introduces new texture options and photographic styles, so you can add film simulation effects like grain. If you're really into film styles, I love Fujifilm, then this is probably a welcome change, but the styles are getting a little complicated at this point. Cool. Rose soft skin. Rose gold soft skin. What do those words mean?
All iPhones that support the new customizable photographic styles will get this option. So, it's not just on the 18 Pro series.
On the video side, there's updated focus tracking that uses AI to stay on your subject. It'll even pick them up if they leave the frame for a few seconds and come right back or if someone else steps in the way.
Went back to Andrew.
We did some quick testing with it and it's pretty persistent though. We were able to confuse it.
There are a few other medium to small updates on the 18 Pro and I get into all of that in my written review on theverge.com. There's, of course, the new A20 Pro chipset, updated thermals, faster wired charging, and battery life improvements. The Pro Max is bigger, per usual, and Apple claims its battery life is significantly improved over last year's model. It's been pretty promising in our testing so far, but we've only been using it for about a week at this point, and it's hard to say how that will hold up in the long run. The dynamic island now shows up to three live activities at once for the truly committed multitaskers. And in big personal news, there's now a wrist strap designed to go with Apple's tech woven case. And I freaking love a wrist strap. So, I guess the definition of a big new feature is kind of relative. You know,
when I started testing the 18 Pro, I wanted to know more than anything if I could really enjoy using it as a camera. I take lots of pictures with lots of different phone cameras, and they're convenient, and I often like the results, but I don't really think of it as a fun experience. The 18 Pro had its moments. But even with this new aperture on the main camera, I found myself wanting to switch back to the four-time telephoto for that simple reason. It's just more fun to use.
A moving aperture really doesn't do it for me, even if I appreciate the fringe benefits like sun stars. For the average person, this is not going to be a big deal. But if the flexibility of depth of field or new film grain effects are your kind of thing, this might be a big update for you. It's all relative.
All right.
