iPhone 18 Pro review: 7+ hours screen time and quick charge

Battery life is the best part of the iPhone 18 Pro. Our tester juggled WhatsApp, Slack, Teams and iMessage, plus YouTube, Instagram and plenty of photography, and still got up to 7 hours and 10 minutes of screen time. That is a full working day for most people, with room to spare.

Charging finally feels quick too. A full charge took around 45 minutes. Other testers found that a 60-watt charger got the phone to 50 percent in about a quarter of an hour, which puts Apple level with fast-charging Android phones like the Galaxy S26 Ultra. If you often forget to plug in overnight, a short top-up over breakfast now goes a long way.

One tip: that speed depends on the charger. A slower, older power adapter will still work, but it won’t get you these numbers.

The biggest camera change is variable aperture on the main 48-megapixel camera. In plain terms, the aperture is the opening that lets light into the lens. On most phones it’s fixed. Here, a set of six small blades can widen or narrow that opening, a bit like the iris in your eye.

You get four settings in the Camera app: f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8 and f/4.0. A low number lets in more light and gives a soft, blurred background. A higher number keeps more of the scene in focus, which helps with group shots and bright days. If you don’t want to think about any of this, leave it on auto and the phone picks for you.

Day to day, photos were excellent. Portraits, selfies and shots in awkward light came out well most of the time. The weak spot is the telephoto. Pictures at 8x zoom were softer than we hoped, especially in difficult lighting. During one bright outdoor shoot at 8x, the phone froze briefly before recovering. It happened once in a month, but it’s worth knowing if zoom is why you buy a Pro.

The A20 Pro is built on a 2-nanometer process, which means Apple could pack more of the tiny switches called transistors into the chip while using less power. In practice, apps opened instantly, switching between them was smooth, and recording 4K video then jumping to a work message caused no slowdown.

Heat was the pleasant surprise. Even when we ran demanding benchmark apps back to back, the phone only got noticeably warm around the camera bump, and never uncomfortably so. Other reviewers reported smooth play in console-class games such as Red Dead Redemption. Honestly, most people won’t come close to using all this power, but it does mean the phone should feel fast for years.

Sizes haven’t changed. The iPhone 18 Pro has a 6.3-inch screen and the Pro Max a 6.9-inch one, both with ProMotion refresh rates up to 120Hz, Ceramic Shield 2 glass and the same IP68 dust and water rating. The new Pro is only 5 grams heavier than before, and last year’s cases fit.

The one visible change on the front is a smaller Dynamic Island, the black pill at the top of the screen. Apple shrank it with a patch of specially designed pixels that lets Face ID’s infrared light pass through, and it can now show three live activities at once, such as music, a timer and an upload.

The screen itself is bright enough to read comfortably in direct sun. Our main gripe is auto-brightness, which sometimes dims or brightens the display when you least expect it. If it bugs you too, you can turn it off and set brightness by hand.

The new Burgundy color looks rich, but it picks up fingerprints, smudges and dust quickly. The frame is aluminum, which tends to scuff more easily than the titanium used on the iPhone 16 Pro and older. Put a case on it.

It depends on what you’re coming from. Our tester upgraded from a regular iPhone 17 and felt the jump most in battery, camera flexibility and how reliably the phone kept up on long days out. If your phone is older than that, the gains should feel larger still.

If you already own an iPhone 17 Pro, this is closer to an old-style “S” year. The design, screen sizes and rear camera resolution carry over, so the case for upgrading rests almost entirely on variable aperture, faster charging and the smaller Dynamic Island.

Apple’s AI is the area that still needs work. Siri is smarter in iOS 27 but slower to respond than its rivals, and voice typing still makes odd mistakes, particularly with accents. The new universal search, which pulls results from Mail, Messages, Photos and the web from a plain-English request, works very well, though.

Our verdict: if you want a compact iPhone with excellent everyday photos, a battery that gets you through a long day and fast charging, the iPhone 18 Pro is an easy recommendation. If you want the best possible zoom or the biggest screen, look at the Pro Max, which starts at $1,299.