iPhone 18 Pro / Pro Max first impressions — the camera upgrade we've all been waiting for?

All right, I am here at Apple Park in the Steve Jobs Theater, and this right here is the iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone 18 Pro Max. This is the lovely new shade of burgundy. This is replacing sort of cosmic orange as the new hero. Same screen size as last year for both models, and they basically have a lot of feature parity, which is nice. The rumored aperture came here, so we have variable aperture that you can adjust with the true triple camera setup on the back. Longer battery life year over year, which we're really excited about. Apple is promising all-day battery life on both the 18 Pro and the 18 Pro Max. This thing tops out at nearly 40 hours of battery life promise, and this is 30 hours. There's faster wired charging as well, and MagSafe charging is still supported here. But under the hood, there's the new A20 Pro chip, faster CPU, including desktop-level super cores, as Apple calls them, higher-end GPU for some really nice gaming, and an enhanced neural engine to power all those Apple Intelligence features. We saw it's powering some new photographic style models on here. We're going to show off the new pro-level controls. If you've been waiting for pro controls on an iPhone, this is finally the year. So up at the top, we have that aperture controller over here for the lens apertures. We can adjust shutter speed, and you see that impacting with a histogram in real time. Light balance for different presets, so we can jump to daylight if you want to quickly customize a shot. Autofocus, which is really neat, so when you're filming a video, if you're tracking one person, it'll jump out. and if they run back in, it'll automatically refocus. And of course you get your normal customizations there. Still up to five different levels of shooting. So 0.5, 1, 2X, which is that crop of God, crop, digital, 4X telephoto, and the 8X, you can go all the way up to 40X digital on here, which is enhanced as well. And that's it. That's our first look at the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. Maybe the best news though, it's only $100 more. $1,199 starting price, $1,299 starting price, both at 256 gigs and up to 2 terabytes of storage. There's also some other new colors, including a glacier, which kind of has some blue to it, and then black. So, if you were waiting for that with the 17 Pro, you finally get it with the 18 Pro. Visit TechRadar.com for all the news on surprise and sign, and for our full thoughts on the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the iPhone 18 Pro. I really love burgundy.