At this point in time, many people have already reviewed the iPhone 18 Pro. And yet I made the stupid decision to pay Apple and buy it to review. Even though this review is late, it’s going to be an honest one. Also, it’s my first ever iPhone.
So, let’s get into it.
Performance
We’ll try to review it like how we did with all Android smartphones, starting with the performance. One of the main highlights of the performance of the iPhone 18 Pro is the latest A20 Pro chipset. It’s the first 2nm chipset to market, and Apple also enlarged the vapor chamber. It covers basically the entirety of the phone now, but that’s not all. The battery is also covered by the vapor chamber. It’s a very logical design choice.
In our gaming test, we did basically used the same settings that we used on Android devices. In Genshin Impact with the highest graphical settings, we can see that the performance is basically 60fps throughout, but that is to be expected since Genshin isn’t exactly that taxing on the modern flagships.
Zenless Zone Zero is actually very surprising to me. At the highest settings, the iPhone 18 Pro manages to keep it near 60fps for a lot of the time. There are some frame drops here and there – particularly with chain attack slow motion and all the particle effects, and it actually runs very smoothly. Somewhere near the end of the flower boss fight, it finally started throttling and the frame rate starts dropping. Even in this condition, the frame rate is still kept above 30fps – and that’s great.
Wuthering Waves is most demanding game that we have right now, mostly because the game’s optimisation is trash and it just doesn’t run well on all devices – including gaming PCs. Either way, on the iPhone 18 Pro with the highest settings, we can get above 30fps in the nest fights, and even after completing two nest fights and drive around the map, it didn’t throttle.
We also travelled to the new Mengzhou area and it didn’t throttle too. We flew around the entire map, and eventually it did start to throttle – but the frame rate is still at around 30fps at minimum. And that’s just crazy to see, as none of the phones we’ve reviewed so far can handle WuWa so well.
We also tested a lot more games – and the video is down below. Do hit that like and subscribe button too as we post a lot of videos on our YouTube channel.
Battery life
Now, the battery life. It’s not something that we can compare with Android devices since the PCMark tool is not available on iOS. That means we don’t have a standardised battery life test for iPhones. There are officially two different battery capacities of the iPhone 18 Pro, one for the physical SIM version and another eSIM version.
But that’s okay because I can at least describe my user experience to you. Since this is my first iPhone, I went and pressed around all the settings, downloaded a bunch of apps, tinkered around and whatnot – and the battery managed to survive throughout the day with its 4,056mAh battery – or 15.86Wh. Wh is a much better way to measure battery capacity; video here where we explained why.
I am indeed using it in auto brightness at around 80 nits most of the time, with True Tone turned on.
Charging speed
The charging speed is an interesting one. We recently switched over to a new charger, the UGREEN X776. This charger is interesting since we can toggle what protocols to be available on each of the ports. So, I was giddy about this and just enabled all protocols and did the test for the iPhone 18 Pro. As shown on the screen here, it prefers USB-PD PPS.
The charging curve is rather typical, I’d say. The charging speed is split into few sections. Once it reaches certain percentage of battery charge, it slows the charging speed. It happens on these points on the charging curve. It will also take around an hour to charge completely.
Now, this graph shows that the battery exceeds 100% charge – and that’s because anything above 100% is power loss. In this case, it exceeds by 5.52%, which is to say – 0.875Wh. It’s a very tiny amount.
If we force the charger to go AVS mode, then the iPhone 18 Pro can actually negotiate a much higher wattage from the charger – however, it’ll still only take around 41W at most. There’s a flat part around the middle – which I think is due to thermal throttling. During that 7 minutes, it’s literally not charging the phone at all. I guess my room was just that warm that time.
Either way, if we magically ignore that time loss, it takes around the same time to charge completely, but has less power loss, at only 4.62%, or 0.732Wh. Again, tiny amount – but measurable.
Honestly, don’t sweat it. Just charge your iPhone with either USB-PD PPS or USB-PD AVS charger.
Screen
Now, let’s talk about the screen. The iPhone 18 Pro comes with a 6.3-inch Super Retina XDR OLED panel with a resolution of 2622×1206 pixels and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate too.
From our tests, I can only get it up to around 1024 nits at most. Apple claims that the iPhone 18 Pro can go up to 1600 nits in HBM, but I am using the same testing methodology as how we tested Android phones. It worked for every single phone we’ve tested so far, but the iPhone 18 Pro only still shows 1024 nits. But that brightness is actually okay since the iPhone 18 Pro has an anti-reflective coating too.
At minimum though, it can reach 0.95 nits. Still a very good range, I’d say.
Before we start testing the color gamut coverage, we have to disable True Tone. There are also no other color profiles to select from.
From our tests, the iPhone 18 Pro covers basically 100% of sRGB and 75.6% of DCI-P3, while having an extremely low ΔE number across the board. This is actually the same way how Apple tunes their displays. The colors are not vivid at all – and we can’t change that.
By the way, the center cluster is now smaller, as the IR camera has been moved to the corner, hidden under the display. It’s actually very difficult to see, but we can take advantage of the moiré effect and ah – there it is. Since the subpixel arrangement is different for the under-display camera, we can map out its location.
Software
I would also want to talk about the software – but I am very new to iOS so I can’t really say anything about it. Actually, there are some preinstalled apps – but we can uninstall them if we want to.
So far, iOS has been… strange and I am still discovering and learning things as I go. The settings menu is surely weird with auto brightness fitted into the accessibility options instead of the display options – that’s for sure.
We’ll have some other content talking about iOS in general in the future – so stay tuned for those content.
Camera
As for the cameras, there are way too many videos talking about it already, so I’ll make a simple one from my perspective. There are 3 cameras here, and the main highlight this time around is the main camera with the variable aperture. On the official camera app, it has 4 steps – f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8, and f/4.0.
I’m not really someone who’s crazy about phone cameras – so here are a few pictures to share with you. To me, I think the cameras look fine. To have a look at all of the pictures and videos taken with the Apple iPhone 18 Pro, watch the video at the top of this review.
Design
All of the things we talked about is packed within this design. I’m not sure if this is the same design as the previous generation, but it sure looks like so. I like how everything is curved, and there are no sharp 90° angles, making it very comfortable to hold and also no corners for dust to hide.
I also really like the Glacier color – which is why I got this color.
It’s also quite jarring that iPhones have the power button on the right side and the volume buttons are on the left side. This will definitely mess with my muscle memory.
A few more things to mention
And we have a few more things to mention about the new iPhone 18 Pro. It has a USB 3 port at the bottom, great – but display output is not that simple. I plugged it into our portable monitor – and this will work for Android devices – but the iPhone 18 Pro says “it takes too much power”.
Bah, no worries. I used my Thunderbolt 5 dock instead – and that worked flawlessly. It seems to be outputting 4K resolution too, as the text and icons look sharp.
My keyboard works instantly, but my mouse does not work at all. Weird.
Our variant of the iPhone 18 Pro has a single SIM card slot and also eSIM support, which is to be expected at this point since Apple is trying to move away from physical SIMs anyway.
But one thing I have to admit – speakers on iPhones are seriously good.
Should you buy the iPhone 18 Pro?
So then, should you buy the iPhone 18 Pro? Honestly, not sure. If you’re coming from the iPhone 17 Pro series, it seems like the biggest highlight this generation is the variable aperture and the A20 Pro chipset. I mean, the chipset is amazing – but is it really worth spending all this money to get a new iPhone?
And if you are serious about gaming, then better get a handheld like the ROG Xbox Ally X, right?
I did ask my friends if they’re upgrading, and those who are using the iPhone 15 Pro are eager to upgrade to the iPhone 18 Pro. Those on the 16 and 17 though… they’re waiting for what comes next.
But I’m not here to dictate how you should spend your money. Heck, this is the first time I’m reviewing an iPhone anyway – so what do I know?
Instead, let me know what you think about the iPhone 18 Pro down in the comments below in the YouTube video. What phone are you using now, and are you going to get the iPhone 18 Pro? Are you an Android user who is tempted to switch over? Let me know all of your thoughts.
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