iPhone 18 Pro Review: Gotta get them angles

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reviewing the iPhone 18 Pro Max. I chose to stick with the Max due to the bigger display, bigger battery and bigger attitude, but besides these three features, both phones are practically the same. Despite reviewing the 18 Pro Max, I’ll be calling it the “18 Pro” for the sake of simplicity

The iPhone 18 Pro is a jack of all trades and good, if not great, at everything I’ve tasked the device with. Want to take a stellar photo at night, play a triple-A game for over an hour, quickly charge it after it survives for over a day — the iPhone 18 Pro can do it all. However, given its price tag, it better do it all.

Smaller Island

From the outside, the 18 Pro looks pretty much identical to its predecessor. One small change is the Dynamic Island, which is now smaller and can have up to three Live Activities at once. In my daily life, I typically never need to have three Live Activities going on at once, though it can come in handy sometimes. For example, while travelling, I saw Uber, my music, and the boarding pass details all right in the Dynamic Island, which is great.

Pretty much everything else about the outer design remains the same, excluding the new colourways and colour-matching back panel. I chose Burgundy; I’m a little surprised they didn’t call it Cosmic Burgundy or something cool. Regardless, it’s definitely my favourite colour option.

However, the Glacier and Black are also gorgeous. And I’ve mentioned that these phones colour-match now, compared to the 17 Pro series, which had two different shades on the metal chassis and back glass. I think the Burgundy all-in-one colour looks premium, and having the lighter secondary tone could come off as cheap-looking. Though this change in design and colour isn’t as eye-catching as the Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro (for better or for worse).

Smaller Dynamic Island, a brilliant shade of Burgundy and colour-matching; the design changes are minimal, but that’s par for the course. Apple has made some changes with the iPhone 18 Pro series, but you won’t notice them right away if you’re like me, coming from an iPhone 17 Pro; but slowly, as you use the device, you’ll feel the differences.

Those coming from an older device might notice the chunky camera, bigger battery, and more powerful processor a lot quicker than I did.

Who needs a DSLR?

The cameras on the iPhone 18 Pro are incredibly reliable, being able to take beautiful shots no matter what. The 18 Pro excels at photography, taking pictures in low light, on sunny days, at sunset, no matter the time or the subject. Pictures are vibrant, well exposed, and offer great colour accuracy.

I’ve taken pictures with friends and family, of wildlife, and scenery and had zero issues with the point-and-shoot, with the device automatically adjusting the variable aperture.

And while I attended a luau with a fire show, though I didn’t need to, I lowered the exposure and lowered the shutter speed, so I could get some pretty cool shots of the fire show. I also played around with the shutter speed while taking pictures of a Toronto streetcar so I could get a pretty cool motion blur effect.

These features aren’t exclusive to the iPhone 18 Pro on the smartphone market, but they’re easily accessible and let any amateur photographer become far better. But if you’re like me and just like to point and shoot, then the 18 Pro performs amazingly. Messing with the variable aperture isn’t something I ever found myself really needing to do. While it’s a cool feature, I haven’t found myself wanting to mess around with it, as the phone dynamically adjusts itself.

I love the look of these two photos taken above; they were taken about twenty minutes after one another. I think they show a decent range of colours, high dynamic range and details without having to make any adjustments. The sky is beautiful, the waves, even the footprints in the sand. I didn’t do anything with these pictures and just snapped a photo in the default state.

These three images above were taken with the telephoto camera and not the primary camera. Despite not using the variable aperture, you’re still able to get crazy detail and spectacular quality even in low light. To clarify, the two outer images (the ones of the birds) were taken at 8x zoom, and the luau performer was taken at 4x zoom.

9 images

Console gaming

The iPhone 18 Pro uses the 2nm A20 Pro chip that’s highly efficient and capable. Apps open as fast as I tap on the icon, and switching between them is just as quick.  Everything I throw at the 18 Pro is no issue for the device, whether it’s gaming, shooting and editing video, working on articles, swiping through social media, or watching videos. While we don’t put too much stock in benchmarks, the 18 Pro performs amazingly well on Geekbench 6 with a single-core score of 4,689 and a multi-core score of 12,408.

And it does all of this while never running too hot. Even after gaming, playing titles like Marvel Snap and Cult of the Lamb for over an hour, the handset doesn’t get too warm. I also tried playing Remedy’s Control with its default settings, and ray tracing turned on; the 18 Pro handles this very well.

The advanced vapour chamber can disperse heat evenly across the device, so after an hour of gaming, the phone is warm but isn’t uncomfortable to hold. However, if you bump up the settings, the 18 Pro can get hot after just ten minutes. And if it gets too hot, the game will slow down to the point it can feel laggy. But honestly, the game still looks great even without bumping up the display quality settings.

This is helped by the 18 Pro’s 6.9-inch Super Retina XDR OLED with up to a 120Hz refresh rate and a 1320 x 2868-pixel resolution. Not only Control, but every game looks great with this resolution and display quality.

In my testing, I didn’t use a lot of AI features. I’ve used the Apple Intelligence photo editing tools before to reframe photos and clean up images. These work great, but I didn’t use them a lot during this review process.

Siri AI is a daily companion, usually to set alarms or for stupid queries. It’s in beta, and that’s good because it still needs a little time to cook. A common thing I like to ask of my AI is to add my schedule for an upcoming event to my calendar. Google’s Gemini does this without a hitch, but Siri floundered. The AI was able to add the first two days of my schedule to the calendar, but failed to include the entire schedule. Whereas Gemini did the whole thing without a hitch.

I like Siri AI for minor tasks, asking tons of queries and going back and forth (usually about anime), and I like how it looks and how you’re able to adjust the pace and expressiveness, but it’s not as reliable as Gemini so far (I’ve even caught it making a mistake about one of my favourite anime).

Energizer Bunnies

The iPhone 18 Pro Max’s battery is surprising. According to GSMArena, the handset uses a 5,567mAh cell, which isn’t impressive on a global standard, but in terms of Canada, this puts it near the top, especially in the flagship category. However, battery size isn’t the whole story, and the efficient A20 Pro does a lot to extend the battery life. 

On days when I’m playing hardcore games or taking a lot of videos and editing them, I can squeeze out an entire day from the 18 Pro Max. But with my regular day-to-day usage, the 18 Pro Max survives just under two days. A regular usage day could look like scrolling through social media, watching YouTube videos, and playing a game or two of Marvel Snap. On Monday, the device will be fully charged, and then I’ll need to charge it Tuesday night.

Strangely, using the same example, my partner has been using the 18 Pro, testing out its battery, with less gaming and video editing and mostly scrolling through social media, and too many AI queries for my liking — his device consistently makes it to Tuesday night before bed, even Wednesday morning (with less than 10 per cent left).

But my partner and I both agree that our favourite aspect of the iPhone 18 Pro series is its fast charging. Having more than 50 per cent charge in about 15-16 minutes is great for an iPhone. When I’m reviewing Android devices, I’m typically used to fast charging from brands like OnePlus, Motorola and Samsung, but Apple has been lacking. While the company usually makes up for it with impressive battery life, fast charging is like a missing piece of the iPhone experience. And still, when I’m charging on the Belkin MagSafe stand, StandBy mode is great.

Total Package 

Apple’s latest and greatest is fantastic. Whether you want to game, take the perfect photo or video, or use it for whatever else, the iPhone 18 Pro is the choice if you’re okay with spending that pretty penny.

The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,749, and the 18 Pro Max starts at $1,899 in Canada.