Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max went on sale Friday in more than 65 countries, drawing lines at flagship retail stores even as online delivery windows for new orders slipped into October within days of launch. The rollout follows preorders that opened September 12 and caps a launch cycle that also introduced Apple's first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, which will not reach stores until next month.
The Pro starts at $1,199 for the base 256GB model, with the larger Pro Max starting at $1,299. Both phones ship with Apple's new A20 Pro chip, built on a 2-nanometer process, which early benchmark testing found to run 24 to 26 percent faster than last year's iPhone 17 Pro. The headline hardware change is a redesigned main camera with a larger sensor and a variable aperture, a first for the iPhone line, paired with a bigger battery that Apple says gives the new Pro models the longest battery life of any iPhone to date.
A familiar shape, sharper edges
Apple kept the iPhone 18 Pro's overall design unchanged from the past two generations, concentrating this year's engineering on the camera system, chip and battery rather than the exterior. That continuity has shaped how reviewers are framing the launch: strong on execution, light on surprise, with most of this year's genuine novelty reserved for the Duo.
"Excellent and utterly iterative" is how The Verge's Allison Johnson summarized the Pro line, according to a review roundup published by MacRumors. Engadget's Cherlynn Low, in her own review, made a similar point, noting the phone lives in the shadow of the still-unreleased Duo. Neither reviewer called the upgrade a bad one — Engadget's full review praised the new camera's manual controls and AI-assisted editing tools — but both suggested owners of an iPhone 16 Pro or newer have little urgent reason to trade up.
Excellent and utterly iterative.
Allison Johnson, The Verge
Apple is betting that the bigger draw for holdouts will be the improved Siri, which now runs on Apple's licensed Gemini model and is available on the iPhone 15 Pro and newer, not just this year's models — meaning the new hardware's advantage over recent devices lies mainly in speed, camera and battery, not software.
What's next
The iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable phone, opens for preorder October 16 and reaches stores October 23, giving Apple a second, higher-margin launch moment this fall. The launch was also a milestone inside Apple's executive suite — one outlet's account of how incoming chief executive John Ternus is steering his first major product cycle found more continuity than change in Apple's approach. For now, the early delivery slippage on the 18 Pro line suggests solid initial demand for the more conventional phone, even if this year's changes are evolutionary rather than dramatic.
