What the reviewers said
Digital Trends
8/10Oct 18, 2026A refined, long-lasting formula: excellent cameras, great battery life, and strong performance, with minor issues like fingerprint-prone finish and occasional camera freezes.
- Excellent cameras for everyday photography
- Outstanding battery life and fast charging
- Blazing-fast performance with good heat management
- Bright, smooth 120Hz ProMotion display
- Premium, compact design with good one-handed usability
- Telephoto photos could be sharper, especially at 8x zoom
- 8x zoom struggles in challenging lighting
- Burgundy finish attracts fingerprints and smudges
- Occasional camera freezes under demanding conditions
- Apple's AI needs more work
Tech Advisor
4.5/5Oct 9, 2026An excellent, polished phone, but an iterative update at a higher price. Owners of the iPhone 17 Pro have little reason to upgrade this year.
- Colour-matched design with glass back
- Longer battery life and faster charging
- Variable aperture main camera
- Smooth performance with new A20 Pro chip
- Bright, excellent OLED display
- Price increased by $100
- Siri AI needs ChatGPT for in-depth queries
- Only incremental upgrades over iPhone 17 Pro
- Camera Control awkwardly placed
- Case makes camera bump look odd
Tom's Guide
4.5/5Sep 20, 2026Fastest phone yet thanks to the A20 Pro chip and a new variable aperture camera, with strong battery life, faster charging, and a $100 price increase plus extra weight.
- Fastest chip in a phone (A20 Pro)
- Variable aperture main camera with new Pro controls
- Strong battery life, better than predecessors
- Faster charging than previous iPhones
- Smarter Siri AI assistant
- $100 price increase over last year
- Heavier than predecessors
- Battery gains over 17 Pro are modest
A refinement of last year's Pro rather than a reinvention. Cameras with variable aperture and Pro controls are the biggest leap, plus long battery life and better thermals, though upgrading…
- Excellent camera system with useful Pro controls
- Variable aperture adds creative flexibility
- A20 Pro is very fast with long battery life
- Improved thermals and smaller Dynamic Island
- Burgundy and Glacier colors look attractive
- No major design changes from last year
- $100 more than the previous generation
The Verge
8/10Sep 16, 2026An iterative upgrade over the iPhone 17 Pro. The new variable aperture brings only marginal photo gains, though manual camera controls are a welcome addition.
- Manual exposure controls in native camera app, finally
- Marginal image quality improvements, especially in low light
- Variable aperture helps depth of field and Night Mode
- Sunstar photography is strong
- $100 more expensive than last year
- Manual exposure controls are tiny
- Higher storage tiers are quite pricey
- Aperture gains are subtle and hard to notice
Verdicts, pros and cons are short summaries in our words of each publisher's review; scores are as the publisher gave them. Specs are taken from the reviews' spec boxes — where they differ, we show the value most of them give; price is the US launch price of the base model. Read the originals for the full picture.