Apple iPhone 18 Pro review

Familiar 6.3-inch OLED display

The iPhone 18 Pro features a 6.3-inch LTPO OLED display, which Apple calls Super Retina XDR OLED. It's the same as last year's display on the iPhone 17 Pro, except that the Dynamic Island pill has gotten smaller by moving the IR camera for Face ID outside of it and hiding it under the display in the top left corner. The change is proprtionately much more perceivable on the smaller iPhone 18 Pro than on the Pro Max.

The technical screen specs include a 1206 x 2622px resolution, refresh rate of 1-120Hz and support for HDR10 and Dolby Vision video.

iPhone 18 Pro

In our max brightness tests, the iPhone 18 Pro reached the same levels as last year. In auto mode, we are getting just under 1,000 nits with a 75% white patch filling the screen and more than 2,700 nits with a 10% white patch. Although those figures might not sound like much, the anti-reflective coating helps with sunlight legibility, and even with this brightness, the contents on the screen will be well visible even on a bright sunny day.

The minimum recorded brightness was 1 nit, which is ideal for pitch-black environments.

Refresh rate

Since this is an LTPO panel, it supports granular refresh rate control, which Apple calls ProMotion. The system automatically lowers the refresh rate to as low as 1Hz when the screen is idle or when viewing static content.

You can still cap the refresh rate to 60Hz to preserve battery, but we have our doubts about how big of an impact this will have on endurance.

Battery life

The iPhone 18 Pro comes with either a 4,056 mAh or 4,288 mAh battery, depending on which version of the phone you get. The eSIM-only variant gets the larger capacity, while the iteration with a physical SIM slot gets the smaller battery. The reviewed version is the one with a physical SIM card and 4,056 mAh capacity. Both battery options are marginally higher than last year, though.

Despite the rather modest battery capacity increase, the iPhone 18 Pro showed improved battery endurance in all of our screen-on tests and achieved a respectable 16:43h Active Use Score. It could be a software optimization, or it could be the new, more efficient Apple A20 Pro SoC. Whatever the case may be, the new iPhone brings a notable improvement in battery life.

When compared to competitors in the same price bracket and size from the Android camp, only the Xiaomi 17 seems to offer longer battery life. The Samsung Galaxy S26 and the Google Pixel 11 Pro both posted lower endurance scores in our tests.

Charging speed

The new iPhone 18 Pro is advertised by Apple to have a slightly faster charging rate, but as usual, it doesn't give much detail beyond "50% in 15 min," which is 5 minutes faster than last year.

Luckily, the EU retail box gives us the actual power rating, and it lists the charging power going up to 45W max. The previous generation was the first to adopt the AVS charging standard built on Power Delivery. Apple already sells an AVS-enabled charger called "40W Dynamic Power Adapter with 60W Max", and it's finally available to buy in Europe around the launch of the iPhone 17 series, it was it was only available in the States.

Alternatively, you can buy a third-party power adapter that complies with Apple's AVS profile, and one such charger is the Pixel Flex Dual Port 67W USB-C Fast Charger, which we used for testing the iPhone 18 Pro's charging speed.

In our testing, we weren't able to get to 50% in 15 minutes, but the iPhone 18 Pro was still marginally faster to charge at the 15-minute mark than last year's iPhone 17 Pro. At the 30-minute mark, the 18 Pro pulled further ahead and finished 16 minutes earlier than its predecessor. It's also slightly faster than the Samsung Galaxy S26 and blazing-fast compared to the Pixel 11 Pro.

Still, we wished the 18 Pro was just as fast as the 18 Pro Max, which surprised us this year with more than decent charging speed, peaking at 53W.

When it comes to wireless charging, the 18 Pro retains the 25W charging rate over Qi2 with MagSafe.

Apple caters to battery-anxious users as well, giving them the option to limit the charge from 80% to 100% in 5-percentage-point increments. There's also Optimized Battery Charging, which learns from your charging habits and kicks in fast charging only when needed and also minimizes the battery's time spent at 100%.

Speakers

The Apple iPhone 18 Pro has a hybrid setup of stereo speakers where the top speaker doubles as an earpiece. This comes at the cost of balance, as the top speaker is almost always quieter or less punchy. In the iPhone case, both speakers sound pretty uniform.

To our surprise, the newer iPhone is sensibly louder than before, earning a "Good" -26.5 LUFS loudness score, up from -28.9 LUFS on the 17 Pro.

The sound tuning, however, hasn't changed much. The iPhone 18 Pro sounds as great as always and, quite frankly, these speakers are still among the benchmarks in the industry. Rarely will you find better-sounding loudspeakers on a phone.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.