Battery life has been stellar on the Pro models over the last few years, and that remains true here. The Pro Max is the more notable of the two because it packs a denser battery. With average use (around 5 hours of screen-on time), I hovered around 50 percent by the end of the day, and easily made it through day two on a single charge. I spent a little less time with the smaller Pro, but so far it has also comfortably gotten me through a day with around 40 percent left by bedtime. Safe to say, most people will very much enjoy the battery life, but the update doesn’t feel drastic.
Next, there’s the processor: the A20 Pro chip. I hardly run into problems with Apple’s flagship silicon, and that hasn’t changed. The phones run every app fluidly, and my benchmark tests show a surprisingly sizable leap over the A19 Pro in the 17 series.
It runs Control—a AAA game from 2019 ported to iOS earlier this year—decently well. However, aggressive upscaling makes the graphics look grainy, and character movements can feel a little sluggish. (I maxed out the graphics settings.) It’s certainly not perfect, but I still can’t believe I’m playing such a demanding title on an iPhone.
Control on the iPhone 18 Pro Max.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
More impressive is Apple’s thermal management on these phones. The company has expanded the vapor chamber’s surface area by three times—the phone’s cooling technology that helps spread heat around—meaning the entire phone felt toasty after close to an hour of gameplay in Control, with no uncomfortable localized hot spots. This larger vapor chamber also lets you game longer before phone’s thermal throttling kicks in and slows everything down.
The iPhone 18 Pro models come with iOS 27 out of the box, which features the all-new Siri AI. Yes, Siri AI is infinitely more capable than any version of Siri that Apple has offered before. It still doesn’t quite have the spark or versatility of other AI assistants, but you might be fine with that. If you throw Siri AI a question, there’s a good chance it can actually give you a satisfactory answer now. Remember that Siri AI and other Apple Intelligence features aren’t exclusive to the latest models, though you do need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer to access them.