The Fruity Cargo Cult Apple has wheeled out its iPhone 18 Pro, leaning on 2nm silicon to make another incremental refresh look exciting.
According to Ars Technica, at the centre is the A20 Pro, the first 2nm chip used in an iPhone. It has a six-core CPU with two so-called super-cores and four efficiency cores. Job’s Mob claims the super-cores are up to 20 per cent faster. The seven-core GPU supposedly delivers up to 40 per cent more performance and greater memory bandwidth. A new Neural Engine, which Apple describes as effectively two Neural Engines on one chip, is also included.
Much of the launch was spent flogging Apple Intelligence and the long-delayed AI version of Siri. The company reckons keeping calendars, habits and other personal context on the phone gives its AI an advantage while preserving privacy. Siri AI is due in October.
Job’s Mob has tinkered with thermal management as well, presumably because a flagship phone that gets painfully hot is hard to present as premium engineering.
The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are slightly smaller than their predecessors while maintaining similar claimed battery life. The Dynamic Island is slightly smaller, so owners get a marginally smaller black blob for their money.
The 48-megapixel main camera now gets a variable aperture that changes with lighting conditions. Users can manually adjust aperture and shutter speed rather than surrendering every photograph to Cupertino’s computational photography machinery.
Naturally, there is a new colour called burgundy, because apparently semiconductor process nodes alone cannot persuade people to replace perfectly functional telephones; they need to be lured by the prospect of a phone the colour of sweeties.
The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 while the Pro Max begins at $1,299. Storage reaches 2TB, giving buyers ample room to contemplate where the rest of their money went.
Pre-orders begin on 12 September and shipments start on 18 September. Buyer’s remorse will probably begin soon after.
