The iPhone 18’s monstrous performance isn’t just on the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine side of things. The battery life on the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max just goes and goes. Apple advertises up to 36 hours of local video playback on the iPhone 18 Pro, which is 3 hours more than on the iPhone 17 Pro and 3 hours less than on the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Meanwhile, the iPhone 18 Pro Max can last up to 45 hours for local video playback, 6 hours more than on the iPhone 17 Pro Max and 9 hours more than the iPhone 18 Pro.
My take on the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max is that they are obscenely powerful phones inside a quiet redesign. You get the fastest chip ever in a phone with the A20 Pro, a variable aperture camera I find easy to use and overdue Pro controls that give you more creative freedom when shooting photos and videos.
Apple has doubled down on its strategy. The iPhone 18 Pro takes the foundation of the iPhone 17 Pro and pushes it even further. There is a massive leap in performance, the camera is more capable, the Dynamic Island is smaller, and battery life is even better.
Should You Buy It?Yes. While Apple’s keynote may not have impressed you, the changes on this device are numerous and directly impact both photo and video capture in a positive and meaningful way.
Even if the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are aimed more at creative types than at regular folks, that doesn’t change the fact that they are outstanding and powerful phones. The battery life in my testing so far matches that of the 17 Pro and Pro Max. Charging is fast and iOS 27 improvements make interacting with the iPhone feel lively and less tedious. I’ve enjoyed Siri AI and think that when more folks try out the beta voice assistant, it will win over a lot of new fans.
Battery life is the eternally impossible question to answer about a phone after a week of using it. I haven’t experienced anything like a “normal day” for the past week, but I haven’t seen any surprising battery drain from the 18 Pro in my downtime, either. It survived a day of intense use during a video shoot without a recharge at any point, which is no small feat. Apple quotes a modest gain in battery life for the smaller Pro model — 36 hours of video playback, up from 33 hours on the 17 Pro. The 18 Pro Max offers a bigger increase: 45 hours of video playback compared to 39 on the 17 Pro Max.
In the iPhone Duo's shadow, the iPhone 18 Pro certainly feels like an "S" device. But S-year iPhones were never bad iPhones. They were simply unexciting. Similarly, while none of the iPhone 18 Pro's latest features are things you should run out the door to spend money on, it's certainly a meaningful improvement for anyone on an iPhone 16 Pro or older. Of all the iPhones you can buy now, it has the best camera setup, and anyone with the slightest interest in manual photography will appreciate the new variable aperture controls.
Gast
