Summary

Gruber reviews the iPhone 18 Pro, the 20th flagship iPhone generation, framing it as a classic 'S-type' year: nearly identical externally to the 17 Pro but meaningfully improved internally. The standout new feature is variable aperture on the main camera, which he calls a genuine hardware breakthrough and likely the last 'easy win' for iPhone cameras. He wrestles with whether the 18 Pro or the newly launched iPhone Duo is the true flagship of the year, concluding the Duo may be the more culturally significant device. He examines Photographic Styles 3's Film texture feature at length, finding the default halation effect too heavy but the feature directionally right. He concludes the 18 Pro is objectively Apple's best iPhone ever, just not an exciting one.

Key Insight

The iPhone 18 Pro is objectively Apple's best phone ever, but the excitement deficit isn't Apple's failure — it's the inevitable consequence of a design that has reached its platonic ideal, leaving only compounding incremental gains where breathtaking leaps once lived.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 5

  The iPhone 18 Pro, let's just say it, sort of is [boring]. But it's boring because it's exactly like the iPhone 17 Pro — except for specific details inside the phone that are obviously better.

• 6

  The iPhone Duo is not boring.

• 6

  The most exciting iPhone years are those when the new flagship screams 'new'. But the best iPhone models were the ones from the S years.

• 7

  I suspect variable aperture is the last remaining 'easy win'. I think every camera gain after this will be more incremental.

• 3

  The S years (and S-type years, even when there's no S in the name) are low on excitement but high on practical gains.

• 7

  It's the best version of the most successful product ever made. And yet by nature of how the iPhone 18 Pro improved in the last year, it's not exciting at all. How jaded we all are.

• 3

  Do that [incremental gains every year], and the experience for someone upgrading every fourth or fifth year will be exhilarating.

• 8

  The U.S. iPhone 18 Pro Max will almost certainly be the last product Apple ever ships with a Qualcomm modem. Good riddance.

Tone

reflective, opinionated