A day and a half between charges, sometimes two on a light day: that's what MKBHD got from the smaller iPhone 18 Pro over a week of use, with two hours of CarPlay a day in the mix. Apple's EU energy label puts the battery at 4,056 mAh, barely more than the 17 Pro's. So the channel credits the 2nm A20 Pro, and calls a phone it files under S updates underrated.

What the A20 Pro changes

  • Cooling. Moving the DRAM beside the processor instead of stacking it on top leaves room, per the video, for a vapor chamber with three times the surface area, and Apple's iPhone 18 Pro announcement rates it for up to 40 percent more sustained performance. The video's use case is 4K shooting outdoors in a New Jersey summer, where older iPhones ran hot.
  • Siri. With the Neural Engine doubled to 32 cores, the requests Siri handles on-device come back much faster than on an iPhone 16, in the channel's testing.
  • Charging. Run flat and plugged into a 67W charger in the channel's test, the phone held a 45W draw for a long stretch.
  • Capacity. Apple doesn't print it on the spec sheet, but the EU labels do: 4,056 mAh for the Pro and 5,391 for the Pro Max, both SIM-tray models. MKBHD expects the eSIM-only US phones to carry a few percent more.

In the Camera app

  • Variable aperture. Six blades on the 48MP main camera step from f/1.48 through f/1.8 and f/2.8 to f/4. In MKBHD's side-by-sides, f/4 pulls more of the background into focus, and the difference is subtle.
  • Auto mode. In the channel's shooting it stayed at f/1.48 or f/1.8 and never stopped down on its own, so the wider opening is what everyday shots get: faster shutter speeds and lower ISO in dim light.
  • Pro controls. Press and hold the control bar to line up shutter speed, format, manual focus, and manual white balance in any order. The channel rates this above any of the new hardware.
  • Still missing. A Rec. 709 preview while recording log, and 8K at 30fps from a sensor MKBHD says is big enough for it.

On the outside

  • Dynamic Island. The infrared Face ID sensor moves behind the display in the top-left corner, per the video, so the island shrinks and fits three Live Activities. MKBHD caught the faded circle once, in direct sunlight.
  • Colors. Black, Silver, Glacier, and a new Burgundy. The review unit was matte black, which picks up more fingerprints than the channel hoped, and the burgundy gets called ugly outright.
  • C2 modem. Apple rates it at 15 percent less energy than the C1X. iPhoners buying the iPhone 18 Pro Max in the US get a Qualcomm modem instead.

That efficiency is the video's whole argument. A chip year usually buys either more speed or longer battery life, in MKBHD's telling, and the A20 Pro delivers both on the Pro's barely changed cell, with no denser silicon-carbon battery doing the work (the channel would happily take both).

It's silicon chops instead of silicon-carbon.

Variable aperture is first-generation iPhone hardware, and it behaves like it: subtle in MKBHD's samples and, the video argues, built for the 1-inch-type sensors iPhones don't have yet. The A20 Pro needs no such wait. It shows up on every charge.