Marques Brownlee’s iPhone 18 Pro Review

He takes the same “this is pretty much exactly what Apple used to label an ‘S’ year” angle I did, so, unsurprisingly, I think his review is spot-on. Brownlee emphasizes one point that I should have, but didn’t: according to Apple’s published specs, the regular iPhone 18 Pro gets longer battery life than the iPhone 17 Pro Max. That’s just a year-over-year spec that anyone can understand, for an attribute that everyone cares about.

Sidenote, per that point: Brownlee wonders why Apple still refuses to publish the capacities of iPhone batteries in mAh. We eventually find out when people take new iPhones apart, so why not publish the numbers? Brownlee only mentions batteries but I’ll point out that Apple still does the same thing with RAM. There is no spec on the tech specs page for any iPhone telling you how much RAM it has. In some ways this is a little silly, but the way Apple thinks about it is that they only publish specs that they think are useful for comparison. Storage is useful for comparison, so Apple dutifully publishes storage capacities. In fact that is the spec by which they price higher tiers. Battery life is useful for comparison, so Apple publishes that as a spec, based on multiple use cases. But mAh capacity of the battery, to Apple’s mind, isn’t useful for comparison. Not for comparison to Android phones, especially, and not even for comparison to other iPhone models. If they published a spec that says iPhone A has a 4,000 mAh battery and some Samsung phone has a 5,000 mAh battery, one could conclude that the Samsung phone “wins”. Obviously a bigger battery leads to longer battery life, but battery capacity alone doesn’t tell the battery life story for any device. The main reason that the year-over-year iPhone Pro battery life has improved so much that the regular iPhone 18 Pro gets longer battery life than the 17 Pro Max isn’t related to battery size — it’s the increased efficiency of the A20 Pro SoC (and perhaps secondarily the improved thermal system). Same thing for RAM. To Apple’s mind, iPhones perform much better with less physical RAM than Android phones do, so they don’t think RAM-vs.-RAM is a useful comparison. In fact, they think looking at RAM would be misleading. So they don’t publish it. They know that those of us who care are going to learn how much RAM is in these phones (12 GB, just like last year’s 17 Pro models), and how big the batteries are in mAh. But they’re only going to list the specs that they think are useful for comparison purposes.

★ Sunday, 20 September 2026