New iPhone day is a recognized holiday at my house. I like to take the day off (or at least work from home) and wait for the delivery.

Apple made some big news with the iPhones it introduced at its event in early September.

Everyone knew the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max would be announced, but Apple also introduced the iPhone Duo, which is their first folding phone. The Duo is getting the bulk of the attention, but it won’t be released until later in October.

They might not have the wow-factor of the Duo, but Apple packed the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max with their fastest processor and best camera and the longest battery life. There’s plenty to love about these new iPhones.

Sizes remain the same — 6.3-inch screen for the iPhone 18 Pro and 6.9-inch for the iPhone 18 Pro Max. The dynamic island, where the front camera and sensors live, is smaller, as the Face ID camera has moved behind the screen in the top left corner.

What’s new?

I received the iPhone 18 Pro Max to review in the new burgundy color. It’s also available in glacier (a frosty light blue), silver and black.

Apple has started a fun tradition of introducing a new color with the iPhone Pro models. Last year it was orange, and this year it’s burgundy. It’s the color you’ll see in all the commercials and Apple knows fans will instantly recognize it as the new model.

The new processor is the A20 Pro, which is Apple’s most powerful and efficient chip design and Apple says it’s inspired by their M-series chips. Graphics performance is up to 40 percent faster than last year’s iPhone 17 Pro.

The new chip design puts the CPU side-by-side with the memory, which combines with a larger vapor chamber to help keep the internals cooler.

There’s a new 16-core Neural engine, which provides the power for the new advanced Siri AI and all your AI tasks.

Battery life is a sleeper feature for me. All the features in the world take a back seat if your phone’s battery can’t keep up.

The iPhone 18 Pro Max increases battery life by six hours over the 17 Pro Max. Apple’s got a new battery test that simulates real-world use. In this test, the 18 Pro Max run for 30 hours per charge. Straight video playback hit 45 hours on a single charge.

Speaking of charging, Apple has sped up wired charging with up to a 50 percent charge in just 15 minutes with a fast USB charger.

New cameras

The main camera is a new 48-megapixel fusion camera with a variable aperture for more control over lighting and depth of field. It has a 24/48 mm focal length (1x/2x). The aperture ranges from f/1.148 to f/4.

There’s a 48MP Fusion Wide camera with a 13mm focal length (.5x), and a 48MP Fusion Telephoto with 100/200 mm focal length (4x/8x).

Apple has also brought the manual camera controls front and center if you’re the kind of person who likes to adjust aperture and shutter speeds.

There are also new photographic styles you can apply to change the overall tone of your photos.

The better processor and AI bring intelligent photo editing including spatial reframing (getting to change the lens position after the shot), as well as the extend tool, which can add more background around the edges of your pictures. The clean-up tool is also enhanced to help you remove unwanted items in your shots. Apple Intelligence is the engine for all these features.

You can also enhance video, including adding cinematic effects after the fact. A new audio mix feature lets you separate music and voices from background noise in your videos. One other new video feature I want to explore is 4K time lapse.

Siri AI

Along with the new iPhones, Apple has released a revamped Siri with improved AI.

The new Siri includes features like natural conversation, which allows for more open-ended conversations and follow-up questions; personal context which lets Siri access information from your Messages, Mail, Photos, Notes, files and other supported apps; Onscreen awareness, which lets you ask Siri about a document or web page that’s on your screen.

Pricing

I’d like to say this year’s iPhones are priced at the same levels as last year, but if you’ve been paying attention to memory and storage prices, you’ll know that’s not the case.

The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 with 256 gigabytes of storage. The 18 Pro Max bumps the starting price to $1,299 for 256gb. Storage configurations are available up to 2 terabytes.

If you’re curious, an 18 Pro Max with 2TB costs $2,399.

Conclusions

Externally, the iPhone 18 Pro Max looks exactly like the 17 Pro Max. Apple has settled on a design that obviously works, and it’s great to see them working hard to make the key features better.

The A20 Pro, the cameras, the battery life and the AI are all improved.

Long ago, Apple would release a phone, like the iPhone 5, then the next release would be called the 5S, and all the improvements were on the inside.

I’m a fan of finding a great design and taking your time to refine it and make it better.

If you ask most users what they would improve on their phone, they’d say make it faster, have better battery life, charge up faster and take better pictures.

Apple has checked all those boxes.

I’m hard-pressed to come up with a list of how I’d like Apple to improve on these features, but I’m sure they will for the iPhone 19 Pro Max.

The iPhone world’s focus will now shift to the folding Duo, which is a lot flashier.

But as someone who isn’t quite sold on the Duo’s form-factor, I’m very happy with the 18 Pro Max and all those improvements.

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