The iPhone 18 Camera is Reportedly Getting a Variable Aperture
After the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro featured updated cameras, the iPhone 18 isn’t expected to take a similar leap. But it will reportedly get one interesting new feature: variable aperture.
Most smartphone cameras have a fixed aperture; the iPhone 17 is fixed at f/1.6. This affects how light hits the sensor, and proper camera setups always come with a variable aperture (typically from f/2.8 to f/22) that photographers exploit to achieve desired aesthetics.
The news that the iPhone 18 camera lens will feature a variable aperture comes from trusted technology journalist Mark Gurman after he was asked by a reader whether the iPhone 18 Pro will be a “big update”.
Gurman explains that Apple used to add the letter ‘S’ to the company’s more minor iPhone updates. But that changed in 2021 when the iPhone 13 was released, despite it being nearly identical to the iPhone 12.
“We’ve seen this play out a couple of times since, including with the move to the iPhone 16 from the iPhone 15,” Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter, published by Bloomberg. “Later this year, the pattern will continue with the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, which represent minor tweaks from last year’s iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max.”
However, Gurman says that an important change will be a new camera system that has the variable aperture as well as a faster A20 processor. “In any case, the Pro model isn’t likely to be the star of Apple’s iPhone launch this fall: The spotlight will be on the company’s very first foldable phone,” teases Gurman.
How the variable aperture gets implemented will be interesting: for photographers who know their way around a lens iris, they will likely have fun playing with the depth of field. But for most people who don’t know what an aperture is, will Apple use AI computer vision to set it automatically? If not, then surely it will stay buried in the settings, untouched by the vast majority of iPhone users.
To find out more about a camera’s iris and what it does exactly, why not read PetaPixel’s comprehensive guide on aperture in photography.
Image credits: Apple