iPhone 18 Pro finally gets a variable aperture — and it changes what the camera can do

Apple has announced the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, and for once the camera headline is not a bigger number. It is a mechanical one: the main camera now has a variable aperture, physically stopping down from f/1.48 to f/4. That is a first for iPhone, and it is the most photographically meaningful change Apple has made to its camera system in years. Full details are on Apple’s site. Why variable aperture matters Every iPhone until now has had a fixed aperture. Depth of field was therefore fixed too, and the only way to blur a background was Portrait mode — which is software estimating depth and applying blur, with the tell-tale errors around hair and glasses that give it away. A physically variable aperture changes the optics rather than the processing. At f/1.48 you get genuinely shallow depth of field and considerably more light reaching the...