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A Camera Expert Says the iPhone 18 Pro Max's Big Rumored Feature Probably Won't Change Much
With Apple's September 9 event locked in, the rumor everyone's chasing is a variable aperture on the iPhone 18 Pro Max's main camera. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman — who's been right about this stuff more often than not — recently backed the idea, and it would mark the first time in a while that Apple's biggest phone gets a camera feature the smaller Pro doesn't.
But according to DPReview's Mitchell Clark, who's both a longtime iPhone shooter and a camera reviewer, don't expect it to actually change your photos much.
What a variable aperture would even do
A variable aperture lets you control how much light hits the sensor and how much of your shot stays in focus. Smaller aperture (higher F-number) means less light and more of the image in focus; wider aperture means the opposite. Right now, the iPhone 17 Pro's main camera is stuck at a fixed F1.78 — plenty fast, but with no way to stop it down.
The theory is that giving the 18 Pro Max something like an F4 setting would take pressure off the phone in bright daylight, where it's already leaning hard on ultra-low ISOs and blisteringly fast shutter speeds to keep from overexposing.
Here's the catch
Clark's take is that this solves a problem nobody's really running into. He's never hit a wall where his iPhone couldn't handle too much light — the phone already compensates just fine. And Apple almost certainly isn't opening the aperture wider (from F1.78 to something like F1.2); if it could build a faster lens, it already would have.
The depth-of-field argument doesn't hold up much better. Because iPhone sensors are so much smaller than a full-frame camera's, that F1.78 lens already behaves like an F6.1 lens would on a full-frame body — plenty of background blur is already baked in. Stopping down to F4 would just push that to roughly F13.7 equivalent, which is a jump from "enough" to "more than enough." It still wouldn't get you the shallow, blurry-background look Apple currently has to fake with Portrait mode.
We've actually seen this before — and it flopped
Variable apertures aren't new to phones. Samsung put one on the Galaxy S9 and S10, and by most accounts nobody could tell the difference — Samsung quietly dropped it. Huawei still ships variable apertures on some phones today, and it barely gets a mention in their own marketing.
There's also the practical question of how Apple would even build it. A true mechanical aperture is complex and another point of failure on a device that has to survive daily abuse — not exactly Apple's style lately, given it swapped the home button for solid-state and reportedly considered doing the same elsewhere on the phone. A simpler Waterhouse-stop setup or even an ND filter trick could get similar results without the added complexity.
The bottom line
Clark's not convinced this even makes it into the keynote. If it's real, there's probably a solid computational-photography reason behind it, and it might shave off a small, mostly invisible benefit. But barring a surprise sensor size bump — which isn't part of the rumor at all — the takeaway is simple: iPhone photos will still look like iPhone photos, Pro and Pro Max included.
Reported by Digital Photography Review.
