Overview
- Apple has shipped the iPhone 18 Pro with a physical variable-aperture main camera implemented as a six laser-cut blade iris driven by a rotor mechanism.
- The Camera app supports smooth automatic aperture adjustment and four user-selectable aperture settings so users can change light and depth-of-field directly from the phone.
- The new lens opens from the prior model’s f/1.78 to about f/1.48, which is roughly one stop wider and yields a small but noticeable increase in shallow depth of field.
- The production design departs from an earlier Apple patent that proposed a soft-membrane aperture, showing the company tested multiple engineering approaches before choosing a blade-based solution.
- Photographers and filmmakers gain an extra optical tool for exposure and subject separation while Apple’s computational blur methods remain available on older iPhones, and the industry should watch for further optical improvements in future iPhone generations.