The iPhone 18 will be the first iPhone in a long time that'll leave fans indifferent. That's because it doesn't have that novelty aura glowing around it and lighting up the darkness. The magic happened on September 9, when Apple presented the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the 18 Pro… and the iPhone Duo, the first-ever foldable iPhone.
By the time the vanilla iPhone 18 arrives—which is expected to happen in the spring (March? April) of 2027—it'll be roughly half a year since the iPhone 18 Pro Max. And in today's epoch, half a year ago is considered ancient times.
Unless, of course, John Ternus (Apple's new CEO after Tim Cook stepped down) pulls some crazy stunt like Elon Musk did with the flying car the other day. Something tells me we won't be getting anything close to such a shocking, bizarre upgrade with the iPhone 18.
But we could get an iPhone 18 that looks like an iPhone 18 Pro Max. It's something.
How do you like it?
I was slurping my morning tea when I came across Polina's latest iPhone 18-focused piece, titled:
Before I go on and share with you my answer to the question above, it's worth giving a look at the thing itself. It's a leaked dummy by a prominent tipster:
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Hot or not? | Image by X account of Majin Bu
As always, it's crucial to take all rumors and every bit of preliminary information with a grain of salt. There are still many months ahead and Apple could make a U-turn… or this leaked image could turn out to be off-track.
Hello, iPhone 18 Pro, my old friend
In this particular leak, the iPhone 18 looks like the iPhone 18 Pro, right?
It's the camera island—sorry, the camera plateau as Apple calls it—that's to blame for this resemblance.
We get two cameras (a main one and the obligatory wide-angle snapper) on the rear's raised rectangle, but something's missing.
The camera plateau looks a bit empty. That's because the baseline iPhone won't feature three cameras, only two.
OK, I'm fine with two, but how about we trade that ultra-wide for a dedicated telephoto? It doesn't need to feature some fancy embellishments like a variable aperture or a 1-inch sensor; it just needs to allow vanilla iPhone users to access the ~75mm focal length realm. This is great for portraits with natural bokeh, tourist shots abroad and everything in between.
The iPhone 18's delay
Many Apple fans doubt that Apple will surely not redesign the baseline iPhone 18 and we'd end up with another iPhone 17 clone.
I'd personally wait for a couple more iPhone 18 render leaks to drop before deciding whether to get hyped or not. But it would be interesting to see how Apple brings the non-Pro and the Pro models closer together (at least on the outside).
Maybe that's the apology for the iPhone 18 delay? It's a captivating theory I'd like to go with for now; maybe the skeptics are right and we won't get to see how Apple grants the iPhone 18 an iPhone 18 Pro design status, but one can dream.
It looks like the Vivo V80, too (and the Redmi K100)
One could say that the rumored iPhone 18 design resembles that of the recently released Vivo V80 or the Redmi K100 series (internationally known as Poco F9 Pro and Poco F9 Ultra).
Here's the Vivo V80:
Brother from another mother (and another father, for that matter). | Image by Vivo
And here's the Poco variants:
Rectangles, so many rectangles. | Image by Poco
But the iPhone 18 leaked render looks like a Vivo/Redmi phone precisely because these Vivo/Redmi phones are desperately trying to imitate the iPhone 17 Pro which introduced the camera plateau. Time is a flat circle and so is the tech industry.
Sebastian is one of PhoneArena’s senior opinionators. A veteran news writer with almost 20 years of experience in media and technology, he not only covers all the hot news about Galaxies and iPhones, but often provides hot takes on industry trends. He’s fascinated with camera-focused flagships from the likes of Oppo and Vivo, as well as foldable phones.
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