GSMArena has begun its review of the iPhone 18 Pro Max, running the phone alongside the standard iPhone 18 Pro ahead of Apple’s usual autumn review cycle. The units confirm what many expected: a chip update, minor camera tweaks and two new colours, the kind of change that used to earn an S-suffix rather than a full new number.
Apple is still charging more for it: the iPhone 18 Pro Max costs $100/€150/£100 more than last year’s iPhone 17 Pro Max, a rise landing squarely inside the ongoing global memory chip shortage. In the box, buyers get a USB-C cable and nothing else.
The standard iPhone 18 Pro, also now in for review, adds a new hero Burgundy finish alongside Glacier, Black and Silver, plus a smaller Dynamic Island that can now show up to three live activities at once. Both phones are sharing attention this cycle with the foldable iPhone Duo, whose hinge mechanism teqpost already put through a 3D model before launch.
iPhone 18 Pro Max battery forces a shipping fix
The review units also line up with a detail Apple only documented this week: the iPhone 18 Pro Max’s battery is large enough that Apple has published its own shipping requirements notice for the phone. The constraint traces back to international rules that flag any single battery cell above 20Wh for extra handling in transit.
This year’s silicon-carbon cell chemistry packs more energy into the same physical size, and some manufacturers have dealt with the resulting capacity by splitting one large battery into two smaller cells wired together, keeping each individual cell under that 20Wh line. Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro Max instead keeps a single cell large enough to trip the threshold, which is why the shipping notice exists at all.
For anyone buying the phone, none of this changes what is in the box. It changes how Apple moves the phone through freight and customs before it gets there, and it is the clearest sign yet of how close this generation’s battery sits to the international shipping limit.
That is a different story to the one teqpost was telling on 10 September, when we covered the price rise before a single review unit had shipped: iPhone 18 Pro becomes Apple’s new default flagship. The number that mattered then was $100. The number that matters now is 20Wh, and it says more about what the silicon-carbon battery actually cost Apple to fit.
Still a Qualcomm modem in the US
A teardown from analysis firm TechInsights, first reported by 9to5Mac, confirms that the US version of the iPhone 18 Pro Max still runs a Qualcomm modem rather than an Apple-designed one. For a phone generation built around a new chip and a bigger battery, the modem is the one part of the radio stack that has not moved this year, at least not in the US market.
What to watch next
GSMArena’s full written verdicts on both the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max are still to come, along with independent durability testing that has already started on the new variable aperture camera and the phone’s hidden Face ID sensor. Whether Apple narrows the gap on its own modem in future US models, and whether the 20Wh threshold forces similar shipping workarounds across the industry, are the two threads worth following from here.
Image: Ka Kit Pang via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
