iPhone 18 Pro Preorders Just Opened. Here’s How to Grab Yours - VICE
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You’ve waited a year, and the wait is juuuuust about over. Apple pulled the wraps off the Apple iPhone 18 Pro, and it becomes available for pre-order on Saturday, September 12, 2026. That’s… right about now (or a few hours ago, if you slept in).
The lineup of four colors looks swanky, and beyond the incremental, expected performance upgrades there’s a neat new camera trick within the new iPhone, too. Here’s where you can preorder yours so that it’s in your eager paws on September 18.
Apple usually releases the base-level version of each annually refreshed iPhone alongside the higher-end Pro model in late summer, but this year it skipped the iPhone 18 when it pulled the wraps off the iPhone 18 Pro. Apple has seemed, in recent years, to want to stagger some of its product launches across the year, and so we expect to see the regular iPhone 18 in spring 2027.
Until then, if you want Apple’s latest and greatest iPhone (but not the $2,000 folding iPhone Duo, which launches next month), you’ll have to make do with the iPhone 18 Pro. Oh, buck up. It’s a fantastic phone, an evolutionary step along the path more so than a revolutionary model, but that’s a good thing. The iPhone 17 Pro was—no, still is—a high-quality, stable device that’ll last for years and years before becoming obsolete or slow.
The iPhone 18 builds upon its predecessor by offering a slightly faster processor in the Apple-designed A20, the first 2 nm iPhone chip. Cooling performance is better, too; Apple says up to 40% better sustained performance, which we can’t verify yet but would be a boon to gamers who game on their iPhones.
The main camera moves from the iPhone 17 Pro’s fixed focal length of f/1.78 to a selectable f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8, or f/4, allowing the shooter more control in determining photographs’ depth of field. Cinematic Mode also gets a boost to be able to shoot at up to 60 frames per second (fps) in 4K Dolby Vision, rather than being hamstrung at 30 fps.
You can go with the iPhone 18 Pro Max if you want more screen real estate than the “mere” iPhone 18 Pro. The Pro Max ups the diagonal screen measurement from 6.3″ to 6.9″. It’s bigger in practice than it sounds like on paper. That also means a larger phone in your pocket or purse, so keep that in mind when you’re calculating which to get.
Right out of the gate T-Mobile is offering folks an iPhone 18 Pro for $0, as long as you trade in an eligible phone on T-Mobile’s Experience Beyond Plan. That means T-Mobile will pay the “bill” for the phone each month for the next 36 months. If you jump ship and leave T-Mobile before then, you’ll owe the remaining number of payments, so it’s $0 for a brand-new iPhone 18 Pro—as long as you stick around for three years.
