Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Mashable's iPhone 18 Pro Max finished an AI image prompt in the same time as last year's phone
Apple doubled the Neural Engine in the A20 Pro. In the one head-to-head Mashable ran, the new Pro Max and last year's model produced the same image in exactly the same time. That leaves battery and cooling as the upgrade case.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Mashable's review of the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max lists Apple's A20 Pro chip with a 6-core CPU, a 7-core GPU and a dual 16-core Neural Engine.
- The special features Apple lists for the generation are an improved vapor chamber cooling system and spatial reframing for photos.
- The design is pretty much the same as the iPhone 17 Pro's, with four colors offered this year: black, silver, glacier blue and burgundy, silver carried over from last year.
- Both sizes list a 48-megapixel triple rear camera with 8x optical-quality zoom and a variable aperture on the main camera, plus an 18-megapixel front camera.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint A refresh has to be argued from a spec sheet this year, because the person handed the phone in a store, or at a desk on Monday, gets no visual cue that anything changed.
- decision The Pro versus Pro Max split becomes a battery and screen-size decision for anyone speccing more than one handset, since the review treats the smaller phone as identical in most respects.
- cost Weight is the change users will actually notice: the new model is quite a bit heavier than the last, and that is paid every day by whoever carries it.
Mashable's reviewer typed one prompt into Playground, "futuristic city with a river running through it", and pressed Go on an iPhone 17 Pro Max and an iPhone 18 Pro Max at the same moment. Both phones finished in exactly the same time [8]. Visual Intelligence, the other on-device AI feature the review timed, was a little faster on the new phone [9]. The spec line says the Neural Engine has been doubled [7].
The doubled Neural Engine promises faster on-device AI for everyone who touches it. One reviewer with two phones in hand got a tie on image generation and a small win on visual lookups. Mashable calls the A20 Pro "blazing fast" and qualifies it in the next sentence, "Nothing you'll notice browsing the web or even playing games, mind you" [10].
Battery is where the two sizes separate. Apple rates the Pro Max at up to 45 hours of video playback and the 18 Pro at 36 [12]. That is nine hours, or 25 percent more on the larger phone [21]. Both reach 50 percent charge in 15 minutes on a 60W adapter [13]. The screens are 6.9 inches on the Max and 6.3 on the Pro [14], and storage tiers run 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB, so the top tier is eight times the base [16][22].
The invisible work is real, and the review is blunt about how little of it surfaces. Apple's engineers walked Mashable through the smaller Dynamic Island in a post-launch briefing: image quality in that patch of screen is worse, and the review says the difference is essentially imperceptible to the human eye [4]. Months of engineering, and the user-visible result is a slightly smaller black shape. Mashable's summary of the lineup is that the new phones lack the kind of flashy upgrade you could point to as a must-have in 2026 [23].
For whoever has to defend the purchase order, the internal changes fall into two kinds: changes where you can name the task they speed up, and changes where you can measure that task on a phone your team already carries. Rated battery life and charge time are both, and someone working a long shift off a charger feels the nine hours. The doubled Neural Engine is only the first, on this evidence. Mashable's verdict on the generation is that "Not everyone should upgrade their phone this year" [11].
What to watch
- Whether Apple ships a first-party on-device AI benchmark that names the tasks the doubled Neural Engine speeds up, or leaves reviewers timing prompts by hand.
- Sustained-load testing of the improved vapor chamber, which would show whether the thermal claim holds on long jobs rather than short bursts.
- Field battery results against the 45-hour and 36-hour playback ratings once the phones are in daily use.