Like the mechanical aperture seen in traditional digital cameras, Apple is reportedly bringing a variable aperture to the iPhone 18 Pro camera.
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Apple has begun readying its next-gen iPhone camera for mass production, potentially bringing a game-changing new lens to this year’s iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, according to a report from ETNews.
The upgrade will reportedly bring a new variable-aperture lens that physically narrows or widens the lens opening in response to available light.
According to the report, Chinese optical component manufacturer Sunny Optical has already started producing new lens actuators—the tiny motors that directly control the aperture blades. These new actuators add physical moving parts to the design and will require Apple to monitor their reliability closely.
Finished camera modules are expected by “early summer.” Regular Apple partner, LG Innotek, is set to begin final assembly in “June or July,” having already installed dedicated equipment at its Gumi plant in South Korea.
Smartphones, including Apple’s current iPhone lineup, almost always deploy a fixed-aperture lens that remains “wide open” (f/1.78) to capture as much light as possible, enabling clearer low-light shots and a shallow depth of field that makes subjects pop out from the background.
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When paired with a large image sensor, like the iPhone’s current 1/1.28-inch component, both effects are multiplied even further, but the extremely thin depth of field can make it difficult to keep everything in focus, especially when taking group shots or photographing a document.
In these situations, the only practical solution is to switch to a narrower lens aperture. This reduces the amount of light captured while keeping more of the image in sharp focus. Traditional cameras typically let you adjust the aperture to achieve the best trade-off between light capture, focus and sharpness. Smartphones without this capability are forced to choose a fixed aperture size, leaving too much performance on the table.
For example, Fujifilm’s popular Instax film cameras offer a huge “sensor” area, the exact size of your final photograph, but they use a tiny fixed aperture of f/12.7. The result is sharp focus across the frame without the need for an autofocus lens, but with relatively poor low-light performance that relies on a powerful flash.
Where a large fixed-aperture lens might deliver blurry text at the edges of document scans and out-of-focus faces in group shots, Apple’s new variable aperture will let the camera adapt to different shooting situations, delivering the best possible quality. This recent Reddit post highlights these issues, where the iPhone 17 Pro’s large, fixed aperture sometimes causes a reduction in sharpness due to its shallower depth of field, especially at the closer end of the focus range, just before the camera would switch automatically to the ultrawide lens to engage macro mode. The ability to reduce the aperture size would enable shots from the primary lens to remain in focus closer to the subject.
This won’t be the first time a smartphone manufacturer has developed such a lens; previous attempts, such as Samsung’s Galaxy S9, flirted with the idea, only to abandon it a year later in the Galaxy S10. This is likely because the S9’s sensor was too small to achieve a meaningful real-world advantage from the technology.
However, given the issues Apple’s current lineup has been facing due to its large imaging sensor and wide-aperture lens, a variable aperture is likely now a necessity for the iPhone rather than a gimmick.
Rival Chinese flagships like 2024’s Xiaomi’s 14 Ultra and the current Huawei Pura 80 Ultra use even larger sensors than the iPhone range, and have already switched to variable-aperture lenses to counteract these exact issues with depth of field. However, they are not always easy to implement. Xiaomi recently switched back to a fixed-aperture design, which, despite delivering exceptional picture quality, has caused some earlier focusing issues to reappear, such as difficulties keeping group shots in focus, as revealed in testing by Dxomark.
Apple will want the iPhone 18 Pro to nail every shot without the nerd-level camera tinkering often required to get the best out of the Chinese flagships. The large-sensored smartphones at the top of Dxomark’s camera test results often require the user to select a specific mode or lens to get the best results. However, the iPhone 18 Pro will need to make these adjustments automatically, and assuming Apple pulls this off, this is where we’ll see the true benefits of the new variable-aperture lens.
Like the mechanical aperture seen in traditional digital cameras, Apple is reportedly bringing a variable aperture to the iPhone 18 Pro camera.
getty
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