iPhone 18 Pro and Watch Series 12: Variable Aperture and the Always-Listening Wrist on Vergecast

This Vergecast is a rare swap where both senior reviewers play host and guest at once, with Allison Johnson handling the iPhone 18 Pro and V Song handling the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4. The show opens with Josh Kahas and 90 Seconds on The Verge, a rapid run through Snap's $2,200 Specs glasses and the latest AI safety debates, before the conversation locks onto phones and watches for the rest of the hour. From the outside everything looks familiar, but inside Apple has slipped in its first moving aperture in years and a completely reworked sensor engine on the wrist. The hosts set the frame honestly from the start: better than last year, but not by as much as the keynote suggested.

Same Shell, New Mechanics Inside

The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max could be twins of the 17 Pro at a glance; dimensions, weight and the aluminum frame are carried over so closely that old cases still fit. Four finishes are on offer: black, silver, a pale glacier blue, and the burgundy that dominates the conversation. Inside there is an A20 Pro chip with a revised thermal design that sustains peak performance longer, plus a slightly larger battery. Apple claims 36 hours of video playback for the small Pro up from 33 hours, and 45 hours for the Pro Max up from 39 hours. Prices move up $100 across the line, starting at $1,199 for the Pro and $1,299 for the Pro Max with 256GB, stretching past $2,400 for the 2TB tier. The Dynamic Island is also a touch smaller and can now show three Live Activities side by side, a small win for travelers juggling a flight, a ride and a game.

The headline hardware change lives inside the main camera, where a six-blade variable aperture finally arrives. The blades are laser-cut and as thin as a human hair, a detail Apple highlighted on stage. Where previous iPhones were locked at f/1.8, the new module offers four selectable stops at f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8 and f/4 and defaults to full auto. In practice the phone picks the stop for you: it opens to f/1.48 in dim light to gather more photons, holds at f/1.8 in good light most of the time, and stops down to f/4 for a group portrait with a second row or for a close-up document where extra depth helps keep everything legible.

Variable Aperture: Big Idea, Small Difference?

On the street the difference is subtle, and Allison is candid about that after shooting with it in Cupertino. Smartphone sensors are tiny, so even the brightest f/1.48 setting equates to about f/5 on full frame in depth terms; most scenes already have a lot in focus, so stopping down does not transform the image the way it does on a large camera. Two narrow windows do benefit: a person standing a few feet behind a group gets a touch sharper at f/4, and a menu or sheet of text up close is more consistently sharp across the frame. In low light the wider maximum aperture helps night mode finish faster, sometimes completing in two seconds instead of four, which can mean less noise and a better chance of freezing motion.

Put side by side, even careful comparisons of f/1.8 versus f/1.48 or f/4 often look almost identical unless you are in those edge cases. Allison notes that at the hands-on demo she struggled to tell the variants apart without pixel peeping, and that matches the review's verdict that this is an objectively cool mechanism whose everyday payoff is marginal. The upside is that you do not need to understand f-stops at all; auto does a reasonable job and you can ignore the control entirely. The trade-off is mechanical complexity: a new moving assembly behind sealed glass adds a long-term reliability question that will only be answered after years in pockets and on wrists.

Software finally catches up with hardware in the stock camera app. Alongside aperture control, Apple now exposes manual shutter speed, white balance and focus with focus peaking, plus the existing exposure compensation; there is still no direct ISO dial, but it is enough for more hands-on shooting than ever before without a third-party app. These controls live in the new iOS 27 top bar that is customizable for flash, night mode and other toggles, and at first glance they are available only on the 18 Pro pair. The implementation is tiny; icons are small and crowded, more comfortable on the Pro Max, and anyone who already lives in Halide or a similar app may not feel compelled to switch. Still, baking them into the default app normalizes creative control for a wider audience.

Video, Authenticity and Low-Light Polish

Video gets two practical lifts. AI-assisted focus tracking now sticks to a subject and will reacquire them if they briefly leave the frame, though it tends to forget after a few seconds away. You can also convert footage from the main camera to Cinematic after the fact, much like flipping a still to portrait later, and files are not dramatically larger than standard clips from the 17 Pro. On the authenticity front Apple introduces Reference Image, a new encrypted signature added by the redesigned main sensor that can later prove a photo came from that camera, complemented by tagging AI edits with Google's SynthID standard. The setup is clunky today and limited to the main camera on the Pro models, yet the architecture is robust and leaves room to grow, while the half-stop of extra brightness quietly helps night shooting without fanfare.

Is Siri Finally Smart?

The most visible software change is the new Siri in iOS 27, which is finally allowed to index messages, mail and calendar across the system. The initial indexing can take days if you have years of history, a point both hosts flag from the beta period, but once done it changes the calculus of asking. Allison describes starting to reach for Siri before a web search for small tasks and finding that it now completes without babysitting, creating a small habit loop. The car is where it shines most; V Song recounts a partner rerouting in New York traffic by asking Siri to navigate to an address just texted, without touching the screen. Rough edges remain: phantom prompts to send Apple Cash when money is merely mentioned, and overly eager Genmoji suggestions for offhand jokes that the model then refuses to generate. Shortcuts look more immediately useful, with a nightly sweep that deletes stray screenshots as an example listeners shared.

That mix of promise and over-eagerness frames the hosts' take on Siri AI. After years of relegating the assistant to timers, both reviewers say they now trust it for certain chores and expect that trust to build if reliability holds. The system is no longer trying to be a general chatbot for everything; it is a contextual helper that can act across apps with permission, and its best demos are mundane rather than magical. The advice to listeners is pragmatic: try it for the repetitive lookup or hands-free task you would otherwise do manually, and see where it earns a place versus where it still needs to be corrected.

Who Should Upgrade: A Wait-and-See iPhone

Price and payoff push the iPhone verdict toward patience. At $100 more, with gains that live on the margins, the 18 Pro is not a must-buy for anyone coming from a 17 Pro, especially when a refurbished 17 Pro is the better value on the same design. The review's guidance is to consider an upgrade if you are more than three years out, care about the extra low-light headroom, or genuinely want manual controls in the stock app. For everyone else the phone is excellent and iterative, the kind of personal technology that helps quietly in the background without demanding you learn what an aperture is. If burgundy alone is tempting you, the hosts joke, maybe sit with that feeling a little longer.

The Lab on the Wrist: Series 12 and Ultra 4's New Heart

The watches keep the same look on the wrist; the news is underneath, where the sensor array has been rethought. The Series 12 introduces a 32-petal electrode and a recentralized cluster of photodiodes and LEDs that is more efficient and leaks less light, which V Song notices as less green flash leaking from the side at night compared with an Oura Ring. The headline metric is sampling rate: heart rate now once every five seconds, a 60-fold increase over every few minutes, with heart rate variability sampled up to 24 times more often. That density powers a new recovery HRV metric captured during sleep, pitched as a better gauge of daily stress than the longer-baseline HRV the watch already offered. A new S11 chip with a separate Secure Enclave underpins both the sensing and the intelligence features to come.

Materials and power round out the hardware story. Radiant gold is marketed as the goldest gold yet, dark bronze reads as a glossy chocolate in person, and ceramic returns in dark blue and white with heft and scratch resistance at a premium. The S11 enables the headline intelligence workload while keeping health sensing efficient. Battery life is where the Ultra pulls away: Ultra 4 is now rated at 50 hours up from 42 hours, with an extended workout mode for the final leg of a triathlon and faster charging that can reach 80 percent in about 45 minutes. Series 12 stays at the familiar 24-hour estimate, but V Song notes faster top-ups in testing, going from 20 to 64 percent in 20 minutes, which makes overnight wear for sleep tracking much easier to sustain with brief daytime charges.

Health interpretation is where Apple tries to close the gap with Garmin, Oura and Whoop. A new Readiness app distills overnight vitals, sleep duration, blood oxygen and recovery HRV into a 1 to 10 score that updates through the day as new data arrives. Unlike a static morning number that can feel like a verdict, Apple's version can rise after a mid-morning nap or dip after a stressful afternoon, with labels such as Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready and Go For It. V Song sees clear value for people in heavy training blocks who need a nudge, while noting that many users will already know how they feel and should treat the score as a permissive advisor rather than a command. A second longevity feature called Health Age, which would compare physiological age to chronological age inside a redesigned Health app's longevity tab, is not yet live and will not require a new watch; V is openly skeptical of single-number age gamification and urges users to treat it as a lifestyle dashboard rather than a medical diagnosis.

An Always-Listening Wrist: Audio Intelligence Debate

The most debated additions are Audio Intelligence, a set of four features that share a name and a privacy architecture. Two were not available at launch and could not be tested: Live Rewind and Siri Recap. Live Rewind is activated manually with a double press of the crown and rewinds 15 seconds, showing a small on-wrist text record that disappears when the display sleeps unless you explicitly save it to the Siri app on the phone. Siri Recap is different: it does not continuously record but it does continuously listen for conversations, with user-set boundaries such as only at work or never at night, and then produces high-level summary notes without speaker attribution. Apple has published an unusually detailed privacy white paper stressing that raw audio is sent to the Secure Enclave, processed on device, and then immediately deleted, with no names attached in the recap.

The other two audio features are less controversial and were partly testable. One is enhanced music detection that automatically recognizes ambient music and surfaces it in the Smart Stack via the Shazam database; it must be enabled in settings and turns songs into signal matches rather than recordings. The other is sound recognition as an accessibility aid, enabled via iPhone accessibility settings, that can alert you that a doorbell rang even if you are deaf or hard of hearing and is tuned not to be tripped by a doorbell on television. All audio features are opt-in and off by default, which shapes the buying advice. V Song suggests Series 9 and later can comfortably wait, Series 6 and older or original Ultra owners have a reasonable upgrade case, Ultra 2 and 3 owners should hold, and anyone uneasy with listening can simply never enable it or buy a prior-year model in a premium material for a more sustainable and less fraught choice.