One of the questions Apple watchers have is about the colors of the next product. A new report claims to know what the iPhone 18 Pro colors will include — and it’s an unprecedented change. The same report claims that the colors for the widely-predicted iPhone Fold, Apple’s first folding phone, have also been established. And the 18 Pro could also promise a subtler design change: a significant upgrade to one of the rear cameras. More on both those aspects below.
The First-Ever Red iPhone Pro?
The iPhone 18 Pro could be the first ever iPhone to launch in red. But wait, I hear you say, there have been red iPhones before. Absolutely, but never a Pro model and rarely when that year’s iPhone first launched.
“The first red iPhone arrived as a mid-cycle release version of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. You could buy the newest iPhone in red, but not in the first six months of that model’s availability,” 9to5Mac reported.
The same thing happened the following year for the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus — red came later, not at the original release.
While the iPhone XR had red as one of its options from day one, that didn’t apply to the high-end iPhone XS.
From Muted Tones To Cosmic Orange
The Pro models have, until this year, tended towards quieter colors, such as Forest Green, Deep Purple and muted shades.
All that changed last September with the introduction of the modestly-named Cosmic Orange. A bright, feisty color, it came as a surprise to many and offered an all-new way to think about iPhone colors.
The first mention of the red iPhone 18 Pro came from Bloomberg, which suggested that Apple will handle red in a serious way. “Apple is now considering a deep red color for its next lineup. Given the success of orange, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company keeps that option around and just adds the red as an additional choice. But red and orange might be a little too close on the color wheel to have both. We’ll see how this plays out exactly, but I can at least tell you that, as of now, red is the new flagship color in testing for the next iPhone Pros,” Mark Gurman said.
For the record, I don’t believe the hero color, Cosmic Orange, will be held over for a second year.
There’s one other iPhone expected this fall, the much-rumored iPhone Fold. The reason it’s the only other phone predicted for 2026, now the iPhone 17e has been announced — full details of the iPhone 17e are here and a complete timeline of when you can get hold of it is here — is it looks like the iPhone 18, the base model, that is, will be held over until spring 2027.
The same report that first mentioned the red iPhone 18 Pro also said that for the first folding iPhone, Apple will “stay away from fun colors,” it said. Instead, the Fold will be revealed in more traditional colors such as black and silver.
Since the Fold is predicted to be a very expensive phone, it makes sense to me that Apple wouldn’t risk alienating potential buyers with brighter shades, at least in the first generation of the new product category. Samsung’s first folding phone was in muted colors. It was only with later generations, such as the Galaxy Z Fold7 with its bright blue shade, that things changed.
As other reports have noted, the colors for next fall will almost certainly have been decided on, but we’ll see.
Assuming the color changes are accurate, the other new element noted by Bloomberg will be less visible, but potentially more ground-breaking. Mark Gurman has claimed that the iPhone 18 Pro could in some ways be thought of as the iPhone 17S, to use the naming convention Apple previously employed for alternate years. The S came to mean an iPhone with little or no external changes but internal updates instead.
I’d suggest that a new color may mean that there will be a noticeable external change in the 18 Pro, but anyway, it’s inconceivable that Apple will go back to the S nomenclature.
“We’ve seen this play out a couple of times since, including with the move to the iPhone 16 from the iPhone 15,” Gurman said of what he saw as gradual updates between the 2023 and 2024 releases.
“Later this year, the pattern will continue with the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, which represent minor tweaks from last year’s iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max,” he added.
Even so, he went on, there would be some big changes in the form of the updated processor inside (going from A19 Pro to A20 Pro) and the addition of a variable aperture for the camera.
This likely means the main camera only, and exclusively for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max.
“Most smartphone cameras have a fixed aperture; the iPhone 17 is fixed at f/1.6. This affects how light hits the sensor, and proper camera setups always come with a variable aperture (typically from f/2.8 to f/22) that photographers exploit to achieve desired aesthetics,” as PetaPixel described it.
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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