Is Apple about to debut a new iPhone camera feature?

After a fairly significant hardware upgrade in 2025, it’s sounding like things will be quieter for the iPhone this year. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in his newsletter this week that the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max will “represent minor tweaks” from their predecessors and “won’t be a big update.” Much of the attention in fall 2026 is expected to be on Apple’s first folding phone.

Gurman did, however, note that the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max will have “a new camera system with a variable aperture,” which caught my eye as a phone camera obsessive. There have been rumors about this for years, but I wasn’t expecting it to be perhaps the key feature of what are likely to be this year’s most popular iPhone models.

That’s because variable aperture is an idea that’s come and gone in smartphones several times in the past. Does Apple have a truly new take on the concept, or is it just late to the party?

Aperture 101

Aperture refers to the size of the opening that a lens allows to hit a sensor, or film back in the day. The setting is expressed in what’s called f-stops, for example f/1.4 or f/2.0; smaller numbers represent bigger apertures. The larger the aperture, the greater the amount of light, which means the photographer can use a faster shutter speed for a given amount of brightness. Larger apertures also produce a shallower depth of field, allowing the photographer to isolate their subject by blurring the background.

That’s not to say that a larger aperture is always desirable. On a manually controlled camera, sometimes it’s necessary to “stop down” the lens to a smaller aperture to avoid overexposing the photo in bright conditions. Lenses also generally perform better at medium apertures in terms of sharpness, so it’s not advisable to shoot wide open at all times unless you know what you’re doing.

Aperture is an essential parameter for enthusiast photography on dedicated cameras, but it tends to be less of an issue on smartphones. The smaller sensors in use mean that it’s difficult to get significantly shallow depth of field, while the fully electronic shutters are capable of far faster speeds than any mechanical camera, which virtually eliminates the risk of overexposure. As a result, the vast majority of smartphones have their apertures fixed as wide as possible, since the light-gathering benefits usually outweigh all else.

Prior efforts

That hasn’t stopped smartphone makers trying to make variable aperture a selling point. The Nokia N86 in 2009 was among the first—though somewhat cropped by today’s standards, its 28mm-equivalent f/2.4 lens was considered unusually wide-angle for the time, and automatically stopped down to f/3.2 or f/4.8 depending on the ambient lighting. The N86 also had a mechanical shutter, so the variable aperture did have something of a raison d’etre.

In the era of modern smartphones, Samsung was first to try something similar with the Galaxy S9 in 2018. The aperture was an unusually bright f/1.5 wide-open, while it could also stop down to f/2.4. In practice there was very little difference between the two settings, and the feature was jettisoned two years later for the Galaxy S10.

Chinese phone makers soon took the idea to the next level. Huawei’s 2022 Mate 50 Pro went all the way from f/1.4 to f/4, letting you dial in ten steps across the range. Xiaomi, meanwhile, had a two-step f/1.4 and f/4 system in the 13 Ultra in 2023, and the following year’s 14 Ultra featured a “stepless” f/1.63-f/4 lens that could be set to any aperture you liked.

Xiaomi’s last two flagship phones, however—the 15 Ultra and the particularly excellent 17 Ultra by Leica—have abandoned this kind of lens design. If I had to guess, I imagine that the decision was linked to those phones’ huge telephoto modules; at smartphone scale, variable aperture lenses are a mechanically complicated design that take up a lot of space. 

But I don’t think it will have been a particularly difficult call for Xiaomi to make. In practice, the feature just wasn’t that useful. I shot a lot with the 13 Ultra and 14 Ultra, and even though they had biggest-in-class 1” sensors, they would almost always default to larger aperture settings. It would occasionally be useful to be able to stop down to f/4 when taking close-up pictures of food, for example, to render more of the dish in sharper focus, but even then the difference wasn’t dramatic. 

Why Apple?

So why might Apple be targeting its own version of a feature that many rivals have attempted and abandoned? Honestly, I’m not sure. Perhaps Apple will use a bigger sensor or larger maximum aperture and wants to mitigate the impact on depth of field in edge cases. Maybe it plans to go softer on its heavy-handed image sharpening and lean into traditional optical quality. Or the plan might just be to market the iPhone 18 Pro as the ultimate foodie camera.

I’m unconvinced it’ll be the right tradeoff, but I’m intrigued to learn more about the implementation. Apple is often known for putting a compelling new spin on existing technology. Just remember, if you’re watching the iPhone launch event in September and a section on variable aperture comes up, that this is an idea that much of the industry has already tried and decided wasn’t worth pursuing.