The iPhone 18 Pro may be faster but it also comes with a potential battery downgrade

The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are finally here. Surprisingly, there is still information we don't know yet, including battery size (something Apple doesn't share) and how much better the A20 Pro chipset is compared to the A19 series.

Two different leaks may have given us some of that information. The first is a new Geekbench listing that appears to show how the A20 Pro works in the iPhone 18 Pro spotted by X user never_released.

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If the results from this listing are typical, the single core of 4,719 and a multi-core 12,677 show that the A20 is about 25% faster than the A19 silicon. In its press release, Apple claims the A20 Pro has 50% more memory bandwidth and 40% faster than the A19 Pro.

It's not quite 40% better, but the A20 Pro is still a significantly more powerful chip. In fact, I looked at our testing for the M5 chip, and it compares very favorably to Apple's M5 chipset.

We've argued before and the A20 Pro seems to prove it, there is no reason Apple couldn't run its laptops on its own phone chips. The proof is in the MacBook Neo, but things could get even more powerful.

Now, this is all said with the caveat that Geekbench listings can be faked, and we have the iPhone 18 Pro in hand right now. We're sending the new iPhones to our testing lab where we'll put the phones through our own series of tests.

A battery downgrade?

Some of the imagery and press releases from Apple claimed that the battery in the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max is larger than the one in the iPhone 17 Pro models. It's hard to prove because Apple doesn't list battery size in its technical specifications, at least in the US.

In the EU, the company does list the capacity. MacRumors spotted the capacities for the SIM tray versions of the iPhone 18 Pro.

• iPhone 18 Pro: 4,056 mAh
• iPhone 17 Pro: 4,252 mAh
• iPhone 18 Pro Max: 5,391 mAh
• iPhone 17 Pro Max: 5,088 mAh

Based on those numbers, that's a 1.7% increase for the Pro and almost a 12% increase for the Pro Max.

I've seen comparisons to the eSIM version of the iPhone 17 Pro, which has a larger capacity compared to the SIM version. The eSIM iPhone 17 Pro comes with a 4,252 mAh battery that is bigger than the physical SIM version.

Meanwhile, the iPhone 17 Pro has the same 5,088 mAh in the eSIM version.

That all said, even if the battery is slightly smaller or only a bit bigger, the gains in battery life will likely come from the new A20 chipset and its expected performance and efficiency upgrades.

From what we can tell, the eSIM capacities for the iPhone 18 Pro models have not been released yet.

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