Chinese Reviewers Find Severe Glare in the iPhone 18 Pro's New Variable Aperture Camera
The first iPhone 18 Pro reviews dropped simultaneously across China's tech media on Tuesday night, and the country's biggest reviewers zeroed in on two things: a severe glare flaw in the phone's first-ever variable aperture camera, and charging speeds that finally match domestic Android rivals.
Review embargo day for a new iPhone has become a spectacle of its own in China, and this year's edition — on the evening of September 16, two days before the iPhone 18 Pro reaches buyers — produced the sharpest verdict yet. MediaStorm, one of the country's most-watched tech channels, opened the phone's headline camera feature and found it badly flawed.
[The glare problem]
The iPhone 18 Pro's main camera is the first on an iPhone with a physical variable aperture, six laser-cut blades stepping between f/1.48 and f/1.8. Open it fully, reviewers found, and strong light sources smear across the frame. In MediaStorm's video, founder Tim said it plainly — his two-word review of the flare, "拉完了," was clipped and recirculated on Weibo within hours, alongside screenshots of test footage where streetlights bloom into halos.
The flaw matters because Apple built this year's launch around the camera, calling it its most advanced yet. Chinese reviewers, who test phones with a rigor that now shapes global perception of a launch, treated the glare not as a nitpick but as a design miss. Another widely followed reviewer published a full day of battery and thermal tests instead, part of an evaluation culture that Chinese phone makers have learned to dread and Apple cannot opt out of.
[The charging gap closes]
If the camera took a knock, the battery numbers restored some balance. Testing by the channel Xiaobai found the Pro Max's 5,391 mAh cell peaking at around 52 watts on Apple's own charger — a figure that would have been unthinkable for an iPhone a few years ago. Ten minutes of charging added 34 percent; a full charge took 76 minutes. On Weibo, the charging results trended as evidence that Apple has "caught up" with domestic Android flagships, which have shipped 100-watt charging for years.
The episode lands in a market where Apple has been fighting for position: presale-day crashes and AI-driven checkout chaos earlier this month showed demand for the new lineup, even as Apple has raised prices in China and shipped its first foldable into a segment where Huawei and Xiaomi set the pace. A glare flaw in the marquee camera gives domestic rivals an easy talking point for the weeks of head-to-head marketing to come.
Apple has not said whether a software fix can tame the flare; physics may not cooperate. For now, the most consequential review of the iPhone 18 Pro was not written in California — it was delivered in Chinese, to the market that matters most.