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Pixel 11 Pro vs. iPhone 18 Pro: Copy-copy-paste or just copy-paste [Video]

Published: 10/01/2026, 04:00 PM

There’s a new phone in town, and like the Pixel 11 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro looks eerily similar to what we saw last year. What can we glean from this duo? Here’s what you need to know. If you wanted to critique the smartphone industry in Western markets, there are no two devices more obvious to use as the basis for your argument. There is something very familiar about the Pixel 11 Pro and the iPhone 18 Pro – two phones that are almost the same as their predecessors. For more video content, subscribe to 9to5Google on YouTube. Hardware progress has almost ground to a halt, which is both a fair criticism and maybe an admission that there really isn’t much left to do on those ubiquitous products we carry each and every day. A smartphone is a tool. It’s your wallet, your mobile shopping card, your digital camera; it’s more than something you want, it’s an essential. Maybe that is why we haven’t seen the two of the world’s biggest tech companies try to veer away from the “safe” designs they’ve peddled for a couple of years. It could be that we, the buyers of these products, similarly don’t care now. Realistically, you could just read our deeper dive comparing the iPhone 17 Pro to the Pixel 11 Pro, and you’d get 95% of the way there. However, there are a few changes worth noting, given that Apple is still the top dog in the US market and dominates global sales in the “premium” segment. Google has been using Apple’s playbook, following a tried-and-tested path to some relative success as of late. And so, we have two phones that look identical to the previous generation. Barely any visual cues save the colors to differentiate. It’s an indictment of where phones are today in some ways. As far as I can tell, there are only two major changes to the iPhone 18 Pro. A smaller Dynamic Island and a variable aperture for the main lens. The camera aperture has been lauded somewhat, and it’s an interesting addition for a number of reasons. Samsung experimented with the concept years ago when mobile sensors were significantly smaller, but the implementation here is different. Because modern smartphone sensors have such small pixels, you typically avoid ‘stopping down’ to prevent diffraction.