iPhone 18 Pro Goes on Sale Worldwide: Apple's Launch Day, From Kuala Lumpur Outward

On Friday 18 September 2026, iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max went on sale at Apple Store locations worldwide, alongside Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4 and AirPods 5. Apple’s own dispatch from launch morning was not filed from New York or London. Every photograph in it was taken at Apple The Exchange TRX in Kuala Lumpur, the company’s first store in Malaysia, which opened in June 2024 in the Tun Razak Exchange financial district.

That choice of city is a small detail with a large geography behind it. This article sets out what went on sale today, in which countries, at what price, and what Apple has said is still to come. It is drawn entirely from Apple’s own press releases and updates, which are cited in full at the end.

What went on sale on 18 September

Apple announced iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max on 9 September. Pre-orders opened on Saturday 12 September at 5 a.m. Pacific time, and general availability began on Friday 18 September, in stores and online.

Both models come in four finishes, which Apple calls black, silver, glacier and burgundy, and in 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB storage capacities. Apple’s release gives United States pricing only:

Model	On sale	Starting price (U.S.)
iPhone 18 Pro	18 September 2026	$1,199, or $49.95 a month for 24 months
iPhone 18 Pro Max	18 September 2026	$1,299, or $54.12 a month for 24 months
iPhone Duo	23 October 2026	$1,999, or $83.29 a month for 24 months

The same Friday brought Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4 and AirPods 5 into stores. The new Mac mini, with the M6 and M5 Pro chips, and the new Mac Studio, with M5 Max and M5 Ultra, were already open for pre-order when Apple published its 11 September update, and reach stores on Tuesday 22 September.

Where it went on sale first

Apple says the first wave covers “more than 65 countries and regions”. Its release names eighteen of them: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States and Vietnam. A further “20 other countries and regions” follow on Friday 25 September. Apple does not publish the full list in the release, so we cannot say which countries fall into the second wave.

For readers who think in cities rather than countries, the named first wave means that a launch-day buyer in Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City, Bogotá, Istanbul or Mumbai was served on the same Friday as one in New York, London or Tokyo. That is a broader opening than the phrase “worldwide launch” usually implies.

One variation runs inside the first wave. In twelve markets, Apple sells iPhone 18 Pro only in an eSIM-only version with no physical SIM tray: Bahrain, Canada, Guam, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Apple says those models use the space freed by the tray for a larger battery worth two extra hours of video playback. Battery figures Apple quotes for the Pro models refer to the eSIM-only version.

Launch morning in Kuala Lumpur

Apple’s launch-day update, dated 17 September in Cupertino and describing Friday 18 September at the store, reports that “customers celebrated the arrival of the new products as Apple team members greeted them and offered hands-on demos, personalized shopping assistance, and introductions to each of the new products”. Its photographs show a crowd filling the atrium outside the store’s glass facade, display units of all four iPhone 18 Pro finishes, and customers being walked through Apple Watch Ultra 4 and AirPods 5.

The store itself is young. Apple The Exchange TRX opened on 22 June 2024 as “the company’s first retail location in Malaysia”, in what Apple describes as “the heart of Kuala Lumpur’s new Tun Razak Exchange (TRX) central business district”. Apple’s opening-day photographs from 2024 showed “hundreds of customers” lining the same atrium, and a rooftop park that wraps around the store’s upper level. Two years and three iPhone generations later, Malaysia sits in the named first wave, and Apple chose this store to represent the global launch.

We draw no conclusion about demand from a photograph. Apple selected the images, and a queue at one store on one morning is not a sales figure. Apple published no launch-day sales numbers.

What is new in iPhone 18 Pro

The four areas Apple emphasises are camera, chip, battery and software. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, is quoted in the announcement: “With iPhone 18 Pro, we’ve made advancements to the areas our users care about most: camera, performance, battery, and intelligence.”

Camera. The 48-megapixel main camera gains a variable aperture, which Apple says is a first for iPhone. Six laser-cut blades move between four aperture settings, from ƒ/1.48 for low light to ƒ/4 for deeper depth of field in group shots, either automatically or under manual control through a new set of Pro controls in the Camera app. Photographic Styles add texture and grain controls, cinematic effects can be applied after capture to video shot at up to 60 frames per second, and time-lapse now records in 4K Dolby Vision.

Image authenticity. A feature with consequences beyond photography is Apple Reference Image. The new sensor signs every pixel it captures, and in a new Reference mode the signed sensor data is developed by Apple’s Private Cloud Compute into what Apple calls “an unalterable reference image”, stored beside the main photo like a digital negative so that any later edit can be checked against it. Apple positions this for photojournalists alongside upcoming support for the SynthID standard for identifying AI-generated images.

Chip and thermals. The A20 Pro is built on a 2-nanometre process with a 6-core CPU, a 7-core GPU that Apple says is up to 40 percent faster than the A19 Pro, and a dual 16-core Neural Engine with double the AI throughput of its predecessor. A new package places the memory beside the chip, out of its thermal path, so the chip attaches directly to a vapour chamber with three times the surface area of the one in iPhone 17 Pro. Apple claims up to a 40 percent gain in sustained performance over the previous generation.

Battery. Apple quotes up to 36 hours of video playback for iPhone 18 Pro and up to 45 hours for iPhone 18 Pro Max, both on eSIM-only models, and says iPhone 18 Pro can charge to 50 percent in around 15 minutes by cable. For the Pro Max, Apple introduces a new usage model “that leverages real-world data” and quotes up to 30 hours of use on a full charge.

Connectivity. Both models carry Apple’s N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread, and its C2 cellular modem, which Apple says uploads faster than the C1X while using 15 percent less energy and now supports millimetre-wave 5G in the United States. The Dynamic Island is smaller and can show three Live Activities at once.

Software. iOS 27 shipped as a free update on Monday 14 September, the day Apple’s Newsroom announced the release of the next generation of Apple Intelligence. It brings the next generation of Apple Intelligence in sixteen languages and Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri that rolls out in beta in English first, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish due in October. Apple lists on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute as the privacy basis for both. A new iPhone Handoff feature lets users on supported carriers switch between two iPhones with the same phone number.

Materials. Apple states that both models are made with 40 percent recycled content overall, including 100 percent recycled cobalt in the battery and 85 percent recycled aluminium in the enclosure.

What is not on sale yet: iPhone Duo

The product that drew the most attention on 9 September is not in stores today. iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable iPhone, opens for pre-order on Friday 16 October and reaches customers on Friday 23 October, in “more than 70 countries and regions” with the same eighteen named markets as the Pro models, and in 28 more from 30 October.

Opened, iPhone Duo has a 7.6-inch inner display and is, Apple says, the thinnest iPhone ever made. Closed, its 5.4-inch outer display gives “90 percent of the screen area of iPhone 18 Pro” in a body Apple compares to a passport. It is built from grade 5 titanium with a hinge of more than 100 components, runs the same A20 Pro chip as the Pro models, is eSIM-only in every market, and ships with iOS 27.1. It starts at $1,999 in the United States and comes in two colours, star white and night sky. John Ternus, Apple’s CEO, calls it “the most transformational change to iPhone since the original”.

Nothing in the four September releases we read describes a non-Pro iPhone 18. We do not know Apple’s plans for one and do not speculate about them here.

How launch-day buying works, and where the deals stop

Apple’s retail material describes several ways to lower the purchase price, and almost all of them are United States programmes. Apple Trade In offers $175 to $885 in credit for an iPhone 13 or later. Carrier offers of up to $1,200 in credit against an iPhone 14 or newer, in any condition, are activated with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. Apple Upgrade, a leasing programme provided by Klarna, offers 12- and 24-month terms from $34.99 a month for iPhone 18 Pro and is “available in the U.S.”. Apple Card Monthly Installments at 0 percent APR are likewise for customers in the United States.

The starting prices in the table above are U.S. list prices because those are the only prices the global release gives. Local prices in the other 64 or more first-wave markets are set per country on Apple’s regional stores and are not quoted here. In every market, Apple says customers can buy in person, on apple.com or through the Apple Store app, and Apple Specialists offer Personal Setup for new devices.

What this article does not show

Every technical figure above is Apple’s own claim, published with footnoted test conditions that we have not reproduced. Global City Intelligence has not measured battery life, performance or camera behaviour on any of these devices, and no independent test existed on launch day. The article gives no sales volumes, because Apple published none, and no prices outside the United States. The photographs are Apple’s press images, selected by Apple, and the crowd at Apple The Exchange TRX is one store on one morning, not a measure of demand in Kuala Lumpur or anywhere else.

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Editorial note

This article was written on 18 September 2026 from six Apple Newsroom documents, listed in the sources below, each of which was opened and read that day. Apple did not review the article before publication, and Global City Intelligence has no commercial relationship with Apple.

The images are Apple press photographs and product renders from those Newsroom pages, reproduced for editorial coverage of the launch with credit to Apple Inc., which retains copyright. They are not GCI’s own imagery and are not licensed for reuse from this page. The five photographs were each opened and inspected at full resolution before the captions and alt text were written.