Seeing Red: Why the iPhone 18 Pro Might Finally Embrace the Crimson Tide

Over the past few years, Apple has embraced colorful iPhones like never before, taking what felt like a one-off experiment with the iPhone 5c in 2013 into the mainstream with the 2018 iPhone XR. However, there are a couple of shades the company conspicuously steered clear of.

Over the years we saw iPhones in almost every imaginable shade of blue, green, yellow, and even purple and pink, ranging from deep Alpine Greens to pastel blues that bordered on white. As a rule, Apple reserved deeper, more “serious” colors for the iPhone Pro models while keeping the standard iPhone lineup light and breezy.

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Still, it wasn’t until last year’s iPhone 17 Pro that Apple got bold enough to embrace orange — and it’s paid off in a big way. The cosmic orange iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max marked the first time Apple had gone with an orange finish on any of its mobile devices since the 2010 iPod nano and iPod shuffle.

Now, it looks like Apple may be getting brave enough to tackle another shade that it’s mostly avoided: deep red.

To be fair, Apple has had a good reason to avoid using any variations of red for its products. For over 15 years, red-emblazoned devices were the exclusive domain of its partnership with (RED), the global initiative to end HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria epidemics in developing nations. Although that was a very specific shade of red, it’s not hard to imagine that Apple didn’t want to muddy the waters by adding any other variations into the mix.

For the first decades of its (RED) partnership, the only mainstream devices to feature the iconic finish were the iPod nano and iPod shuffle. It wasn’t until 2017 that Apple decided to expand (PRODUCT)RED to the iPhone, starting with a mid-cycle special edition release of the iPhone 7. Apple repeated this with the iPhone 8 the following spring before dropping the (PRODUCT)RED edition into the main color lineup with the iPhone XR. Subsequent standard iPhone models followed suit each year until the iPhone 15, when Apple unceremoniously dropped it from the lineup.

Since the iPhone 15 used a new color-infused glass that seemingly resulted in much less saturated colors, many speculated that Apple simply couldn’t produce the proper shade of red. However, when Apple’s 2024 iPhone and Apple Watch releases omitted any (PRODUCT)RED models, it seemed clear that Apple was discontinuing the hardware aspect of the partnership. By early 2025, Apple has stopped selling (PRODUCT)RED iPhones entirely when the iPhone 16e arrived to displace the iPhone 14 and 2022 iPhone SE.

Shades of Red

It’s not the first time we’ve heard rumors of Apple considering a deep red shade for an iPhone. Three years ago, leakers predicted a “crimson red” iPhone 15 Pro. That never materialized, but the fact that we ended up with Blue Titanium instead — a color that felt like a repeat of the iPhone 12 Pro’s Pacific Blue — suggests that Apple may have changed its mind somewhere along the way.

The fact that the (PRODUCT)RED edition model was left out of the lineup that year lends credence to the idea that Apple was at least considering a red iPhone Pro, but maybe it just couldn’t get the color quite right.

It’s also interesting that we heard similar rumors of orange finishes for the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro in 2021 and 2022, suggesting that Apple may have been testing this shade 3-4 years before it finally came to the iPhone 17 Pro. It’s reasonable to assume that leakers often hear of colors that Apple is working on, but don’t always have a lot of visibility into what the company’s final decisions will be — especially months before the new iPhones go into mass production.

In other words, the rumors of “crimson red” from early 2023 may have simply been premature. There wasn’t a ton of consensus on the shade back then, but that’s changed over the past few weeks, with multiple sources ranging from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman to Weibo’s Digital Chat Station now reporting that the iPhone 18 Pro will come in some variation of burgundy or deep red.

Notably, these reports are coming from two very different directions, as Gurman often gets tidbits from sources inside Apple, which he says is “considering a deep red color” for the new lineup, while Weibo-based leakers typically get insights from Apple’s supply chain.

However, in this case, it’s unclear whether Digital Chat Station has heard anything specifically about the iPhone 18 Pro, as the translated statement points more to flagship Android makers adopting the color. The idea here is that they may have heard about this color and be preparing to copy Apple — a fair assumption considering how many of them do precisely that — but it also could be a matter of companies looking at overall market trends as to which colors are likely to be the most popular.

[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]