Buying a brand-new iPhone on launch day usually comes with a few expectations. You get the shiny new hardware, spend an hour moving everything over from your old phone, and then hopefully forget about troubleshooting for a while. Some iPhone 18 Pro owners haven’t been quite so lucky.
The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max only went on sale Friday, but users are already reporting two potentially frustrating problems. One involves the touchscreen occasionally becoming unresponsive, while another appears to cause some phones to restart following a failed Face ID attempt. Apple hasn’t officially acknowledged either issue, and it’s still too early to know how widespread they are. But there are enough reports that they’re worth watching if you’ve just picked up Apple’s latest Pro phone.
Some screens aren’t playing along
The first issue is pretty straightforward: the display seems to stop responding. One iPhone 18 Pro owner posted a video on X showing repeated swipes across the screen producing no response. The user said the problem had already happened twice and pointed to another owner experiencing similar behavior. There are complaints elsewhere, too. A Reddit user reported touch-sensitivity issues on the iPhone 18 Pro, but they were also using a screen protector, making it hard to say whether it’s the same issue.
There’s another possibility here: iOS 27. One X user suggested the freeze can occur when Control Center and Notification Center are accidentally invoked simultaneously, which would make this a software problem rather than faulty iPhone 18 Pro hardware. The original poster disputed that explanation, however, so there’s no clear culprit just yet. And strangely enough, an unresponsive display might not even be the more annoying of the two reported problems.
Face ID could be causing unexpected restarts
Multiple iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max owners are also reporting their phones restarting after Face ID fails to authenticate them. One Reddit user said their iPhone 18 Pro Max restarted several times within its first 24 hours, with three incidents apparently connected to Face ID and another occurring while Apple Wallet was loading. More than 20 replies in the thread described experiencing the same or a similar problem. An interesting hardware change this year could be relevant. Apple redesigned the Face ID system on the iPhone 18 Pro series, making the sensor array smaller.
That isn’t confirmed, though. In fact, the Reddit user who originally reported the problem said Apple Support ran diagnostics on their device and concluded the phone itself was faulty.
So, for now, there’s no need to panic if you’ve just spent a fortune on an iPhone 18 Pro. We don’t yet know how widespread either problem is, whether they’re connected specifically to the new phones, or whether an iOS update could make them disappear. But we’re only days into the iPhone 18 Pro’s life. Two potential bugs probably aren’t what launch-week accessories buyers were hoping to get with it.
