iPhone 18 Pro Camera Upgrade Hands Sunny Optical the Win

Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will use a variable aperture main camera that costs roughly 50% more than the fixed lens inside the iPhone 17 Pro, according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. It is the first iPhone lens that physically moves to control how much light reaches the sensor.

The bigger read in the same note is who gets to build it. Sunny Optical, a Chinese optics maker best known for supplying Android phones, is positioned to take 40 to 50% of the orders, pushing into a camera supply chain Apple long kept inside a tighter circle.

The 50% Premium and the Moving Iris

Every iPhone Pro from the 14 Pro through the 17 Pro has shipped with a fixed f/1.78 aperture, a single opening that never changes size. The iPhone 18 Pro swaps that for a mechanical iris that can widen or narrow, the same control a professional camera uses to balance light against focus.

Kuo says the new part carries an average selling price (ASP, the typical price a component sells for) that runs about half again higher than the seven-element plastic lens Apple buys for the iPhone 17 Pro’s main camera. Reports peg the adjustable range at roughly f/1.5 to f/2.8, though Apple has published no spec yet. The jump adds to Apple’s rising bill of materials on the iPhone 18 Pro, where the new A-series chip alone is estimated to cost far more than the silicon it replaces.

That premium buys photographic control, not just a marketing line. A moving aperture changes three things at once:

• Exposure in bright scenes, where a narrower opening stops highlights from blowing out.
• Depth of field, letting a shooter blur or sharpen the background without leaning on software.
• Low-light capture, where a wider opening pulls in more light than any fixed lens can.

Sunny Optical Moves Up Apple’s Camera Chain

For most of the past decade, Apple sourced its highest-spec iPhone lenses from a small group led by Taiwan’s Largan Precision, with LG Innotek of South Korea assembling the finished modules. Sunny Optical, the Ningbo-based optical components group, sat on the outside, shipping mostly lower-tier lenses to Android customers like Xiaomi, Oppo and Huawei.

The variable aperture project cracks that pattern open. Kuo’s research has the Chinese firm as the primary supplier of the shutter, the actuator mechanism that opens and closes the iris, with Luxshare as the secondary source. Sunny is also the second variable aperture lens supplier behind Largan, and stands to take 40 to 50% of those shutter orders.

Why Sunny, and why now? The company has shipped variable aperture hardware in Android flagships for years, so the engineering is not new to it even if the Apple contract is. That track record is exactly what Apple wants when it adds a moving part to a camera that has to survive years of pockets, drops and temperature swings.

The stakes reach past one component. Apple is racing to keep pace with rivals on imaging, a fight made plain by how the iPhone’s camera hardware stacks up against Android flagships that already pack heavier optics. The supplier that helps close that gap earns leverage for the next several product cycles.

From 5% to a Bigger Slice of Apple’s Optics

The iPhone 18 Pro deal speeds up a climb that was already running. Sunny’s share of Apple lens orders sat near 5% in 2024 and is projected to recover to 15 to 20% in 2025, per Kuo’s analysis of Sunny Optical’s Apple order growth. The moving lens pushes that figure higher again in 2026.

• 50% higher ASP for the variable aperture lens versus the iPhone 17 Pro’s seven-element unit.
• 40 to 50% of the shutter and actuator orders routed to Sunny Optical.
• 5% to 15-20% rise in Sunny’s Apple lens share between 2024 and 2025.
• 10 million MacBook Neo units now forecast for 2026, double the earlier 5 million call.

The MacBook Neo tells its own story about pace. Sunny became a new compact camera module (CCM, the packaged lens-and-sensor unit) supplier for that laptop, and shipments beat expectations so sharply that Kuo doubled his forecast to 10 million units for the year. Each of those cameras is one more Sunny part sitting inside an Apple box.

The OpenAI Orders Buried in the Same Note

Sunny’s name turns up once more in the report, and not for an Apple product. Kuo says the firm has secured component orders for two devices from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT: a smartphone and a separate pocket or mobile gadget.

That places the supplier on both sides of a contest only starting to take shape. OpenAI has been fast-tracking its first AI hardware, with mass production reportedly targeted for as early as next year, and a camera-grade optics partner is the kind of vendor such a device would lean on from day one.

For Sunny, the logic mirrors the Apple bet. Win a hard-to-build optics slot early, prove the yields at volume, and the follow-on orders tend to compound. A supplier that ships precision optics into both the dominant phone maker and its loudest would-be challenger is hedged in a way few component vendors ever manage.

Why Largan and LG Innotek Still Anchor the Build

None of this knocks the incumbents out. LG Innotek stays Apple’s primary camera module partner and is installing dedicated gear at its Gumi plant in South Korea for a June or July production start, and it is likely to take the larger share of the more complex main module. Its position as the assembler of record is intact. Look at the iPhone 18 Pro Max’s wider hardware reset and the camera is one piece of a much larger upgrade.

Largan Precision, for its part, keeps the lead variable aperture lens slot it has held through generations of Pro models.

The split matters because the variable aperture system carries more failure points than a fixed lens. Apple has spread the work so no single vendor can choke supply, which is why Luxshare backs up Sunny on the actuator and Cowell shares assembly. For Sunny, being named the primary on the shutter rather than a backup is the bigger prize.

What the 2028 Roadmap Signals for Sunny

The forward signal sits in 2028. Kuo expects that year’s iPhone ultra-wide module to drop flip-chip packaging for an improved chip-on-board (COB, a layout that mounts the sensor die directly to the board) design, which can make the module thinner or free up room for other parts. Stack the threads together, the moving lens, the laptop camera ramp, the OpenAI orders and a packaging shift the firm is lined up for, and the Ningbo supplier has spent years building the kind of intelligent optics product range that Apple and its challengers now need at scale.

If Sunny holds its yields through the iPhone 18 Pro ramp and the OpenAI devices ship on time, it converts a single camera slot into a structural seat at a table Largan and LG Innotek held alone for a decade. If the moving lens stumbles in the field, Apple has the backups in place to lean on the old guard, and the climb stalls before it really starts. The fall launch, due alongside Apple’s first foldable iPhone, will start telling us which way it breaks.