Xiaomi 18 Pro and Pro Max: Price, Specs and Privacy Screen Explained

Xiaomi officially unveiled the Xiaomi 18 Pro and Xiaomi 18 Pro Max in China on September 23, 2026, pairing a new hardware "Smart Privacy Screen" with Qualcomm's freshly announced Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips, dual 200-megapixel Leica cameras and, on the larger model, an 8,500mAh battery. Both phones are already listed for sale on Xiaomi's official Chinese store, mi.com, starting at 5,999 yuan for the Xiaomi 18 Pro and 6,999 yuan for the Xiaomi 18 Pro Max. Xiaomi has said the series will reach markets outside China before the end of 2026, but as of this writing the company has not published an international launch date, a market list, or non-China pricing.

What Xiaomi announced on September 23

Xiaomi's launch event introduced the Xiaomi 18 Pro and Xiaomi 18 Pro Max as, in the company's own words on its Xiaomi 18 Pro Max product page, "the first imaging-technology flagship of the AI era," built around a redesigned, customizable rear display. Both phones share the same basic formula: a large front display with a hardware privacy mode, a secondary OLED rear screen that can show custom widgets and AI-generated art, a dual 200-megapixel Leica camera system, and Xiaomi's HyperOS 4 software. The Pro Max is the larger of the two, with a bigger screen, a bigger battery and Qualcomm's more powerful "Extreme" chip variant.

A third, related device, the Xiaomi 18 Fold, also went on sale the same week starting at 10,999 yuan. It is a book-style foldable with a 5.38-inch cover screen and 7.58-inch inner screen, and, notably, it runs on Xiaomi's own in-house Xuanjie O3 chip rather than a Snapdragon platform, according to Xiaomi's own Xiaomi 18 Fold specifications page. It is a separate line from the Pro and Pro Max, but its simultaneous release rounds out what Xiaomi is calling its "18" generation.

Price and availability in China

All three phones are listed as current, purchasable products on Xiaomi's official store, with the following starting prices for their base configurations:

*Approximate conversions at roughly 7.1 yuan per US dollar, for reference only. Xiaomi does not sell these models outside China, and it has not announced pricing in any other currency.

Xiaomi's store pages list higher-memory and higher-storage configurations priced above these starting figures, but Xiaomi's public product pages do not break out the exact RAM and storage tiers in a way we could independently confirm, so we're not going to guess at specific gigabyte numbers here.

The chipset: two flavors of Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6

The Xiaomi 18 Pro and Pro Max are among the first phones to ship with Qualcomm's newest flagship silicon. Qualcomm's own September 22 announcement confirms it introduced two new platforms this cycle: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the more powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, both built on an advanced 2nm process node with Qualcomm's custom Oryon CPU, a rearchitected Adreno GPU and an upgraded Hexagon NPU. Qualcomm names Xiaomi, alongside Honor, iQOO, Motorola, OnePlus, OPPO, Redmi, RedMagic and vivo, as launch partners for the two platforms.

Xiaomi's own product pages spell out which model gets which chip: the standard Xiaomi 18 Pro uses the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, while the Xiaomi 18 Pro Max steps up to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Both are described on Xiaomi's site as using a "new-generation 2nm flagship process" with a 2+6 all-big-core arrangement and a peak clock of 5GHz. If you want the fuller picture of what this chip generation brings and which other phones are getting it, we've covered that separately in our rundown of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 rollout.

The headline feature: a hardware "Smart Privacy Screen"

The feature Xiaomi is pushing hardest is what it calls the Smart Privacy Screen, built on technology it brands Super Pixel 2.0. According to Xiaomi's own description, the display uses a full RGB subpixel arrangement — 9.5 million subpixels on the Pro Max, 8.18 million on the standard Pro — to physically narrow the light emitted at wide viewing angles, rather than relying on a film or software blur. Xiaomi says this lets it darken the view from the side while keeping the image sharp when viewed head-on.

The feature can be turned on in several ways, per Xiaomi's product pages:

• A one-tap toggle that switches the entire screen into privacy mode
• Per-app rules, so specific apps automatically enable privacy mode for their notifications, pop-up windows or split-screen panes
• Automatic "page-level" privacy for sensitive screens in banking, payment, system-password and messaging apps
• Voice commands through Xiaomi's Super Xiao AI assistant, including geofenced rules tied to a location
• A "privacy leak alert," which uses the front camera to detect whether someone else appears to be looking at the screen while privacy mode is active, and notifies the user by vibration or through Xiaomi's notification "island"

On the standard Xiaomi 18 Pro, Xiaomi also cites a German TÜV Rheinland certification for the anti-peeking function. Xiaomi is not the first company to ship this kind of hardware privacy display, but it is one of a small number of Chinese and Korean flagships to add one this generation, alongside rivals such as Honor's Magic9 series.

Cameras: dual 200MP Leica optics on both phones

Camera hardware is identical across the Pro and Pro Max, per Xiaomi's specification pages. Both phones use a Leica-branded dual 200-megapixel system:

• A main camera with a Leica Summilux lens, a 1/1.28-inch sensor, and what Xiaomi calls LOFIC high-dynamic-range technology
• A 200-megapixel periscope telephoto with a 1/1.56-inch sensor, 3.2x optical zoom, and a 12cm macro focusing distance

Xiaomi also describes an on-device and cloud-assisted imaging pipeline it calls "Legendary Moment," which includes camera-style optical-style blur processing, cloud-based image enhancement, and three "legendary" color/film-emulation styles. These are software and cloud-processing features described by Xiaomi rather than independently tested benchmarks, so treat Xiaomi's imaging claims as the company's own description of what the camera system is designed to do.

Battery, charging and the main display

The Pro Max's bigger body allows for a larger battery than the standard Pro. Xiaomi's own figures:

Xiaomi describes both batteries as using a new silicon-anode cell design with 32% silicon content, and says the packs retain at least 80% of their original capacity after 2,000 charge cycles in its own lab testing. Both front screens use what Xiaomi calls an M11 OLED emissive material, co-developed with a Tsinghua University chemistry research team, running at a 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate with full-brightness DC dimming.

The customizable AI rear screen and HyperOS 4

Both phones carry over Xiaomi's secondary rear display, but rebuilt around what Xiaomi describes as a fully customizable back screen. Xiaomi's product pages describe letting owners upload photos of people or pets to generate custom rear-screen avatars, apply AI-generated wallpaper styles matched to a phone case, and install "app cards" — small widgets for things like workouts, timers or car status — some of which can reportedly be generated by describing them to Xiaomi's AI in natural language.

Software-wise, both phones ship on Xiaomi HyperOS 4 with the newer "Super Xiao AI 2.0" assistant, which Xiaomi says can operate in an "expert mode" for more complex, multi-step requests, and supports cross-device handoff with Xiaomi tablets and PCs running the same HyperOS version. Xiaomi also documents interoperability features for Apple hardware, including notification mirroring with iPhone and a companion watchOS app for Apple Watch, though Xiaomi notes some of that functionality is tied to specific software versions and a scheduled app-store release later in the year.

Where the Xiaomi 18 Fold fits in

It's worth separating the Xiaomi 18 Fold from the Pro/Pro Max pair, since the naming makes it easy to lump them together. Per Xiaomi's own specification page, the Fold is a book-style foldable with a 5.38-inch external screen and a 7.58-inch internal screen, dual-layer ultrathin glass, a new hinge design, a 6,000mAh battery, and the same Leica 200-megapixel triple-camera branding used elsewhere in the lineup — but it is powered by Xiaomi's self-designed Xuanjie O3 chip rather than a Qualcomm Snapdragon part. It launched at the same time and shares HyperOS 4 and Super Xiao AI 2.0 with the Pro series, but it is a distinct product with its own pricing tier, starting well above the Pro Max.

Global launch: what Xiaomi has, and hasn't, said

Xiaomi has indicated it intends to bring the Xiaomi 18 Pro series to markets outside China before the end of 2026. That's a notable shift: last year's flagship, which we covered when comparing it with Samsung's new phone in our Galaxy S26 vs. Xiaomi 17 Pro comparison, never received a global Pro Max release. At the time of writing, though, Xiaomi has not published a specific launch date, a list of countries or regions, or any pricing outside China for the Xiaomi 18 Pro or Pro Max. Anyone searching for a global release date or non-China price right now is, honestly, ahead of the news — there isn't one yet. We'll update this article once Xiaomi confirms specifics through its official channels.

How the Xiaomi 18 Pro series fits into the current flagship field

The Xiaomi 18 Pro series arrives in the middle of a crowded flagship-refresh cycle. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Elite Extreme Gen 6 platforms are set to appear across multiple Android flagships this generation, not just Xiaomi's phones, so the chipset itself won't be a Xiaomi exclusive for long. Where Xiaomi is trying to differentiate is the combination of the privacy screen, the customizable rear display, and the camera hardware, all bundled at a China price that undercuts many Western flagship launches. Whether that combination is enough to finally get a global Pro Max release — something Xiaomi skipped last generation — is the open question the rest of 2026 should answer.

What happens next

A few concrete things to watch for: an official global launch date and market list from Xiaomi, any change to the chip pairing if Xiaomi later ships a global variant, and confirmation of exact RAM and storage tiers and their individual prices, none of which Xiaomi has published in English yet. Until Xiaomi's global site and press materials catch up with the China launch, the safest place to check for updates is Xiaomi's own Xiaomi 18 Pro Max and Xiaomi 18 Pro product pages, which are already live in Chinese even though an international version has not yet gone up.

Written byNadia Osei

Nadia Osei covers mobile and consumer gadgets for Pandromeda: smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, earbuds and smart-home devices. She tracks launches, software updates and pricing across Apple, Google, Samsung and the rest, and builds comparisons from the manufacturers' published specifications.

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