Apple confirmed Wednesday that its next hardware event will take place on September 9 at 1PM ET at the Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park, with a livestream available on Apple's website and YouTube. The tagline: 'Surprise and shine.' Read the changelog.
The headliner — if the leaks hold — is a foldable iPhone. A photo of an apparent dummy unit suggests a wide form factor similar to Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8, and Apple has been laying groundwork for the device inside iOS 27 code. Engadget reports the phone may carry the name iPhone Ultra and fold out into a tablet-style format, putting something close to iPad Mini utility into a pocket. That is either the future or a very expensive demo. We will know September 9.
Also expected on stage: the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. Both are rumored to be iterative upgrades — no sweeping redesign like last year's announcement. The base iPhone 18, however, reportedly won't appear at the event at all; Apple is said to be pushing it, along with the iPhone Air 2 and iPhone 18e, to spring 2027. Apple is splitting its lineup across two calendar years, which is either a supply-chain decision or a pricing strategy, and probably both.
AI will be a major talking point. Apple spent its WWDC keynote in June reframing its entire software story around Siri AI and Apple Intelligence — a cross-platform ecosystem play rather than the usual feature-by-feature OS walkthrough. Expect September 9 to be the hardware chapter of that same pitch.
The other unmissable detail: this will be the first Apple event with John Ternus as CEO. Ternus, formerly the company's hardware chief, officially takes over from Tim Cook on September 1st — eight days before the show.
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Here's the thing. A foldable iPhone, a new CEO, and an AI-first product narrative arriving in the same week is either the most consequential Apple event in years or the most carefully managed expectations game the company has ever run. Apple's track record suggests the hardware will ship and the benchmarks will be Apple's own — but the foldable form factor is genuinely uncharted territory for Cupertino, and Ternus will own whatever the market thinks of it by the close of trading that day. Free enterprise has a way of grading on results, not roadmaps. The demo is not the product.
