Royole FlexPai foldable smartphones are displayed at CES 2020 at the Las Vegas Convention Center on January 7, 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Apple sent official media invitations today, August 26, confirming that its annual fall product event will take place on September 9 at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET at Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park, Cupertino, California. The event carries the tagline “Surprise and shine” and will be streamed live on Apple’s website, YouTube, and the Apple TV app — but what makes this year’s gathering categorically different from the fifteen before it is the person who will take the stage. On September 9, John Ternus — Apple’s incoming chief executive, a mechanical engineer who built the hardware he is about to introduce — will lead his first public keynote as CEO.
The September 9 confirmation ends months of analyst speculation and supply chain inference. What was anticipated is now official. Apple has scheduled the event, invited the press, and given the lineup a name. What follows is an account of what that event will carry and what it means for readers deciding whether to upgrade, wait, or simply watch.
First Apple CEO Who Built the Hardware He Presents
The September 9 keynote will be the first Apple event delivered under a CEO who is a hardware engineer by profession. John Ternus studied mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and joined Apple in 2001 as a product designer. Over 25 years at Apple, he oversaw hardware development for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Vision Pro — including the Apple Silicon transition that moved every Mac from Intel processors to Apple’s own chip architecture. He personally oversaw the development of the A20 Pro chip, the variable aperture camera system, and the foldable iPhone he will introduce from stage.
Tim Cook, who has led Apple since 2011 through fifteen consecutive iPhone launches, steps down as CEO on September 1 — eight days before the event, per Apple’s succession announcement — and will remain at the company as Executive Chairman, focused on government relations and broader corporate strategy. Cook described Ternus at the April transition announcement as someone with “the mind of an engineer and the soul of an innovator.” Ternus has made limited public appearances since the April announcement — debuting the MacBook Neo at a March event in New York and greeting press at a pre-WWDC reception in June — but September 9 will be his first introduction to the world’s mainstream audience.
Apple last underwent a CEO transition in 2011, when Cook succeeded Steve Jobs. That handover carried enormous uncertainty about continuity. This one arrives with Apple reporting record results: the company posted $109.4 billion in revenue in its third fiscal quarter of 2026, up 16 percent year over year — the company’s best June quarter ever.
iPhone Ultra: Apple’s First Foldable Phone and What It Gives Up
The product carrying the most anticipation is one that has never existed in Apple’s lineup before. Apple’s first foldable phone — widely expected to be called the iPhone Ultra — will feature a 5.5-inch (14 cm) outer display that unfolds into a 7.8-inch (19.8 cm) inner display with a 4:3 aspect ratio, proportions closer to an iPad mini than to the tall, narrow format of most Android foldables. The unfolded screen is designed for productivity and media consumption in a pocket-sized device that, when closed, behaves like a standard phone.
The iPhone Ultra will be powered by Apple’s A20 Pro chip — built on TSMC’s 2-nanometer process using Gate-All-Around nanosheet transistors — and is expected to carry 12 gigabytes of RAM, qualifying it for iOS 27’s advanced Apple Intelligence tier. The rear camera system includes two 48-megapixel sensors — main and ultrawide — with no telephoto lens. The dual-battery architecture required by the device’s two-chassis design (approximately 1,921mAh and 2,962mAh, combining to roughly 4,900mAh total) leaves insufficient engineering room for a third camera.
The chassis, which folds to approximately 4.5 millimeters (0.18 inches) when unfolded — thinner than any current iPhone — creates a second notable absence. At 4.5mm, there is no space for the TrueDepth camera array that Face ID requires (an infrared dot projector, flood illuminator, and IR camera). Instead, the iPhone Ultra will use Touch ID integrated into the power button — the first time Apple’s highest-priced flagship has relied on fingerprint rather than facial authentication since 2017.
The address issue: no telephoto, no Face ID. The form factor tradeoff is real, and buyers considering the iPhone Ultra are making a choice to prioritize a 7.8-inch display and a new form factor over two capabilities that currently define the Pro line. Whether that tradeoff is worth it depends on the use case. For media consumption and split-screen productivity, the 4:3 inner display is genuinely different from anything the current lineup offers. For photography requiring optical zoom or reliability of facial unlock in varied conditions, it is not.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported the iPhone Ultra will carry a starting price above $2,000. For comparison, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 starts at $1,899 and Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold at $1,799. Supply at launch will be constrained: analyst Kuo projects 500,000 to 1 million foldable units available in the third quarter of 2026. Broader availability is expected in early 2027.
What Makes the A20 Pro Different From Every Prior iPhone Chip
The iPhone Ultra and iPhone 18 Pro share Apple’s new A20 Pro chip, and the engineering architecture underneath it is the most significant chip change Apple has made in years.
Every Apple processor from the A14 through the A19 Pro used FinFET transistors — a three-dimensional fin-shaped silicon structure that allowed chips to shrink generation over generation, but which approached its physical limits at the 3-nanometer node. At 3nm, FinFET fins become so narrow that electrical leakage through the channel when the transistor is supposed to be switched off becomes a significant efficiency drain.
The A20 Pro uses TSMC’s 2-nanometer N2 process, which replaces FinFET with Gate-All-Around (GAA) nanosheet transistors. Instead of a single fin, GAA stacks three to four horizontally oriented silicon ribbons — each only a few atoms thick — with the gate electrode wrapping entirely around all four sides of each ribbon. The additional gate contact eliminates the leakage problem at sub-3nm geometries. TSMC’s N2 process delivers approximately 10–15 percent faster CPU performance at equal power, or 25–30 percent better power efficiency at equal performance, compared to 3nm.
The A20 Pro also uses TSMC’s Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) packaging, which co-fabricates the processor and its 12 gigabytes of LPDDR5X memory at the wafer level rather than attaching memory to a finished die in a separate step. The benefit is bandwidth and efficiency — the memory and processor communicate without crossing a separate data bus. The tradeoff is supply chain vulnerability: because the DRAM is integrated at fabrication, a shortage of LPDDR5X directly stalls chip completion. TSMC is estimated to hold a significant quantity of fully fabricated A20 Pro silicon that cannot be packaged because the required memory has not yet arrived.
One specification that US buyers should understand explicitly: the iPhone 18 Pro sold in the United States will use a Qualcomm modem rather than Apple’s in-house C2 chip. Apple’s C2 does not support mmWave 5G — the ultra-high-frequency band (24–39 GHz) that Verizon and AT&T deploy in dense US cities for maximum-speed 5G. As a result, US Pro buyers will not receive the power-efficiency benefit of Apple’s integrated modem-processor architecture, and they are not expected to receive the satellite broadband capability international models are expected to support. This difference is not visible on the retail spec sheet. For full details on the US modem difference and its implications, see TechTimes’ earlier coverage.
iPhone 18 Pro: Variable Aperture Arrives and a Smaller Dynamic Island
The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will introduce Apple’s first mechanical variable aperture camera. Every iPhone Pro from the iPhone 14 Pro through the iPhone 17 Pro Max has shipped with a fixed f/1.78 lens opening. The iPhone 18 Pro’s main 48-megapixel camera will use a mechanical iris that adjusts continuously between approximately f/1.4 and f/2.8.
The engineering precedent exists in Android: Samsung debuted a two-stop implementation (f/1.5 and f/2.4) on the Galaxy S9 in 2018 but discontinued it by the Galaxy S20 lineup. Apple’s implementation is expected to offer continuous rather than stepped adjustment, with the primary benefit falling on video — a mechanical iris allows the camera to maintain a slow shutter speed without overexposing the frame, producing natural motion blur for cinematic video without requiring neutral-density filters or digital workarounds.
Additional changes to the iPhone 18 Pro include: a smaller Dynamic Island — shrinking approximately 35 percent from around 20.76mm (0.82 inches) to approximately 13.5mm (0.53 inches) in width — an upgraded 24-megapixel front camera, improved telephoto lenses with wider apertures, and the signature Dark Cherry color expected to replace Cosmic Orange (described as a blend of burgundy, coffee, and deep purple).
The iPhone 18 Pro is expected to arrive at a starting price approximately $200 to $270 higher than the iPhone 17 Pro’s $1,099 launch price — putting it in the range of $1,299 to $1,369. The increase traces directly to the DRAM shortage: 12 gigabytes of LPDDR5X now costs Apple roughly $145 versus approximately $39 in the iPhone 17 Pro cycle — a 272 percent increase for memory, according to TechInsights analysis. The underlying cause is the massive reallocation of DRAM manufacturing capacity toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in AI accelerators, which earns three to five times more revenue per wafer than phone-grade LPDDR5X, according to HBM capacity shift reporting. Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are estimated to be spending a combined $650 billion on data center infrastructure in 2026 — nearly triple their combined 2024 figure — and that investment has redirected the global memory supply chain in ways that iPhone buyers now absorb at checkout.
The 12GB AI threshold: The most consequential structural fact about the iPhone 18 lineup is one that does not appear on any spec sheet. iOS 27’s most advanced on-device AI capabilities — customizable Siri voice expressiveness and significantly improved dictation accuracy — require a minimum of 12 gigabytes of unified memory to run on-device. Private Cloud Compute cannot substitute for the missing memory. The iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max, and Ultra all clear the 12GB threshold; the standard iPhone 18, arriving spring 2027, is expected to ship with 9 gigabytes — below the threshold. The iPhone 17 non-Pro shipped with 8 gigabytes — also below the threshold. The only current-year path to the advanced Apple Intelligence tier is a Pro model.
Siri AI: Apple’s Biggest Bet — and Its Largest Structural Dependency
At WWDC 2026 in June, Apple confirmed what Bloomberg had reported for months: Siri AI — the completely rebuilt version of Apple’s voice assistant shipping with iOS 27 — runs its most demanding reasoning tasks on a custom version of Google’s Gemini, a 1.2-trillion-parameter model running on Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs in Google Cloud. Apple reportedly pays Google approximately $1 billion per year for the arrangement, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by technology outlets including TheNextWeb.
The architecture uses a three-tier routing system. Simple queries stay on the device using Apple’s own smaller models. Moderately complex tasks route to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers. The most demanding reasoning — multi-step requests, complex document analysis, questions requiring broad world knowledge — routes to Google’s servers, with queries anonymized and tokenized before transmission so neither Apple nor Google staff can link requests to individual users.
For a company that has built its brand on privacy as a competitive differentiator, paying a direct competitor approximately $1 billion annually to power its flagship personal assistant represents the most significant strategic dependency in Apple’s modern history. It is also a public admission that Apple’s own AI models were not competitive at the frontier — after two years of promising and not shipping a rebuilt Siri, Apple chose to license rather than build the intelligence required. The September 9 event will be the first time Siri AI operates on hardware optimized for it: the A20 Pro’s WMCM-packaged memory is specifically designed to accelerate the on-device tier of Siri’s workload.
Siri AI will launch initially in English, with the US the primary market. Users in the European Union and China will face a delayed rollout due to regulatory constraints in those regions. Both the EU and China impose different requirements on AI systems operating within their jurisdictions.
Apple Watch Series 12, Ultra 4, and AirPods
Apple’s wearables lineup will also refresh at the September 9 event. The Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 are both in late-stage testing, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman’s late July report, and both will receive a new chip expected to carry S11 designation — the first meaningful performance upgrade since the S9 shipped in 2023. That chip matters because watchOS 27 is built around Siri AI, and the current S9 hardware has created a bottleneck for on-device processing of Siri requests, health data analysis, and navigation. The S11 addresses that constraint directly.
Neither model is expected to receive a major exterior redesign. Apple’s focus this cycle is internal: faster processing, health sensor improvements (expanded blood pressure monitoring capability is expected for Series 12), and battery efficiency gains. A ceramic casing option for the Ultra 4 has appeared in some speculation but has not been confirmed by reliable supply chain sources, and this article treats it accordingly.
On the audio side, new AirPods — likely successors to the AirPods 4 — are expected in September, potentially in variants with and without Active Noise Cancellation. The camera-equipped AirPods that appeared in macOS Tahoe beta code earlier this year — designed to feed Apple’s Visual Intelligence system with real-time environmental context for Siri — are not expected to ship in September 2026. Gurman reported that camera-integrated AirPods have slipped to 2027.
HomeOS and the Smart Home Hub
Apple previewed homeOS at WWDC 2026 in June — a new operating system for an upcoming smart home hub device described as a roughly 7-inch display mounted to a speaker, designed to run on an A18 chip and powered by Siri AI. Gurman has noted that a September preview of the completed product is “plausible,” though a retail launch would likely follow later in 2026 or in early 2027. The homeOS preview details from WWDC 2026 are available in TechTimes’ earlier coverage. If the HomePad appears at September 9, it will be a software demonstration rather than an immediately available purchase.
What Is Not at September 9
The standard iPhone 18, iPhone 18e, and second-generation iPhone Air 2 are not coming to September 9. All three are expected in spring 2027, with March the most commonly cited target from supply chain sources. This is the first time in iPhone history that Apple’s entire base and budget tier has been absent from the fall event.
The practical consequence: every new iPhone available this holiday season will start at $999 or above. Buyers whose upgrade budget falls below that number have no new iPhone option in 2026 and will need to either purchase a discounted iPhone 17 or wait until spring. When the standard iPhone 18 does arrive, it will carry 9 gigabytes of RAM — below the advanced Apple Intelligence threshold — at an expected price in the $799 range, which will likely be higher than the iPhone 17’s launch price given ongoing memory costs.
Upgrade Decision: Before You Watch on September 9
iPhone 14 Pro or older: The compound advances across three hardware generations — the variable aperture camera, the GAA chip’s efficiency at AI workloads, and the 12GB memory qualifying for the full Apple Intelligence tier — represent genuine generational progress. The upgrade case is strong.
iPhone 17 non-Pro (8GB RAM): Your phone supports standard Apple Intelligence but not the advanced dictation and Siri customization that require 12 gigabytes. The only current-year path to those features is the iPhone 18 Pro.
iPhone 15 Pro or 16 Pro (12GB RAM): You already qualify for the advanced Apple Intelligence tier when iOS 27 ships this fall. The variable aperture camera is the primary new hardware not available on your current device. Whether it justifies a price increase is a personal judgment call on how often you shoot video in variable lighting conditions.
iPhone 17 Pro or 17 Pro Max (12GB RAM): Your phone already meets the advanced Apple Intelligence threshold. The variable aperture and a smaller Dynamic Island are the architectural changes not available via a software update. These are incremental improvements rather than generational leaps.
Waiting for base iPhone 18 in spring 2027: You will receive a capable phone with a competent A20 chip and 9 gigabytes of RAM at a lower price than any Pro model. You will not receive advanced Apple Intelligence or the variable aperture camera.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat products will Apple announce at the September 9, 2026 event?
Apple’s September 9 event is expected to include the iPhone Ultra (the company’s first foldable phone), the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, new AirPods, and a substantial software rollout including Siri AI — the rebuilt assistant powered in its cloud tier by Google’s Gemini model. A preview of the HomePad smart home hub running homeOS is also possible. The standard iPhone 18, iPhone 18e, and iPhone Air 2 are not expected at this event; all three are pushed to spring 2027.
How much will the iPhone Ultra cost, and what does it sacrifice compared to an iPhone 18 Pro Max?
Apple’s first foldable iPhone is expected to start above $2,000, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The form factor requires three specific concessions: there is no Face ID (the 4.5mm unfolded chassis cannot fit the TrueDepth camera array, so authentication uses a Touch ID power button instead), there is no telephoto lens (the dual-battery configuration leaves no engineering room for a third camera), and supply at launch will be significantly limited — analyst Kuo projects limited Q3 supply — between 500,000 and 1 million units available in the third quarter of 2026. The iPhone Ultra does carry 12 gigabytes of RAM, qualifying it for iOS 27’s advanced Apple Intelligence tier, and its 7.8-inch (19.8cm) inner display with a 4:3 aspect ratio provides a genuinely different form factor for productivity and media consumption.
Is Siri AI actually private if it uses Google’s servers?
Apple’s three-tier routing system anonymizes and tokenizes queries before they leave the device for either Apple’s Private Cloud Compute or Google’s servers. Neither Apple staff nor Google can link routed queries to specific users, according to Apple’s description of the architecture as covered in TechTimes’ WWDC 2026 report. What this does not change is the structural reality: Apple pays Google approximately $1 billion per year for the arrangement, and the most demanding reasoning tasks in Siri AI — the responses that require the breadth of a 1.2-trillion-parameter model — run on Google infrastructure. Users who prefer that their queries remain entirely on Apple-controlled hardware can use the on-device tier, which handles simpler requests locally. The advanced tier — the one that makes Siri competitive with ChatGPT and Gemini at complex tasks — requires Google’s servers to operate.
When does John Ternus officially become Apple’s CEO?
Ternus becomes Apple’s chief executive officer on September 1, 2026 — eight days before the September 9 keynote event. Tim Cook transitions to Executive Chairman on the same date, as confirmed in Apple’s CEO succession announcement. The September 9 keynote will therefore be Ternus’s first major public product presentation as CEO. He has been Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering since 2021 and joined Apple in 2001 as a mechanical engineer. Cook will continue in a board-level role focused on government relations and corporate strategy.