Apple’s Fall Event Is Set for September 9, and It’s John Ternus’s First One

Apple finally put a date on the biggest phone announcement of the year, and the most interesting thing about it might not be a phone at all. Invites went out Wednesday morning with the tagline "Surprise and shine." The event happens Wednesday, September 9 at 10 a.m. Pacific (1 p.m. Eastern) at the Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus.

You can watch it the usual ways: Apple's website, YouTube, and the Apple TV app. What actually separates this one from the last decade of Septembers is who will be standing at the front of it. John Ternus takes over as Apple's CEO on September 1, with Tim Cook shifting to executive chairman. That makes September 9 Ternus's first keynote in the job.

What Apple has actually confirmed

Very little, which is exactly how this always goes. The date, the start time, the venue, the livestream, and a tagline nobody at Apple will ever explain. That's it. Everything else you're about to read is rumor, leak, and supply chain chatter, and you should hold it loosely until Ternus says it out loud.

What's expected to show up

The headliner is Apple's first foldable iPhone, widely reported to be called the iPhone Ultra. Leaks describe a book style design that opens wide rather than tall, closer to a small iPad than a taller phone, at roughly 5.5 inches closed and 7.6 inches open. The tradeoffs being reported are real ones: Touch ID instead of Face ID, and no telephoto camera, because there's nowhere to put one in a body that thin. Supply is also rumored to be very limited at launch, so if you want one on day one, plan on a fight.

Alongside it, the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max are expected as iterative updates rather than a redesign, with a new A20 Pro chip built on a 2nm process. There is no regular iPhone 18 this year. Apple has reportedly moved the cheaper models to spring 2027, which is a genuinely strange break from a release rhythm people have counted on since 2017. If you buy the base iPhone every couple of years, your upgrade cycle just got rearranged.

Also on the rumor board: an Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4, new AirPods, and possibly a few smart home pieces including the long delayed home hub, a refreshed Apple TV 4K, and an updated HomePod mini. Apple will also hand out release dates for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate, which is the practical part of the day for everyone not buying new hardware.

The part that's going to sting

Memory prices have been brutal all year, and Apple has already raised prices twice across the Mac and iPad lineups because of it. This week's new Mac mini started at $899, up $300 from where the M4 version launched less than two years ago. Nobody should be shocked if the iPhone 18 Pro follows that pattern. Treat any "same price as last year" assumption as optimism, not information.

Who this event is really for

If you're a Pro owner on a two year cycle, September 9 is a routine decision. If you've been waiting a decade for Apple to make a folding phone, it's the one you circled. And if you're just curious whether a new CEO changes how Apple talks about its own products, that's the thing to watch that no spec sheet will tell you. Ternus is a hardware engineer by trade. Two weeks from now we find out what that sounds like from a keynote stage.