Apple Event, September 9 2026: Everything Announced — iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, AirPods 5 and Apple Watch Series 12

Apple held its September keynote at Apple Park today, and it was a heavier event than the calendar slot usually carries. Four product lines were updated, one of them was created from scratch, and the company finally shipped the foldable iPhone that has been rumoured for the better part of a decade.

This is the full recap: every product, every price, every date. Where Apple made a performance or accuracy claim, we have said so — none of it has been independently tested yet.

If you want the two deep dives instead, they are here: iPhone Duo explained and what actually changed in Siri AI.

The framing: iPhone as your "intelligent personal hub"

The keynote opened with an argument rather than a product. If you were designing the ideal device to sit at the centre of an AI-driven life, what would it need? Always with you. A processor fast enough to run capable models locally. Networking to reach bigger models in the cloud. A large display, good cameras and microphones. All-day battery. Seamless links to everything else you own.

The punchline, obviously, was that you would end up describing an iPhone. It is a self-serving argument, but it is also the honest structure of the whole event — every announcement that followed was positioned as making that hub smarter, longer-lasting or larger.

The privacy line was sharpened too. Apple's pitch is that personal context — your calendar, your messages, your routines — should be processed on the device wherever possible, with Private Cloud Compute extending the same protection when a bigger model is needed. The dig at competitors who move your data to their servers and ask you to trust them was not subtle.

This was John Ternus's first September keynote as chief executive, eight days after taking the job from Tim Cook.

iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max

The Pro line keeps its shape and changes almost everything inside it.

Design and colours. Colour-matched aluminium and back glass for a more unified look, in Black, Silver, a new Glacier, and Burgundy.

A20 Pro. Built on 2-nanometre process technology, with a 6-core CPU — two new high-performance cores Apple says are up to 20% faster, plus four efficiency cores with neural accelerators attached. The GPU moves to a 7-core design that Apple claims is up to 40% faster in one generation. The largest change is the Neural Engine: there are now two of them, 32 cores in total, which Apple puts at double the AI compute of the previous generation. Memory bandwidth is up 50%, the widest interface Apple has shipped in a phone.

The packaging is the interesting engineering. Borrowing from the M-series, the silicon die now sits side by side with the memory rather than stacked with it. That pulls memory out of the chip's thermal path and lets the die connect directly to the cooling system.

Cooling. A second-generation vapour chamber with roughly three times the surface area of the one in iPhone 17 Pro, circulating de-ionised water, built from 80% recycled stainless steel, paired with more conductive graphite and a "Nanotwin" copper layer that moves heat away from the display. Apple's claim is up to 40% higher sustained performance than iPhone 17 Pro, and roughly double that of iPhone 16 Pro and older.

Sustained is the word doing the work there. Peak benchmark numbers have not been the problem on recent iPhones; holding those numbers during a long game or a long video export has been.

Battery. Apple says iPhone 18 Pro now matches the all-day life of last year's Pro Max despite being smaller, and that the Pro Max sees the biggest battery-life increase in iPhone history. The stated figures, for eSIM-only models: 36 hours of video playback on the Pro, 45 hours on the Pro Max. Apple also introduced a second, more realistic metric based on how people actually use their phones — 24 hours per charge on the Pro, 30 on the Pro Max. Wired charging hits 50% in around 15 minutes.

The camera. This is the headline upgrade, and it is genuinely unusual: a 48MP Fusion Main camera with a variable aperture. Six laser-cut blades, each thinner than a human hair, made from a polymer composite, driven by a new rotor mechanism.

Opened up, it takes in roughly 50% more light — better night mode, better astrophotography, faster captures. Stopped down, you get more depth of field, which is what group shots have always needed. Apple says f/1.8 is the sweet spot it has optimised for.

Alongside it:

• Pro controls — manual white balance, a live histogram, four selectable apertures and manual shutter speed. Long shutter for deliberate motion blur, fast shutter to freeze a moment. Genuinely new territory for the stock camera app.
• Cinematic mode from ordinary video, applied after capture, now at 60fps.
• 4K Dolby Vision HDR time-lapse, and AudioMix that now handles music as well as voice.
• Smart focus tracking using on-device models to hold a subject even when it leaves and re-enters the frame.
• Photographic Styles with texture and grain control — you can now dial skin texture and film grain up or down, and reverse it later.
• Apple Reference Image, which signs photo data at the sensor, at the pixel level, at the moment of capture. Apple also said it will support the SynthID standard for identifying AI-generated or AI-edited images.

That last pair matters more than it sounds. We wrote about why in the Siri AI piece.

Software. The Dynamic Island shrinks and now holds three live activities at once. iOS 27 adds more flexible child-safety controls, customisable Liquid Glass, AirDrop transfers Apple says are up to 80% faster, and iPhone Handoff — one phone number live on whichever of two iPhones you pick up, launching with T-Mobile and Telekom Deutschland, with Verizon and EE by year end.

Prices. iPhone 18 Pro from $1,199, now with a 2TB option. iPhone 18 Pro Max from $1,299. Pre-orders Saturday September 12, on sale September 18. In the US, Apple also introduced Apple Upgrade, a 12- or 24-month leasing programme, up to $1,200 in trade-in credit for an iPhone 14 or newer, and AppleCare One Family.

One nice detail: Apple says the event itself was filmed on iPhone 18 Pro, using the new variable aperture.

AirPods 5

The most quietly aggressive announcement of the day, because of the price.

AirPods 5 keep the open-ear fit — no silicone tips — and rebuild the acoustics around a new multi-port architecture and a next-generation Adaptive EQ. Apple's claim is 50% more noise reduction than the previous generation, which it says makes this the best active noise cancellation in any open-ear design.

You also get Transparency mode, Adaptive Audio switching automatically between the two, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, Custom EQ, a camera remote, Personalised Spatial Audio, hands-free Siri AI and Live Translation. Durability is up, rated IP57 for dust, sweat and water.

Battery: 4 hours with ANC, 20 hours with the case.

$129 — the same price as the previous generation without noise cancellation.

There is a second model at $149 with on-stem volume swipe (a first for this style of AirPods), 5 hours of ANC listening from a re-engineered cell, and a wireless charging case that works with Qi and Apple Watch chargers. That one is $30 less than the outgoing generation.

Both are available to pre-order now and ship September 18. ANC is now standard across the entire AirPods line.

Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4

Both watches get a rebuilt sensor array and a new chip.

The Health Sensing System. Within the same footprint, the electrode surface area grows for better ECG contact, the photodiodes are rearranged into a ring to capture light more efficiently, and larger, more power-efficient green LEDs support all-day heart rate measurement during motion.

The practical result is frequency. Background heart rate is now sampled every 5 seconds — Apple says 60 times more often than before — and heart rate variability as often as every 5 minutes, 24 times more often. Apple ran a head-to-head study against other wearables with an ECG chest strap as the reference, and claims the result is the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. That is a claim worth waiting for third-party verification on, but it is a falsifiable one, which is more than most wearable marketing offers.

Readiness. Each morning the watch scores your recent activity, vitals and sleep into a single call: recover, pace yourself, or go for it. It updates during the day and appears in the Fitness app on iPhone.

A redesigned Health app, with an Apple Intelligence summary on a new Insights tab, personalised guidance that adapts to your data, a Health Age metric combining watch data with blood biomarkers, and a Longevity tab scoring sleep, movement and heart health against current clinical guidance. In the US you can order a Quest panel covering more than 50 biomarkers for $119. There are also camera-guided movement assessments — the VO2 max test uses the iPhone camera to watch your form and coach you through it in real time.

Audio Intelligence, powered by the new S11 chip and its always-on processor with a secure audio exclave:

• Sound Recognition for sirens, alarms, doorbells, a baby crying — on-device, and it works without your phone nearby.
• Live Rewind — double-press the Digital Crown to transcribe the last 15 seconds of what was said.
• Siri Recap — ambient note-taking that produces a title, summary and key points for a conversation, on a schedule you set, toggleable from Control Centre.

Apple was specific about the privacy model: no audio recordings are created or stored, raw audio is inaccessible even to Apple, speakers are not identified, and transcripts sync end-to-end encrypted.

Materials and battery. Series 12 in Space Gray, Black, Light Gold and a new Dark Bronze in 100% recycled aluminium, now with Ceramic Shield 2 that Apple says is 60% tougher than the previous Ion-X glass; polished titanium in Radiant Gold and Natural; and a ceramic finish in Pearl White and Night Blue. Up to 24 hours of battery. $399.

Ultra 4 gets a larger battery and the efficiency of S11: over two days of general use, up to 18 hours of full-GPS workout tracking, and a new Max Extended Workout mode good for 45 hours — enough for a 100-mile race. Black and Natural Titanium. $799.

Both can be pre-ordered today and ship September 18. The new Health app arrives later this year in US English; Live Rewind and Siri Recap enter beta later this year.

One more thing: iPhone Duo

Then the foldable.

iPhone Duo opens to a 7.6-inch Super Retina XDR display — 50% larger than iPhone 18 Pro Max, 80% larger than iPhone 18 Pro — and closes to a 5.4-inch outer screen with about 90% of the 18 Pro's screen area. Grade 5 titanium frame, a custom nano-texture finish meant to hide the crease, Touch ID in the side button, an under-display FaceTime camera, and Apple Pencil support on either display later this year.

$1,999, 256GB to 2TB. Pre-orders October 16, on sale October 23.

There is far too much engineering in it for a summary section, so we gave it its own piece.

Everything, with prices and dates

What it adds up to

Three things stood out.

The camera got a mechanical upgrade, not a computational one. Phone photography has improved through software for most of a decade. A physical variable aperture with six moving blades is a different kind of bet, and it gives photographers something software genuinely cannot fake: real depth-of-field control at capture time.

AirPods got cheaper while getting better. Noise cancellation across the whole line, with the wireless-charging model landing $30 below its predecessor. That is Apple protecting a category it dominates rather than harvesting it.

The foldable is the actual story. Everything else was an iteration. iPhone Duo is a new product line, at a price that says Apple expects to sell it to people who already spend Pro Max money, and its success or failure will shape the next several years of the iPhone more than any spec on this page.

We will come back to all of it once independent reviews land — Apple's numbers are Apple's numbers until someone else measures them.

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