CUPERTINO — The first public words from Apple’s new chief executive about the most important product launch of his career arrived not as a press conference or a company tweet but as a memo to Apple’s own staff. John Ternus sent that note on September 1, his second day as the company’s CEO, telling employees that the coming week’s launch would be “phenomenal.”
The event is set for September 9 at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, starting at 10 a.m. Pacific. When Apple sent its invitations on August 26, the tagline read “Surprise and Shine.” Whether the event delivers on either word will define what Ternus’s Apple looks like, and whether the company’s years-long wait on a foldable phone produces something worth the prices Apple is expected to charge.
The most anticipated product is not the iPhone 18 Pro, which is real and incoming and will almost certainly sell in the tens of millions. That device, available in two sizes and powered by Apple’s 2nm A20 Pro chip, includes a variable-aperture main camera that gives photographers control over depth of field at the hardware level. The camera matters. So does Apple’s second-generation C2 modem, which continues the company’s push toward ending its dependence on Qualcomm. But the iPhone 18 Pro will not reframe how the phone industry thinks about what a phone is.
The foldable might.
Apple is expected to announce what it may call the iPhone Ultra: a book-style device with a 5.5-inch cover display that unfolds into a 7.6-inch inner screen, roughly an iPad mini in your jacket pocket. A titanium frame. Touch ID embedded in the power button in place of Face ID. An inner display Apple’s own materials have described as “virtually crease-free.” That last detail is load-bearing. The defining criticism of every book-fold device on the market has been a crease that stays visible in direct light, and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8, which scored strong reviews this summer, still carries one. Apple’s claim is that it solved the problem. September 9 is the first time anyone outside the company will get to look.
The expected starting price is $1,999. Some configurations are rumored to reach $2,500.
Beyond the two iPhones, Apple is expected to introduce the Apple Watch Series 12 and a fourth-generation Apple Watch Ultra, the wearables refresh that typically accompanies each fall iPhone event. For the first time since 2017, no budget iPhone ships in September; the standard iPhone 18 is reportedly delayed to spring 2027, a shift that concentrates the fall lineup on Apple’s highest-margin products.
That price changes the pitch entirely. Apple’s standard iPhone upgrade proposition is to pay roughly what you paid last time and get a meaningfully better camera and chip. That logic does not apply at twice the cost of an iPhone 18 Pro. The foldable has to make the case that it replaces two devices, not one: that an iPhone Ultra does enough of what an iPad does to justify the premium. Whether that argument holds up against a Samsung Z Fold 8 that already exists and costs $1,900 depends on execution that no rumor can confirm.
The third pillar of the event is Apple Intelligence and the rebuilt Siri. Apple licensed Google Gemini to underpin Siri’s relaunch after falling measurably behind in generative AI, a decision Eastern Herald covered in detail when Ternus formally took the CEO title this week. The company previewed parts of Siri’s new capabilities at WWDC 2026 in June, emphasizing integration across the operating system and the ability to act across apps in ways that ChatGPT and Claude, running as third-party applications, cannot replicate at the system level. On-device processing, a rebuilt natural language understanding layer, and a personal context model that draws from messages, email, and calendar data were part of the preview. What WWDC did not show was the head-to-head comparison that buyers will actually make.
That comparison will now happen in public, and Apple will not control the frame. OpenAI’s Astra model reached the industry’s highest cybersecurity evaluation threshold this week, in a test of autonomous capability that no Apple product has been submitted for. Anyone arriving at the Steve Jobs Theater on September 9 will carry that context. Ternus needs a Siri that can stand next to it.
What Ternus himself will do on stage remains publicly unknown. Tim Cook mastered the Apple keynote format over fifteen years: practiced, controlled, comfortable with the rhythm of product reveals and studio-filmed interstitials. Ternus spent 25 years in hardware engineering and has never been Apple’s public face. September 9 will be the first time he speaks, as CEO, to an audience larger than Apple’s own workforce.
The AI memory crunch that drove MacBook Air onto backorder last month has eased somewhat since Apple’s best-ever quarterly results in June, but it reflects how completely the company’s hardware roadmap is now tied to AI compute demands it does not fully control. The A20 Pro chip’s performance improvements arrive against that backdrop: Apple needs its own silicon to carry Apple Intelligence workloads that competitors are running on Nvidia GPUs in cloud data centers Apple will never build.
None of this makes the event a failure waiting to happen. Apple has a foldable screen, a rebuilt AI assistant, and a 2nm processor to show on September 9. The hardware engineering team Ternus spent his career building has been working toward the foldable for years. The “Surprise and Shine” tagline implies something the audience does not already know. The foldable has been rumored for three years. The chip was forecast in May. The AI was previewed in June.
The surprise, if there is one, will have to come from somewhere in the presentation that the leaks did not reach.
Apple will stream the event on its website and YouTube at 1 p.m. Eastern on September 9, as Engadget reported when the invitations went out.
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