Apple confirms September 9 iPhone event — Ternus's first as CEO

Apple has confirmed the date of its annual iPhone keynote: Wednesday, September 9, at 10 a.m. Pacific time. The company put the event page live on its site under the tagline "Surprise and shine," and marketing chief Greg Joswiak posted the invitation the same day. Members of the media have been invited to Apple Park in Cupertino, and the keynote will stream on apple.com and in the Apple TV app. Elsewhere that is 1 p.m. in New York, 6 p.m. in London and 7 p.m. in Berlin and Paris.

The date itself was not a surprise; Apple has held its iPhone launch in the first half of September for more than a decade. What is different this year is who will be running the presentation. Apple announced in April that Tim Cook would move to executive chairman and that John Ternus, the senior vice president of hardware engineering, would become chief executive. That handover takes effect on September 1 — eight days before the keynote. September 9 will be the first September launch since 2011 that Cook does not open, and Ternus is expected to lead it as CEO.

Apple, as usual, has said nothing about the products. Reporting from Bloomberg and the specialist Apple press points to the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, the company's first foldable phone — reported under the name iPhone Ultra — and new Apple Watches, with a chance of updated home devices. None of that is confirmed by Apple, and the invitation carries no product imagery to test it against.

The tagline is doing the usual work of hinting without promising. "Surprise and shine" has been widely read as a nod to a folding screen catching the light as it opens, which is the reading Apple would want if a foldable is the headline device. Apple's event slogans are deliberately loose enough to survive being read wrong.

The more consequential unknown is tone rather than hardware. Ternus is an engineer who has spent 25 years inside Apple's hardware organisation, and his first keynote as chief executive is the clearest signal the company will give about how much changes at the top — and how much stays exactly as it was.