For the first time since Apple began splitting the lineup into standard and Pro, there is no standard model in the fall. At the “Surprise and Shine” event on September 9, it introduced the iPhone 18 Pro at $1,199, the iPhone 18 Pro Max at $1,299, and its first folding phone, the iPhone Duo, at $1,999. Reports through the year have pointed to a spring 2027 launch for the standard iPhone 18, and Apple has confirmed nothing about it. So the cheapest new iPhone Apple will sell you next Friday costs $1,199.
It was also John Ternus’s first keynote as chief executive. He took over from Tim Cook on September 1, with Cook moving to executive chairman. Ternus ran hardware engineering for 25 years before this. His first lineup as CEO is, unsurprisingly, a hardware story: a folding phone, a camera with moving parts, and a chip built on a 2 nanometer process.
What Apple announced, and when you can get it
| Product | Starting price (US) | Pre-order | Ships |
|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone 18 Pro | $1,199 | September 12 | September 18 |
| iPhone 18 Pro Max | $1,299 | September 12 | September 18 |
| iPhone Duo | $1,999 | October 16 | October 23 |
| Apple Watch Series 12 | $399 | September 9 | September 18 |
| Apple Watch Ultra 4 | $799 | September 9 | September 18 |
| AirPods 5 | $129 | September 9 | September 18 |
iOS 27 and watchOS 27 arrive free on Monday, September 14. The iPhone Duo ships later, on iOS 27.1.
iPhone Duo: a 7.6-inch screen that folds into a passport
Closed, the Duo has a 5.4-inch outer screen that Apple says covers 90 percent of the screen area of an iPhone 18 Pro. Open, the inner screen is 7.6 inches, which Apple puts at 50 percent larger than an iPhone 18 Pro Max. Both screens use the same aspect ratio, so an app does not reflow awkwardly when you unfold it.
The build is grade 5 titanium with Ceramic Shield 2 on the front and an IP68 rating. The hinge uses more than 100 components. Apple applied a nano-texture finish to the inner display, which cuts glare and, in Apple’s words, minimizes how visible the crease is. Note the wording. Apple is not claiming there is no crease.
Touch ID sits in the side button, because Face ID does not work across two screen positions. There is a FaceTime camera hidden under the inner display. Split View lets you run two apps side by side on an iPhone for the first time.
The camera tricks are the genuinely new part. Duo Preview puts a live preview on the outer screen so the person you are shooting can see their own framing. Smart Take fires the shutter automatically when it detects people posing. Kid Cue plays Peanuts animations on the outer screen to get a toddler to look at the lens. If you shoot family portraits, weddings, or anything with children in it, those three features are worth more than the spec sheet.
Battery is two cells working as one: up to 31 hours of video on the inner screen, 44 hours on the outer, and 24 hours of mixed use per charge, by Apple’s own testing in August 2026.
One detail worth knowing before you order: there is no SIM tray on any of these phones. The iPhone Duo is eSIM-only everywhere in the world, and in the US the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are eSIM-only too. An eSIM is a SIM card built into the phone rather than a chip you slide in, and AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon all support it. Apple actually turned the missing tray into a feature: the space it used to occupy now holds more battery, worth roughly two extra hours of video playback.
iPhone 18 Pro: the camera now has moving parts
The headline feature is variable aperture, and it is a physical mechanism, not software. Six laser-cut blades open and close over the 48MP main sensor, the same way a proper camera lens does.
Aperture is how wide the lens opening is. Wider lets in more light, which helps in the dark, but throws the background out of focus. Narrower keeps more of the scene sharp but needs more light. Until now every iPhone had one fixed aperture and faked the rest in software.
Now the phone can open to ƒ/1.48 for a dark room, sit at ƒ/1.8 for portraits, or stop down to ƒ/4 to keep the back row of a group photo in focus. You can set it manually in a new Pro controls panel that also gives you shutter speed, white balance and a live histogram. There is an API, so third-party camera apps get access too.
Elsewhere: the A20 Pro on a 2 nanometer process, a GPU up to 40 percent faster than the A19 Pro, a redesigned vapor chamber with three times the surface area of the iPhone 17 Pro’s for up to 40 percent better sustained performance, a smaller Dynamic Island that now holds three Live Activities at once, and Apple’s new C2 modem, which uses 15 percent less energy than the C1X and finally supports mmWave in the US. Battery on eSIM-only units runs to 36 hours of video on the Pro and 45 on the Pro Max. Full specifications are in Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro announcement.
Apple Reference Image: a camera that can prove what it saw
The new main sensor can cryptographically sign every pixel it captures. Shoot in Reference mode and Private Cloud Compute turns that signed sensor data into an unalterable reference image, stored alongside your edited photo in Photos like a film negative. Anyone can compare the two and see exactly what was changed. Apple is opening APIs in iOS, iPadOS and macOS 27 so other apps can display them.
For anyone whose work depends on a picture being believed, journalists, insurance assessors, court evidence, election monitors, that is a real tool rather than a marketing line.
The limits are real too. It is opt-in, so it only protects the shots you remember to switch it on for. It is not available in China at launch for regulatory reasons. In the EU you can develop and view reference images but you cannot capture them at launch. Support for SynthID, the watermarking standard for AI-generated images, is a software update later this year, not something shipping on day one.
The watches got the biggest health upgrade
Series 12 ($399) and Ultra 4 ($799) both get a new Health Sensing System and the S11 chip. Heart rate is now measured every five seconds all day. Heart rate variability, which reflects stress and recovery, is measured up to 24 times more often.
That feeds readiness, a single score from 0 to 10 each morning with one of four instructions: Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, or Go For It. Apple built the algorithm on data from the Apple Heart and Movement Study with its own exercise scientists and physicians.
The Ultra 4 now runs more than two days on a charge, up to 50 hours, and 84 in Low Power Mode. Its Max Extended Workout mode tracks 45 hours of outdoor running with GPS every second, which Apple frames as enough to finish a 100-mile race.
Both watches also gain Audio Intelligence later this year. Sound Recognition alerts deaf and hard of hearing users to sirens, alarms, doorbells and a crying baby without needing an iPhone nearby. Live Rewind shows the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text when you double press the crown. Siri Recap writes a short summary of a conversation afterwards.
Apple built visible guardrails into that. Audio is processed in a hardware-isolated compartment on the S11 called Secure Exclave, then deleted, and is unreachable by apps, the OS, you, or Apple. The features do not identify who is speaking. Live Rewind plays an audible chime and shows a full-screen animation whenever it runs, even on silent, so the person across the table knows.
A redesigned Health app arrives later this year, starting in US English. A Longevity tab covers heart health, sleep, mental wellbeing, movement, metabolic health, hearing and nutrition, and includes Health Age, which compares your numbers to your actual age. It draws on VO2 max, resting heart rate, sleep and HRV from the watch, and you can feed in lab values like A1c and LDL to sharpen it.
Two additions there are more interesting than the score itself. Movement evaluations let you test flexibility, strength, balance and movement mechanics at home using the iPhone camera and the watch. Apple says the whole thing runs on the device and no video is recorded, stored or shared. Separately, Cycle Tracking now supports perimenopause and menopause, and users 40 and over can get a notification when their logged cycle patterns shift in a way that suggests perimenopause, so they can raise it with a doctor. Symptoms often start years before anyone names them, and no mainstream wearable has handled this well.
In the US, the Health app will also let you book lab panels covering over 50 biomarkers for $119 at roughly 2,000 Quest Diagnostics locations.
AirPods 5: noise cancellation at $129, with a catch
Apple brought active noise cancellation down to its cheapest earbuds. AirPods 5 keep the open-ear shape, the kind that rests in your ear rather than sealing it, and Apple says they remove up to 50 percent more outside noise than AirPods 4 with ANC. That comes from a redesigned internal port structure and new audio processing rather than a new seal.
They also get Live Translation, which now runs across the whole AirPods line, and hands-free Siri AI. You can answer Siri by nodding or shaking your head instead of talking, which is a small thing that will matter in a quiet office.
Here is the catch, and it is the reason to read past the $129 headline. The two models are not the same product. The $149 version with the Wireless Charging Case is the one that gets the better battery, rated at five hours with ANC on and 22 hours counting the case, and it is the only one with volume swipe on the stem. Apple did not publish a battery figure for the $129 model, and it describes the more expensive one as adding longer battery life. If battery or stem volume control matters to you, the real price is $149.
What Apple is not putting on the poster
Siri AI is a beta. The version of Siri Apple has been promising since 2024 ships on September 14 as a beta, in English only, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish coming in October. It is not available in the EU at launch, and it is off-limits to anyone under 13.
Some AI features will eventually cost money. Apple’s own footnotes say server-backed Apple Intelligence features carry daily usage limits, and that expanded access “will be available for a fee in the future.” That is a subscription forming in plain sight.
Half the marquee features are not shipping today. Audio Intelligence, the redesigned Health app, SynthID support, and Apple Pencil on the Duo are all dated “later this year.”
Health readings are wellness, not diagnosis. Apple states plainly that the Vitals app is for wellness purposes and not for medical use. Health Age and readiness are trend indicators. They are not a doctor.
Nobody has folded this phone 100,000 times yet. Every durability claim about the Duo hinge, the crease, and the inner display comes from Apple’s own lab. Folding phones from every maker have a track record of showing their weaknesses in month six, not week one.
What to actually do
Wait if you own an iPhone 16 Pro or 17 Pro. You already have the chip headroom. The variable aperture is genuinely new, but nothing else here rewrites your daily use.
Buy the 18 Pro if you shoot for a living. Variable aperture, manual shutter and white balance, a histogram, 4K Dolby Vision time-lapse, and Reference Image together add up to the first iPhone camera update in years that changes what you can produce rather than how sharp it looks.
Do not pre-order the Duo. Not because it is bad, but because you have until October 16 and by then reviewers will have folded it a few thousand times. There is no reason to spend $1,999 on unverified hinge claims when waiting costs you nothing.
If you were waiting for a regular iPhone, the wait continues. The iPhone 17 remains Apple’s current standard model.
If you are buying, do the trade-in math first. Apple is offering $175 to $885 in instant credit on an iPhone 13 or later, and it says select carriers will go up to $1,200 in credits for an iPhone 14 or later in any condition. Carrier credits almost always arrive as bill credits spread over 24 or 36 months, which locks you to that carrier for the duration. Apple’s own credit is instant and has no strings. Price both before you tap buy.
We will test the iPhone 18 Pro for five days before we publish a verdict on it. Until then, treat every number above as Apple’s claim, because that is exactly what it is.
Sources: Apple Newsroom press releases for iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, iPhone Duo, Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4, AirPods 5, and Apple’s health and fitness announcement, all published September 9, 2026.
