Apple Inc. is planning to hold its biggest product launch event of the year on Sept. 10, when the company will unveil its latest iPhones, Watches and AirPods, according to people familiar with the situation.
While the date hasn’t been announced yet, the company is preparing for that date, which falls on Tuesday, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. The phones will be unveiled on Sept. 20, in line with Apple’s usual approach in recent years.
A representative for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.
The launch is crucial for Apple, which has suffered from slowing sales of its smartphones and wearables in recent quarters. The new iPhone 16 launch on September 20 means some of the device’s revenue will be recorded in the current period — Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter — when the company expects sales to grow about 5% from a year earlier.
A bigger share of sales will come in the next quarter, which coincides with the holiday season. Analysts had expected revenue to rise 7% to $128.4 billion in that period.
The iPhone 16 will have larger displays on the Pro models and new camera features, like a dedicated shutter button. The company is also introducing a suite of AI tools called Apple Intelligence. Overall, though, the phones won’t be much different from last year’s models.
Meanwhile, Apple’s wearables are expected to see even bigger changes. The Apple Watch Series 10 models will be thinner but will feature larger displays. Apple plans to release more wearables in the future. Renewing its AirPods lineup With new low-end and mid-range versions. For the first time, the company will offer noise cancellation on the mid-range AirPods, and the base model is being updated for the first time since 2019.
The company also plans to start converting its Macs to M4 processors Mac updates are expected to launch later this year, but Mac updates typically don’t arrive until about a month after the annual iPhone launch.
To that end, the company has ramped up testing on four new Mac models to ensure compatibility with third-party apps, according to developer test logs reviewed by Bloomberg News. It’s a key step before launching the new devices. The Macs that appeared were labeled “16.1,” “16.2,” “16.3” and “16.10.”
All are models with base versions of the M4 chip. Three of the Macs have 10 total cores in their central processing units, or CPUs, while a lower-end version has eight total cores — a measure of performance. The 10-core CPUs also have 10-core GPUs, or graphics engines. The 8-core CPU model has an eight-core graphics engine. All have either 16GB or 32GB of memory.
The 10-core processor has the same specs as the M4 processor in the iPad Pro, including four high-performance cores and six efficiency-focused cores. But the fourth chip seen in developer logs only has eight total cores, split between four high-performance cores and four efficiency cores.
The smaller Mac mini, new MacBook Pros, and updated iMacs with M4 chips will be released later this year, Bloomberg News reported.