Apple announces launch date for new iPhone 16, watches and AirPods. Here’s what to expect

Apple has sent out invitations for a product launch event at its headquarters on September 9 in California, when it’s set to announce details of the iPhone 16 and other new devices.

The presentation will be held at the Steve Jobs Theatre at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, the company said. The theme of the event — “It’s Glowtime” — is a reference to the interface used by the new Siri digital assistant on the company’s latest devices.

The launch is a critical one for Apple, which has suffered sluggish sales of its smartphones and wearable devices in recent quarters.Credit: AP

Apple had previously been preparing to hold the launch on September 10, people familiar with the matter have said, though it will now be one day sooner. September 10 is the date scheduled for the first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump.

The unveiling will be followed by the phones going on sale by around September 20, in line with Apple’s typical approach in recent years.

The launch is a critical one for Apple, which has suffered sluggish sales of its smartphones and wearable devices in recent quarters. A September 20 release of the new iPhone 16 would mean some of the device’s revenue is recorded in the current period — Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter — when the company expects sales to grow about 5 per cent from a year earlier.

A bigger chunk of sales will come the following quarter, which coincides with the holiday season. Analysts have predicted that revenue will climb 7 per cent to $US128.4 billion ($189.2 billion) in that period.

The iPhone 16 will have larger screens on its Pro models and new camera features, such as a dedicated button for snapping photos. The company also is rolling out a suite of artificial intelligence tools called Apple Intelligence. Overall, though, the phones won’t be vastly different than last year’s models.

Apple’s wearable devices, meanwhile, are due for bigger changes. The Apple Watch Series 10 models will be thinner but include larger screens. And Apple is revamping its AirPods lineup with new low-end and mid-tier versions. For the first time, the company will offer noise cancellation on its mid-level AirPods, and the entry-level model is getting updated for the first time since 2019.

The company is also planning to begin transitioning its Macs over to M4 processors 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 of four new Mac models to ensure compatibility with third-party applications, according to developer test logs seen by Bloomberg News. That’s a key step prior to launching the new machines. The Macs that appeared are labelled with the identifiers “16,1,” “16,2,” “16,3” and “16,10.”

They all represent models with base-level versions of the M4 chip. Three of the Macs have 10 total cores in their central processing units, or CPUs, while one low-end version includes eight total cores — a measure of performance. The versions with 10-core CPUs also have 10-core GPUs, or graphics engines. The model with an eight-core CPU, meanwhile, has an eight-core graphics engine. They all have either 16 or 32 gigabytes of memory.

The 10-core CPU has the same specifications as the M4 processor in the iPad Pro, including four high-performance parts and six cores focused on efficiency. But the fourth chip seen in the developer logs only includes eight total cores, split between four high-performance parts and four efficiency cores.

Bloomberg

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