Apple is breaking one of its most reliable rituals. For years the entire iPhone lineup landed in a single September show, and this year it will not. Only the iPhone 18 Pro, the Pro Max, and Apple’s first foldable, expected to be called the iPhone Ultra, are set for the fall. The standard iPhone 18, the iPhone Air 2, and the cheaper iPhone 18e are being pushed to spring 2027. If the phone you want is one of the affordable ones, the wait just got about six months longer.
The reason is crowding. Apple now runs six iPhones in a single yearly cycle, up from four as recently as 2023, and adding a foldable to a September stage that already holds a Pro and a Pro Max makes for a packed night. Michael Burkhardt of 9to5Mac put it plainly, noting that with the iPhone Ultra there will be six annual iPhones, a lineup big enough to make for a very crowded stage if they all arrived on the same night.
There is a supply chain reason too. A Nikkei Asia report earlier this year quoted an iPhone supplier executive saying that keeping the supply chain smooth was one of the key challenges for the year, and that the marketing strategy change also played a part in the decision to split the launch. Spreading the models across two events eases the strain of building everything at the same time.
The fall event itself is coming into focus. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman points to September 8 or 9 as the likely keynote, with pre orders starting Friday, September 11, and phones reaching buyers on September 18. That is the traditional Apple rhythm, just with half the usual lineup on stage.
The most closely watched question on the iPhone 18 Pro is whether Apple finally cuts its dependence on Qualcomm for the cellular modem, the chip that connects a phone to mobile networks. Apple has been building its own C2 modem to succeed the C1X it already uses in some lower end models. Leaked documents from a cyberattack on Apple manufacturing partner Tata Electronics suggested a split by region, with Qualcomm modems kept for US models and the C2 used elsewhere.
Qualcomm’s own words complicate that picture. Chief executive Cristiano Amon told Reuters the company expects revenue from Apple products to fall more quickly than planned, with its share of the components in the next iPhone dropping to well below its earlier estimate of 20 percent. Read closely, that hints the C2 modem could turn up even in US models of the iPhone 18 Pro, a sharper break from Qualcomm than most expected.
The iPhone Ultra is the headliner. Apple’s first foldable uses a book style design with an outer screen around 5.3 to 5.5 inches and an inner display near 7.6 to 7.8 inches, and pricing is expected to start above $2,000. Production has been tricky enough to raise questions about whether it ships next to the Pro models on September 18, though most reports still put it on track for the fall. The spring 2027 wave, with the standard iPhone 18, the iPhone 18e, and the iPhone Air 2, hands Apple a second major event and keeps its cheaper phones from being buried under the foldable’s debut.