Apple's Foldable Is the iPhone Duo, Costs 1,999 Dollars and Ships on 23 October. Everything Else Ternus Announced

The price in the United States starts at 1,999 dollars. Pre-orders open on 16 October and the phone ships on 23 October in more than seventy countries, with a further twenty-eight regions a week later. Ternus called it the most transformational change to iPhone since the original, which is the sort of thing a chief executive says on launch day and which the October reviews will test.

iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max

Apple's second release covers the phones most people will actually buy. The 18 Pro starts at 1,199 dollars and the Pro Max at 1,299, both on the same A20 Pro chip, with a 48-megapixel main camera that now has a variable aperture, giving a photographer control over depth of field that no phone camera has offered before. Pre-orders open at midnight Pacific on Saturday 12 September, a day later than Apple's usual Friday because of the 11 September anniversary, and the phones ship on 18 September. There is no standard iPhone 18 this autumn; the cheaper models move to the spring.

Watches and AirPods

The Apple Watch Series 12, from 399 dollars, runs a new S11 chip and what Apple calls a Health Sensing System, sampling heart rate every five seconds and producing a daily readiness score from zero to ten with a recommendation to rest, pace, train or go hard, according to 9to5Mac. The Ultra 4, from 799 dollars, keeps the 49-millimetre titanium case and stretches battery life to fifty hours. AirPods 5 start at 129 dollars, or 149 with a wireless charging case, with what Apple describes as fifty per cent more noise reduction than AirPods 4 and twenty hours of battery with the case. All three are in shops on 18 September.

What was not said

Prices outside the United States were not on the slides, and with the memory shortage that has pushed up the cost of everything with a chip in it, covered in our report on server prices, Gulf pricing when it appears is unlikely to be a straight currency conversion. The AI story was told in features, Siri and Apple Intelligence woven through iOS 27, rather than as the reckoning the industry had been waiting for. And the questions we set out before the event, in our preview, mostly resolved as the reports said they would: the foldable exists, it costs what a laptop costs, and it is priced like the luxury goods whose customers, as we reported last month, are the ones the rest of the industry is losing. Whether there are enough of them to make a foldable iPhone a business rather than a statement is the question Apple will answer in January's results, not on a stage.