(Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. is planning its biggest product launch event of the year for Sept. 10, where the company will unveil its latest iPhones, watches and AirPods, people familiar with the situation said.
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Although the timing has not been announced, the company is preparing for that date, which falls on Tuesday, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are confidential. The unveiling will be followed by the phones going on sale on Sept. 20, in line with Apple’s typical approach in recent years.
A spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.
The launch is crucial for Apple as the company has suffered from sluggish sales of its smartphones and wearable devices in recent quarters. A September 16 release of the new iPhone 16 would mean that part of the device’s sales would be booked in the current period – Apple’s fourth fiscal quarter – in which the company expects revenue to grow by about 5% year-on-year.
A larger portion of sales are generated in the following quarter, which coincides with the holiday season. Analysts have predicted that sales will rise 7% to $128.4 billion during this period.
The iPhone 16 will have larger screens on the Pro models and new camera features, such as a dedicated button for taking photos. The company is also introducing a set of artificial intelligence tools called Apple Intelligence. Overall, though, the phones won’t be much different from last year’s models.
Meanwhile, Apple’s wearable devices are seeing major changes. Apple Watch Series 10 models will be thinner but feature larger screens. And Apple is revamping its AirPods lineup with new low-end and mid-range versions. For the first time, the company will offer noise cancellation on its mid-range AirPods, and the entry-level model will be updated for the first time since 2019.
The company also plans to start transitioning its Macs 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 stepped up testing of four new Mac models to ensure compatibility with third-party applications, according to developer test logs obtained by Bloomberg News. This is an important step ahead of the new devices’ launch. The Macs released are called “16.1,” “16.2,” “16.3” and “16.10.”
They are all models with base versions of the M4 chip. Three of the Macs have a total of 10 cores in their central processing units, or CPUs, while a low-end version has a total of eight cores – a measure of performance. The versions with 10-core CPUs also have 10-core GPUs, or graphics engines. The model with an 8-core CPU has an 8-core graphics engine. They all have either 16 or 32 gigabytes of memory.
The 10-core CPU has the same specs as the M4 processor in the iPad Pro, including four high-performance parts and six efficiency-focused cores. However, the fourth chip seen in the developer logs only contains eight cores, split between four high-performance parts and four efficiency cores.
Bloomberg News has reported that a smaller Mac mini, new MacBook Pros and updated iMacs with M4 chips are expected to arrive later this year.
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