This week, iPhone Event Invites are out, new Macs are available to preorder, the Vision Pro suffers yet another setback, and more products still to come...
It's Official. 9th September. I Cannot Wait...
The invitations went out earlier this week. "Surprise and Shine." Wednesday, September 9th, 10am Pacific, 6pm BST, live from the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park. Mark your calendars, set your reminders, and clear your evening. This is the one.
I'll be honest with you. This is the first Apple event I've been genuinely, properly excited about in years. Not politely interested. Not professionally obligated. Actually excited. And the reason is obvious: the iPhone Ultra. Apple's first foldable iPhone is, by all accounts, going to be unveiled on that stage in less than two weeks, and it's the kind of product that made me fall in love with this industry in the first place. A completely new form factor. A completely new way of using an iPhone. Something we've never seen from Apple before. Whether it ends up being brilliant or flawed or somewhere in between, it's the kind of launch that reminds you why these events matter.
I'm hoping and praying that it launches globally and not on a US-only rollout, which some outlets have predicted. If it does ship internationally from day one, I will be ordering one immediately. If it's US-only at launch, I will be extremely grumpy and you will hear about it in this newsletter.
Alongside the Ultra, we're expecting the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, both powered by the new A20 Pro chip built on TSMC's 2nm process. Apple Watch Series 12, potentially with a ceramic case option, and new AirPods are also likely. Pre-orders are expected to open on Saturday September 12th, shifted from the usual Friday because September 11th marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Devices should start shipping on Friday September 18th, though the iPhone Ultra may follow on a slightly later timeline depending on production yields.
Now, the bit that needs saying. These iPhones are going to be expensive. The iPhone 18 Pro is expected to start at somewhere between $1,349 and $1,399, up from $1,099 on the current iPhone 17 Pro. The Pro Max will be higher still. And the iPhone Ultra? Rumoured to start north of $2,000. If you've been reading this newsletter all year, none of this will come as a surprise. The memory shortage has been driving prices up across Apple's entire lineup, and the iPhones were never going to be exempt.
What makes this September genuinely unprecedented is what's missing. For the first time in iPhone history, there will be no "affordable" new iPhone at the event. The standard iPhone 18, the iPhone 18e, and the iPhone Air 2 have all been pushed back to spring 2027. If you want a new iPhone this autumn, your cheapest option will be the iPhone 18 Pro at roughly $1,349. That's a significant shift in Apple's strategy, and it means September 2026 is an exclusively premium affair. Apple is betting that the iPhone Ultra, the Pro, and the Pro Max generate enough excitement and enough revenue to carry an entire launch quarter without a single device under a thousand dollars. It's a bold move, and we'll find out very quickly whether it pays off.
There's one more reason this event feels different. It will be John Ternus's first major product launch as CEO. Tim Cook officially steps down on September 1st, eight days before the keynote. Everything we've discussed in this newsletter about Ternus's leadership style, his decisiveness, his engineering background, his stated commitment to bold hardware design, will be put to the test on that stage. This is his introduction to the world as the person running Apple, and the products he unveils will set the tone for everything that follows.
The tagline is "Surprise and Shine." After a year of leaks, price increases, supply chain chaos, and Apple accidentally publishing its entire product roadmap in a software update, the "surprise" part is a tall order. But the "shine" part? With a foldable iPhone, a new CEO, and the most ambitious product lineup Apple has attempted in years, there's every reason to believe this event could deliver exactly that.
September 9th. Two weeks. Let's go.
iPhone Essentials Plus
iOS 27 is likely to arrive in just a couple of weeks, and I’m already adding dedicated iOS 27 content to iPhone Essentials Plus.
More lessons will be uploaded early next week, so if you’d like to understand the new features before the update lands, this is a great opportunity to start learning the new operating system now. Rather than installing iOS 27 and then trying to work out what has changed, you can get ahead of the curve and feel comfortable with it from day one.
I’ll continue adding and updating lessons as iOS 27 develops, alongside the course’s existing library of more than 400 lessons.
And if you need help finding something within that growing library, Ask PHT (my new AI Chatbot built into the training) is proving extremely popular. You can ask it a question in plain English and receive a direct answer based on the course, together with links to the most useful lessons.
It’s becoming a genuinely capable way for people to find exactly the information they need—particularly when they know what they want to do, but don’t know Apple’s name for the feature or where to look for it.
If you already own iPhone Essentials Plus, log in here to start exploring the iOS 27 content and try Ask PHT.
If you don’t own the course, iPhone Essentials Plus is still available at its current price. Buy it now and you’ll also receive my new iPhone Essentials course free when it launches soon. The two courses will be sold separately after launch.
Purchase Links;
New Macs Are Here
Apple dropped new Mac mini and Mac Studio models via press release on Tuesday, no keynote, no fanfare, just a quiet announcement two weeks before the main event. Both ship on September 22nd. Both are faster. Both are more expensive. And after spending the best part of a year telling you I was going to buy an M5 Ultra Mac Studio, I'm not going to.
Let me explain.
The Mac mini gets the M6 chip, Apple's first processor built on TSMC's 2nm process, alongside an M5 Pro option. Apple says it delivers the "world's fastest single-threaded performance" and can process large language model prompts 8.5 times faster than older Pro models. It now starts at $899/ÂŁ899, which is $300 more than the M4 Mac mini cost when it launched in October 2024, and $100 more than the already-increased price Apple introduced in June. Macworld summed it up perfectly: "This is no longer a budget Mac." They're not wrong.
The Mac Studio gets M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips. The M5 Ultra is, according to Apple, its most powerful silicon ever: 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU, Neural Accelerators built into every GPU core, and up to 512GB of unified memory for running AI models locally. Multiple Mac Studios can be clustered together via Thunderbolt 5 to pool memory and run trillion-parameter frontier AI models. The M5 Max model starts at $2,499/ÂŁ2,499. The M5 Ultra starts at $5,499/ÂŁ5,499. And if you want the top-end configuration with 256GB of RAM and a 16TB SSD, that'll be $18,299. The 512GB RAM option isn't even available yet. That's coming in late October, at a price Apple hasn't disclosed but which is expected to exceed $10,000 on its own.
I've been saying in this newsletter for months that I planned to upgrade my M2 Ultra Mac Studio to the M5 Ultra. I was genuinely excited about it. But now that it's here, I'm not doing it, and there are a few reasons why.
First, the price. $5,499 for the base model is a lot of money, especially after watching Apple raise prices across the board all year. My M2 Ultra cost significantly less, and it's still doing everything I need it to do. The performance gains are real, but my current machine isn't struggling. It edits 4K video without breaking a sweat. It handles Logic Pro, Final Cut, and every other app I throw at it without complaint. Upgrading for the sake of faster benchmarks when my existing workflow isn't bottlenecked doesn't make financial sense.
Second, and this is the one that genuinely annoys me, Apple still hasn't fixed the base storage. The M5 Ultra Mac Studio ships with a 1TB SSD on the base model. One terabyte. On a $5,499 professional desktop in 2026. My M2 Ultra has 1TB, and it's been the single most frustrating thing about the machine. I've been managing external drives and shuffling files around for two years because Apple decided that a computer marketed at professionals should ship with the same storage as a high-end iPhone. The fact that they've updated everything else, new chip, new GPU, new Neural Engine, Thunderbolt 5, Wi-Fi 7, and left the base storage at 1TB feels criminal. If you want 2TB, that's an extra $200. 4TB is $600 more. 8TB is $1,400. Apple knows professionals need more storage. It just wants them to pay through the nose for it.
Third, and this is the bigger observation, it's clear to me that the new Mac Studio isn't really being positioned at design professionals any more. Everything in Apple's messaging this week was about AI. Running large language models locally. Clustering machines for distributed AI workloads. Processing trillion-parameter models on device. The marketing copy reads like it was written for an AI startup, not a video editor. Apple used the word "AI" more times in the Mac Studio press release than it mentioned Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Xcode combined. That tells you who Apple thinks is buying this machine, and it's not me.
And the sales data backs that up. I'll admit, I initially thought I'd sleep on it for a night and make a decision in the morning. By the time I looked on Wednesday, the base M5 Ultra had gone from "pre-order with delivery on September 22nd" to "delivery in late October." By Thursday, some configurations were showing November. It's flying off the shelves, or Apple doesn't have much stock, or both. But given that CNBC specifically described the Mac mini and Mac Studio as having "quickly become must-haves in the AI world," and that the Mac mini gained traction specifically because AI developers use it to run agents without a display, I think we can draw our own conclusions about who's buying these machines. It's the same people who are buying all the RAM: AI companies and AI developers. And they're gobbling up Mac Studios the same way they've been gobbling up memory chips all year.
So I'm keeping my M2 Ultra. It still works beautifully. Gurman has reported that the M7 Ultra isn't expected until 2028, so my current plan is to nurse this machine through the next two years and look at upgrading then, hopefully to a Mac Studio that ships with more than 1TB of storage and is designed for people who actually make things rather than people who train models. In the meantime, I'm going to spend that money on an iPhone Ultra, or possibly two, next month. A foldable iPhone I'm genuinely excited about feels like a much better use of the budget than a faster version of a computer that already does its job.
For anyone who does need the raw power, particularly if you're working with AI models locally or you're coming from a much older machine, the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is objectively an incredible piece of hardware. The performance numbers are staggering, and the ability to cluster multiple units together is something no other desktop can do. But for creative professionals who are already on an M2 or M3 Ultra and doing just fine? I'd think very carefully before upgrading. The gains are there, but the price is steep, the base storage is insulting, and Apple's priorities for this machine have clearly shifted.
The Sad, Inevitable Demise of Vision Pro
Mark Gurman gets a lot of grief online for his reporting on the Vision Pro. Every time he writes about the product's declining fortunes, the replies fill up with people accusing him of having an agenda, of wanting the product to fail, of being unfair to a first-generation device that just needs more time. As someone who owns two Vision Pro headsets and has genuinely wanted this product to succeed, I can tell you: Gurman has been right all along. And this week's news made that harder to deny than ever.
Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Apple has laid off approximately 200 employees across its Vision Pro and Siri teams. Around 100 of those cuts came from the Vision Pro division, with the gaming team "largely shut down"and the Immersive Video production team significantly scaled back. The remaining 100 cuts hit the Siri and software engineering teams, specifically targeting employees who worked on the old version of Siri, which is being replaced by Siri AI. An Apple spokesperson said the changes were made "to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users."
Let's translate that corporate language into plain English. Apple has effectively given up on making the Vision Pro a consumer entertainment device. The gaming team is gone. The team producing the cinematic Immersive Video content that was supposed to be one of the headset's killer features has been cut back. The people who were building the experiences that Apple hoped would convince ordinary people to spend $3,500 on a headset are no longer at the company.
This isn't a surprise if you've been reading this newsletter. I've been tracking the Vision Pro's decline for months. The dedicated Vision Products Group was broken up last year. The Vision Air was scrapped. John Ternus reportedly put the entire category "on ice" when he was named as Cook's successor. The device has sold approximately 600,000 units in two and a half years. The next Vision Pro isn't expected until 2028 at the earliest. And now the teams responsible for giving people a reason to actually use the thing have been gutted.
AppleInsider, which independently confirmed at least 60 of the Vision Pro layoffs, made an important point: this doesn't necessarily mean Apple has abandoned spatial computing entirely. visionOS 27 ships next month alongside iOS 27. Apple's work on smart glasses continues. The underlying technology, the displays, the sensors, the eye-tracking, the hand-tracking, will almost certainly find its way into future products. But as a consumer device that you buy, wear, and use regularly? The Vision Pro feels increasingly like it's being quietly put out to pasture.
What frustrates me most is that this didn't have to happen. The technology inside the Vision Pro is genuinely remarkable. The display quality is stunning. The spatial audio is the best I've ever heard. The hand and eye tracking work beautifully. But none of that matters if the device is too heavy to wear for more than 45 minutes, too expensive for anyone but the most dedicated early adopters, and too limited in software to justify the investment. Apple launched a piece of hardware that was years ahead of its time and then couldn't give people enough reasons to use it. Now the people whose job it was to create those reasons have been let go.
The developer community is furious. Comments across Apple forums this week ranged from angry to incredulous. "Why are they firing people who colleagues say were bright spots at the company?" one wrote. "This is such a slap in the face to those workers and us users who rely on their work." Others pointed out the irony of Apple cutting software engineers while its operating systems are still riddled with bugs that have gone unaddressed for years. It's a valid criticism, and it speaks to a broader frustration with how Apple allocates its resources.
For the roughly 600,000 of us who bought a Vision Pro, this week felt like another nail in a coffin that's been slowly closing for months. I'm not expecting Apple to officially discontinue the product any time soon. It'll sit on the website, available to order, occasionally updated with minor software improvements, and gradually forgotten. The smart glasses are the future now. Everything else is just running out the clock.
Gurman has been saying this for over a year. He was right then, and he's right now. Sometimes the messenger really isn't the problem.
The iPhone Event Is Just The Beginning
With the Mac mini and Mac Studio now announced, you'd be forgiven for thinking Apple might slow down for the rest of the year. It won't. According to MacRumors, Apple has at least 13 more products on its roadmap before the end of 2026.
Here's what's still coming: iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the foldable iPhone Ultra in September. Apple Watch Series 12 with a ceramic case option. AirPods 5. The smart home hub with its touchscreen display. A new Apple TV. A new HomePod mini. An OLED iPad mini. And later in the autumn, the all-new OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes.
That's not a product roadmap. That's an avalanche. And it all starts on September 9th. Buckle up.
Tip of the Week
Did you know, if you find the Side Button click speed (the one that you double click for Apple Pay for example) a little too quick, you can change the setting?
Head into Settings, then Accessibility, then Side Button, then choose the Click Speed that works best for you.
