Apple will hold its next product event on Wednesday 9 September 2026 at 10:00am Pacific time, which is 8:00pm in Nairobi, at Apple Park in Cupertino. The invitation carries the line “Surprise and shine” and the event streams on apple.com, YouTube and the Apple TV app. It is the first product launch of John Ternus’s time as chief executive.
Ternus becomes Apple’s chief executive on 1 September 2026. Apple announced the handover on 20 April, with Tim Cook moving to executive chairman and joining policy work rather than leaving the company. Ternus joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, became vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and senior vice president in 2021. He is Apple’s eighth chief executive and the first change at the top since Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011.
The Mac launch was the preview
On 25 August Apple announced a new Mac mini with the M6 and M5 Pro chips, at USD 899 and USD 1,699, and a new Mac Studio with the M5 Max at USD 2,499 and the M5 Ultra at USD 5,499. Both ship on 22 September. We wrote up the price rise on the cheapest Mac mini, the Mac Studio pricing and what the M6 and M5 Ultra chips actually change.
The advert at that launch was different. Very different from what the Apple ads we’ve been accustomed to. “The Mighty Mac Mini with M6” is stop-motion claymation. The Mac mini grows arms, becomes a bodybuilder, turns into a race car, sprouts robot tentacles and takes off as a rocket. TBWA\Media Arts Lab, the agency that works only for Apple, made it with director Nicos Livesey and the studios Blinkink and Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, over nine weeks, using clay, epoxy putty and fibreboard sets, with digital work limited to removing rigs.
Apple then published a behind-the-scenes film showing animators Justin Rasch and Scott DaRos and art director Josh Mahan sculpting and painting every piece by hand. Companies do not publish that unless they want people to know AI did not make it. That advert did over 16 million views on YouTube within two days.
Make tech-ish your favourite source
Star us on Google — you'll see more tech-ish in Top Stories and AI results.
What is actually different
Apple’s Mac advertising has been drifting this way for a year. In October 2025 it ran “Great ideas start on Mac”. In March 2026 it launched the USD 599 MacBook Neo, an A18 Pro laptop in four colours, and sold it as the fun Mac rather than the cheap one. The claymation advert is the loudest version of the same idea: handmade, warm, slightly silly, and pointedly not generated.
That is a marketing choice, not a product strategy, and Apple has not framed it as a statement about anything. But it is a different register from the company that spent 2024 and 2025 putting Apple Intelligence in front of every keynote, and it arrives in the same fortnight as a new chief executive.
What it means here
The event itself is expected to bring the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max and Apple’s first foldable iPhone. There is no standard iPhone 18 this year, which is why we said in August that Kenyan buyers should not expect the iPhone 17 to fall further. The iPhone 17 has sat at about KES 125,000 since December.
Watch the keynote itself on 9 September. Ternus has presented Apple hardware on stage before, including the iPhone Air, so the question is not whether he can do it. We should all be keen to see whether the tone that produced a nine-week clay animation for a desktop computer, will be the same tone when Apple is selling a foldable phone that will cost more than KES 300,000.
Join the discussion