In a few weeks the phone shops on Kimathi Street will have a folding iPhone in the glass cases, priced around KES 300,000. Apple announces it tonight, in Cupertino.
The event starts at 8pm Kenyan time at the Steve Jobs Theater, under the line “surprise and shine”.
The man on stage
John Ternus became chief executive on 1 September. He is 50, joined the product design team in 2001 and has run hardware engineering since 2021, so every iPhone, iPad and Mac of the past five years went through him.
Tim Cook stays as executive chairman after fifteen years as chief executive, a run that took Apple from roughly $350 billion to about $4 trillion in market value. Ternus inherits a company whose next few years will be judged on artificial intelligence, and his whole career has been in aluminium and glass.
Three phones, not four
There is no standard iPhone 18 tonight. Apple has moved the cheaper models to spring 2027, so the September stage belongs to the iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the foldable. That splits the line-up across two release windows for the first time.
The name to expect is iPhone Ultra. Fold and Duo are the other guesses. Apple already uses Ultra as its top tier on the Apple Watch, and on Mac chips.
What the foldable is meant to be
The Ultra folds like a book: an outer screen of 5.3 or 5.5 inches depending on the leak, a 7.8-inch inner OLED with ProMotion, about 4.5mm open and 9mm closed. Touch ID replaces Face ID because the sensor array does not fit. Inside there is the A20 Pro with 12GB of RAM and storage from 256GB to 2TB. The cameras are two 48-megapixel units on the back, wide and ultra wide, with a 24-megapixel front camera and no telephoto at all. The colours are silver-white and deep indigo. We’ll know the exact specs later tonight.
Price estimates run from $2,099 to $2,299. A $2,500 figure is also circulating, but that is a higher-capacity model rather than the base. At about KES 129.4 to the dollar that is KES 272,000 to KES 297,000 before shipping, duty and VAT. For a sense of the local markup, Nairobi retailers list the iPhone 17 Pro from around KES 150,000 against a $1,099 American price.
The Pro phones
Both Pro models get the A20 Pro, built on TSMC’s 2nm process and reckoned to be 18 percent faster and 30 percent more efficient than the A19 Pro.
The changes you’ll actually be able to see however are: a shrunken Dynamic Island and an LTPO+ panel.
There’s also talk of new camera hardware. Specifically, a mechanical variable aperture. Here, there will be an iris of moving blades that opens and closes, in place of the fixed f/1.78 aperture every iPhone has shipped with so far. The leaks say this will be a Pro Max exclusive. The Pro Max also carries a larger 5,567mAh battery.
There will be three colours. Dark cherry and sky blue turn up in every leak. The third is contested: either black or silver. Or both.
Also expected at tonight’s announcement:
- an Apple Watch Series 12 and Watch Ultra 4 with a returning ceramic case,
- and AirPods 5 with an H3 chip.
- A 7-inch home hub,
- an Apple TV 4K and a HomePod mini are also possible.
We’ll also get release dates for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate.
Join the discussion