Apple dumped an entire lineup of new gear on Tuesday, according to press briefings tied to its fall event. The company revealed four new iPhones, three Apple Watch Series 11 models, and the AirPods Pro 3.
Everything ships out or hits shelves on September 19. The company also locked in Monday for the public rollout of iOS 26, which will come preloaded on the new phones.
The spotlight is on the iPhone 17 Air , which kicks off at $999, and is also reportedly the lightest and slimmest iPhone Apple’s ever made.
It’s powered by the company’s A19 Pro chip, which Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing boss, said enables the phone to run “local large language models” for AI tasks.
The chip has a second-gen caching setup and baked-in machine learning accelerators inside the GPU. That GPU, Apple claimed, delivers three times the computational power compared to last year’s chips.
Internally, the company also compared the iPhone’s performance directly to that of its MacBook Pro laptops.
The standard iPhone 17 still costs $799, but its hardware’s not standing still. The screen is now 6.3 inches, barely squeezing out extra display space while keeping the phone’s body the same size. It finally gets ProMotion, the fast refresh rate tech Apple used to keep locked behind Pro versions.
Apple also confirmed a camera improvement but gave no specifics beyond that.
Apple pushes new storage tiers and pricing across iPhone 17 lineup
Apple added more storage and adjusted prices across the Pro line. The iPhone 17 Pro now starts at $1,099, which is a $100 increase, but entry-level storage has been doubled to 256GB. The iPhone 17 Pro Max sticks to its $1,199 starting price.
However, a new top-tier configuration offers a massive 2TB of internal storage, which is the highest capacity Apple’s ever included in an iPhone. The company rolled out iOS 26, its newest operating system version, set to release on Monday as a free software update.
The big change this time is visual: Apple redesigned the UI around a look it’s calling “liquid glass.” Static buttons and menus are out. Animations and transparent overlays that react to how you navigate are in. It’s Apple’s biggest UI shift in years, with the entire interface designed to “flow like water.”
The AirPods Pro 3, still priced at $249, now include a major software feature: real-time translation. Put them in your ears, and they’ll translate foreign languages live while someone’s talking.
Apple also tweaked noise cancellation and sound quality, though the design remains unchanged from the second-gen version.
Apple Watch adds blood pressure detection through machine learning
The Apple Watch Series 11 brings updates across its SE, standard, and Ultra models. Pricing across the board did not change. One of the most notable features is a new health tool that uses machine learning to assess if a user might be at risk for high blood pressure.
No external tools are needed; it runs automatically from the device itself. Apple did not elaborate on how the algorithm works but confirmed it runs natively on the watch hardware.
Apple ended its event without moving the market much. Shares dropped 1.5% after the announcement. Wall Street didn’t seem moved by the updates, including the launch of the iPhone 17 Air and the Watch Series 11.
The company’s decision to bring ProMotion to the entry-level model breaks with its past strategy of limiting smooth refresh rates to higher-end iPhones. Along with the new 6.3-inch display, the screen also has narrower bezels, which means more display without increasing the physical phone size.
Apple kept the body consistent with the iPhone 16. The A19 Pro chip across the new lineup is the most AI-focused silicon Apple has released yet. It combines faster math performance with GPU hardware that can process both graphics and machine learning at the same time.
“The new chip allows us to do more AI tasks locally, without sending data to the cloud,” said Greg.
As for consumer behavior, analysts noted that display quality, just after battery life, is one of the main reasons people upgrade. That makes the ProMotion screen on the regular iPhone 17 a potentially big change, even if the rest of the phone hasn’t physically grown.
If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter .
