Apple has barely finished unveiling the iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro lineup, AirPods 5, and new Apple Watches, but the company already has a much larger pipeline queued up for late 2026 and the first half of 2027, according to Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman.

The coming products are part of what new CEO John Ternus has internally described as Apple’s most ambitious product road map yet. Many of the devices are designed to spread Siri AI more widely across the lineup and close some of the gap with rivals in artificial intelligence. As always, dates can slip and products can be delayed or canceled.

Later this yearGurman reports that Apple is preparing several updates before year-end:

• HomePod mini with Siri AI — Same familiar design as the 2020 model, but with a new chip to power the overhauled assistant.

• Apple TV with Siri AI — Another look-alike refresh, this time with a faster chip for navigation and the new Siri experience.

• Smart-home hub — A square display that can sit on a speaker base or mount on a wall. It will run a new operating system, support video calls, and use facial recognition to personalize what it shows. Apple had considered showing it at last week’s event and is now aiming as early as October, though the timeline remains fluid after repeated delays.

• Touch-screen MacBooks — The biggest MacBook Pro change since 2021, adding OLED panels and touch screens for the first time, with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.

• Entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro — Current design, updated with the M6 chip.

• iMac — New colors and an M6 processor.

• iPad mini — One of the line’s biggest upgrades, adding an OLED display.

The HomePod mini and Apple TV are already being tested with iOS 27. The new Macs are running macOS 27.1 internally, and the iPad mini is on iPadOS 27.1. Both of those software updates are expected late next month.

First half of 2027

The spring and early summer slate is heavier on refresh cycles than radical redesigns:

• MacBook Air — Same 13-inch and 15-inch designs, moving to the M6 chip.

• MacBook Neo — Follow-up model with an A19 Pro chip and more memory.

• Entry-level iPad — Faster chip so the cheaper tablet can run Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.

• iPad Pro — Chip upgrade plus vapor-chamber cooling similar to the iPhone 18 Pro.

• iPad Air — First OLED screens in that line, plus a new chip.

• iPhone 18 — Largely an A20 chip upgrade, with the notable change that the standard model is shifting from fall to spring.

• iPhone 18e — Another chip-focused update; Apple will need to make clear how it differs from the regular iPhone 18.

• iPhone Air 2 — More substantial: a 2-nanometer A20 Pro chip, better battery life, and a second rear camera for ultrawide shots.

• Apple Pencils — New Pencil Pro and USB-C models timed with the iPads; the iPhone Duo will support the stylus as well.

Looking further ahead

The second half of 2027 is expected to get more ambitious still, Gurman writes, with M7 updates to MacBooks, smart glasses, camera-equipped AirPods, a home security system, a redesigned Apple Watch, Twentieth Anniversary iPhones, and a second-generation foldable iPhone Duo.
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MacDailyNews Take: Taken together, the road map suggests Apple is trying to do two things at once: push Siri AI onto more affordable and living-room devices, and finally refresh categories that have languished for years. Whether October brings a full event or quieter waves of launches, the next 12 months look unusually crowded with product launces!

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Apple’s first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, did not arrive because the company suddenly discovered folding screens. It arrived, executives say, because they finally had a product that felt like Apple.

In a sit-down at Apple Park with Tom’s Guide and TechRadar after the September event, CEO John Ternus and marketing chief Greg “Joz” Joswiak described a long, stubborn process: watch the category, reject most of what they saw, then redesign the hardware and iOS until the thing in their hands made them say yes.

“Our history had never been to rush into something with something half-baked,” Joswiak said. The concept itself was simple—a big display that folds into a pocket—but “what we saw others doing wasn’t particularly inspiring.” Two phones awkwardly stuck together produced a bulky square that “wasn’t really designed for the way you want to use a phone.”

Ternus framed the wait as a quality bar, not a calendar. “It’s always about when do we feel like we have a product idea that meets our bar… for quality and durability, but also for design.” The Duo, he said, became “such a good example of hardware and software coming together.” Internally it was a “green field” — a chance to rethink aspect ratio, hinge, display stack, and the OS itself.

The crease was the industry’s loudest complaint. Apple’s answer was a polymer-glass OLED stack with glass on both sides of the panel, plus a new way of applying the nano-texture finish already familiar from iPad and MacBook Pro. The inner surface is polymer, not glass — “cheap-feeling plastic surfaces… wavy, wrinkly,” Ternus said of rivals. Nano-texture “just wipes that all out. It’s beautifully flat. It feels amazing to touch.”

The first time he saw a working prototype: “It was like, yes, that’s it. This is what I want.” Then the hard part: “How do we go make it happen and make it real?”

They also locked the project down harder than usual. Leaks had already confirmed a foldable and even guessed at the unusual aspect ratio. “We put the extra security on it,” Joswiak said. “We had a very funny code name, which I won’t even repeat… We said we’re going to keep this one extra secret… and it worked.”

Software was treated as equally unfinished. Unfolded, the Duo is meant to feel like a small iPad, not a stretched phone. Controls moved to the right so the same thumb that works the closed “passport” shape still finds them when the device opens. “You open it up, it’s there under your right thumb again,” Ternus said. Consistent aspect ratios between inner and outer screens let interfaces scale instead of breaking.

Apple Pencil support — the first on an iPhone — was presented as opportunity, not heresy. “I’ve never really thought of it as a rule,” Ternus said of Steve Jobs’s old “no stylus” line. The Duo works without a Pencil. Some people will want one on the large inner canvas. “It’s called iPhone Duo for a reason. It is like two products.”

The price, which crosses the $2,000 mark, got a familiar defense: complexity and value, plus a line of other phones for everyone else. “This is an incredibly complex and well-engineered device,” Ternus said. iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max remain “the exact right device for a lot of our customers.” Joswiak piled on: the Pros are “iPhone 17 Pro on steroids,” with “massive year-on-year improvements.”

That includes a six-blade mechanical variable aperture. Open it for more light in the dark; stop it down so a group shot keeps both the front row and the back row sharp. Everyday users get automatic choices. Photographers get manual aperture, shutter, and focus. “Best of both worlds,” Ternus said. Asked whether tiny moving blades would survive drops, he noted iPhones already have moving focus and stabilization hardware. “This is what we do… material selection… reliability testing to make sure that things are going to be just as good many years down the road as they are on day one.”

Joswiak was less measured. “The product quality that we have… there’s nobody in the industry close to what we have.” How often does an iPhone fail? “It just [doesn’t].”

The A20 Pro, Apple’s first 2nm phone chip, is sold the same way: not as a spec sheet, but as experiences. Computational photography and on-device AI get more headroom. Graphics performance is up about 40 percent year over year — “that doesn’t come around very often” — paired with a new vapor chamber. Sustained performance jumped similarly. “This thing is on steroids,” Joswiak said. Reliability and software updates, he added, are why used iPhones hold value: “You want it to be fast three years down the road, four years down the road. Something like the A20 Pro is a monster.”

Asked who actually assembles those aperture blades — hands or robots — Ternus smiled: “That’s for us to know.”

Launch day itself, he said, is “why we do what we do.” Yesterday was “a particularly fun one.” After a decade of watching foldables, Apple’s executives sounded less like they had joined a category than like they had finally finished one.
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MacDailyNews Take: For so many years, it’s been such an easy choice: We’re getting iPhone Pro units. This year, with the Duo, we have a much more difficult choice!

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