Apple to shake up iPhone release calendar with base iPhone 18 launch in spring 2027, six months after Pro models

Corroborating The Information reporting from over the weekend, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has laid out his predictions for the next few years of iPhone launches in a post on Craft today. Most notably, Apple will move away from releasing all of its flagship phones at the same time in the fall, a rigid calendar that has been in place since the iPhone 4s in 2011. Going forward, Apple is moving to launching its cheaper budget iPhones in the first half of the year, and Pro models in the fall. This means you will see versions of the iPhone 18 and iPhone 19 arrive in the first and latter half of the same year, across 2027, respectively. 2025 will be the last year of normality for the iPhone release schedule. Kuo says the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone 17 Slim (or what some have been calling the iPhone 17 Air) will arrive in the second half of 2025 as normal, probably in September. In 2026, the launch plan diverges from the long-running norm. In the first half of 2026, lik ... Read full article.