Apple sets September 9 event: foldable iPhone and LLM-powered Siri with a waitlist

Apple has scheduled a September 9 product event, notably the first under new CEO John Ternus, at which it is expected to unveil new iPhones — including the company's first foldable phone. The centerpiece for AI watchers is a new LLM-based Siri, part of Apple Intelligence, capable of operating apps such as messaging and calendars via conversational commands. In a telling signal of capacity and reliability concerns, the more capable Siri will ship with a waitlist when iOS 27 becomes available, and code discovered in the tvOS 27 beta suggests the assistant could eventually extend to Apple TV.

The waitlist approach mirrors how Apple has managed demand for compute-intensive features and hedges against the reliability failures that plagued earlier Apple Intelligence rollouts. Rather than a broad launch, Apple appears to be gating access to control quality and server load — an acknowledgment that a genuinely agentic Siri is a heavier lift than the assistant it replaces.

On hardware, Apple announced new Mac Mini and Mac Studio models with updated chips for AI applications, shipping September 22. The Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra — offering up to 512GB unified memory and 1.2TB/s bandwidth — set off a frenzy on r/LocalLLaMA (1,588 upvotes, 757 comments), where local-LLM enthusiasts debated its value as an inference machine for large models. The combination of a foldable, an agentic Siri, and high-memory Macs makes this Ternus's first event a statement of direction. Watch whether the Siri waitlist translates into a smooth rollout or repeats prior Apple Intelligence delays.