Rachel Reeves has been told that ministers cannot “act surprised” when pensioners start asking why retirement now comes with a larger tax bill.

The warning lands as fresh forecasts show an additional one million pensioners will be drawn into the income tax system by 2030-31, with frozen thresholds doing the quiet work that a headline rate rise would do in plain sight.

The Chancellor has faced sustained criticism over the decision to hold income tax thresholds at their current levels until 2031, a policy that opponents have repeatedly branded a “stealth tax” on older people. For a generation of savers who assumed the worst of the tax man was behind them, the effect is the same as a rate increase, just without the politics of announcing one.

Projections from the Office for Budget Responsibility, published alongside the Spring Statement, suggest the threshold freeze will pull an extra one million pensioners into paying income tax over the next four years. The OBR estimates that 600,000 additional state pension recipients will become liable by 2026-27, climbing to one million by 2030-31. It is a textbook case of fiscal drag: the personal allowance stays put at £12,570 while the state pension keeps rising under the triple lock, and the gap between the two slowly closes until it disappears.

The mechanics matter because they are so easily missed. As Business Matters has reported, 420,000 more pensioners were dragged into the income tax net this financial year alone as the freeze bit harder, taking the total well past eight million. The direction of travel is clear, and it is one way.

The issue reached the Commons on Monday following a public petition that gathered 119,206 signatures before closing on 1 April. It called for a new tax code that would double the £12,570 personal allowance for state pensioners, on the grounds that more retirees are being caught by the tax system precisely because their pension is going up.

During the debate, Conservative MP Alison Griffiths argued that pensioners could see the effect of the policy perfectly well without any help from the Treasury.

“The Government regularly tell people that they have not increased income tax rates,” she told MPs. “However, pensioners, who are a savvy bunch, can see exactly what is happening. They do not need a Treasury briefing to understand where more of their income is being taxed each year.”

She added: “The Chancellor chose to extend the freeze in the personal allowance until 2031. That was a political choice. It means that more pensioners will continue to be drawn into the tax system year after year. Ministers cannot make that decision and then act surprised when pensioners ask questions about fairness.”

Ms Griffiths reserved particular concern for the uncertainty still hanging over the system. Last year’s Budget promised that pensioners relying solely on the state pension would be spared the hassle of small tax bills through Simple Assessment from 2027, but she said her constituents remain unclear about who qualifies and how the process will actually work.

Liberal Democrat MP Charlie Maynard went further, condemning the freeze as “both wrong and unfair” and accusing the government of running a stealth tax that falls hardest on the lowest paid and most vulnerable. “An estimated 600,000 people were dragged into paying income tax for the first time this April and a further 580,000 were pulled into the higher 40p rate,” he said, describing such measures as “dishonest with voters”. He urged ministers to drop stealth tax policies at a time when cost of living pressures are squeezing households at every stage of life.

Conservative MP John Lamont, meanwhile, challenged the comfortable assumption that pensioners are uniformly well off, telling the House that while it may be true of a small minority, it does not reflect the reality for most.

The Treasury defended its position. “Anyone whose only income is the full new or basic State Pension without any increments will not pay income tax and we are committed to that over this Parliament,” a spokesperson said. The department pointed out that 12 million pensioners would see their income rise by up to £470 this year through the triple lock, while still benefiting from the highest personal allowance in the G7.

The government has also pledged to ease the administrative burden for pensioners whose sole income is the basic or new state pension, promising they will not face small tax demands through Simple Assessment from 2027-28 should the state pension tip over the personal allowance threshold. Ministers say they are still working out how best to deliver that change and will set out more detail next year.

For now, the awkward arithmetic remains. The triple lock pushes the state pension up, the personal allowance stays frozen, and the space between them narrows each year. As analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others has shown, freezing thresholds is one of the most lucrative levers a Chancellor can pull, which is precisely why it is so hard to give up. Business Matters has previously examined how this stealth tax raid is reshaping the finances of older households, and the political cost of taxing state pensions despite repeated pledges not to is only growing.

The message from Monday’s debate was blunt. The freeze is a choice, the consequences are predictable, and ministers should not expect retirees to be fooled by the absence of a number on a manifesto.

Jamie Young

Jamie is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, bringing over a decade of experience in UK SME business reporting.
Jamie holds a degree in Business Administration and regularly participates in industry conferences and workshops.

When not reporting on the latest business developments, Jamie is passionate about mentoring up-and-coming journalists and entrepreneurs to inspire the next generation of business leaders.

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One of the most telling statements from President Trump at this week’s G-7 meeting was how worried he was about a potential economic catastrophe related to the Iran war and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. And equally telling, the president referred to the stock market as a key barometer of the economy.

This is very similar to over a year ago when he modified his original liberation day tariff schedules because the stock market tanked badly after his speech. So he made adjustments.

And I can tell you with my own experience when I worked at the National Economic Council in the first term, however many 100 times I was in the oval, he always asked about the stock market when he saw me coming in. 

It’s an interesting point of view. And it’s a kind of old-fashioned point of view. Because business and financial economists used to use the stock market as a key barometer of the economy.  

Leftists hate this, and unfortunately, today’s Wall Street is heavily populated by leftists, particularly the economists. Not all of them. But most of them.

So anyway, the president didn’t want to be remembered as Herbert Hoover. And here’s exactly what he did say on Wednesday in France:

“So the one thing I didn’t want to see is I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened. But all I know is, every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship. It never went down. They didn’t like it.” 

Mr. Trump added that “the stock market is more brilliant than anybody there is, including the people on this stage other than me, of course. Rather than possibly going into a depression, rather than having your favorite president be Herbert Hoover, who was always the one I didn’t want to be.”

I think that’s very important and very instructive on his thinking. I’m gonna get to the masterful, maiden voyage of the Fed chairman, Kevin Warsh, in just a moment, but I want to add from Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post this morning:

“OIL IS FLOWING, IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON (THE WORLD WILL BE SAFE), THE STOCK MARKETS ARE ROARING, JOBS ARE AT RECORDS, AND PRICES ARE DROPPING (AFFORDABILITY). OUR COUNTRY IS STRONG, SAFE, AND RESPECTED LIKE NEVER BEFORE.” 

Mr. Trump concluded: “YOU’RE WELCOME.”

So now, Mr. Warsh made clear in yesterday’s presser that strong economic growth and low inflation, meaning stable prices, and low unemployment can all exist together. He basically told us that models developed 50 years or more ago should not be used in today’s ultra-high-tech, faster-than-the-speed-of-light economy. An important policy statement. And an enormous breath of fresh air.

Meanwhile, reports are coming in that oil is already flowing through the Strait of Hormuz faster than anyone thinks possible.

At $75 and change a barrel, West Texas intermediate oil today is right where it was one year ago, $75. But a year ago, gasoline was $3.18 a gallon. That’s a good forecast for what may happen. Right now it’s $3.99 a gallon nationwide, according to AAA. By the way $3.18 is an awfully good number for the GOP midterm outlook.

Yet Mr. Warsh was very clear that he is leaning toward restoring what he calls price stability. The Fed under its former chairman, Jay Powell, hadn’t hit its 2 percent inflation target in five years. Mr. Warsh wants to correct this.

I think it’s doubtful that he’s gonna start raising the Fed’s target rate, though. Why? Because they’d be looking backward at the lagging story of spiking oil, a story that has obviously completely reversed. Don’t base policy on last year’s story, try to look ahead. This too is a key Warsh theme.

And by the way, he watches commodities, which in general are falling. Energy, gold, silver, corn, wheat, etc., all falling. And as I noted yesterday, under Mr. Warsh, good news can once again be good news.

His goal is to get markets to react to the actual data news, not what some flyover regional reserve bank president says. That’s why forward guidance is gradually going to go away.

You know what’s really good news? Mr. Trump has decimated Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities. They’re on their knees. And that has allowed him to try and pull together a deal that includes reopening Hormuz.

And that’s going to allow Mr. Warsh the latitude for even more good news, both on falling inflation and rising prosperity. Think of it.

Britain’s unemployment rate edged down to 4.9 per cent in the three months to April, according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Thursday, handing policymakers a modest piece of good news just hours before the Bank of England delivered its latest call on interest rates.The reading

was down from the five per cent recorded in the previous quarter and came in better than the expectations of economists, who had pencilled in an unchanged jobless rate of five per cent. It is the sort of small upside surprise that rarely shifts the dial on its own, but it lands at a sensitive moment for rate-setters weighing how much slack is building in the labour market.

Pay growth excluding bonuses held steady at 3.4 per cent over the same period, comfortably ahead of forecasts of 3.2 per cent. Adjusted for consumer price inflation, real earnings rose by 0.3 per cent, leaving workers fractionally better off in real terms. Total pay including bonuses climbed 4.4 per cent, also beating the four per cent the market had expected.

The numbers arrived only hours before the Bank of England announced its decision, with the Monetary Policy Committee widely tipped to leave borrowing costs unchanged at 3.75 per cent. The Bank trimmed rates to that level late last year, as covered in our report on how UK interest rates were cut to 3.75% as the Bank signalled inflation nearing target, and has since trodden carefully amid a patchy growth picture. The full detail of the Committee’s thinking is set out on the Bank’s own Bank Rate page.

Rate-setters have been watching the jobs data closely as they judge whether elevated oil prices, linked to the conflict involving Iran, could feed through into stronger wage demands. A tight labour market would raise the risk of a second-round inflation effect, the kind of dynamic the Bank is determined to avoid.

Responding to the figures, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said the data showed 400,000 more people in work than a year earlier, while acknowledging that instability in the Middle East was creating uncertainty. “We have the right economic plan for growth and stability in a volatile world, and we are taking action to create opportunity and make sure that no one is left behind,” he said.

He pointed to what he called the biggest youth employment reforms in a generation, including a Youth Guarantee backed by £2.5 billion of investment aimed at creating almost a million opportunities for young people, and the Connect to Work programme designed to support 300,000 disabled people into employment.

Not everyone read the release as a turning point. Independent economist Julian Jessop cautioned that the underlying trend remained soft. “Even after some favourable revisions, the trend in payroll jobs is still down, with 119,000 fewer employees in May than in the same month a year earlier, and 187,000 fewer than two years ago,” he said.

A further worry for the Committee is whether softer demand for workers is eroding employees’ bargaining power and their ability to push for bigger pay rises. Most members believe labour market conditions have loosened compared with recent years, making large wage increases less likely. The shift is stark set against the period after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when inflation peaked at 11.1 per cent and wage growth ran above five per cent for almost three years.

Suren Thiru, chief economist at ICAEW, struck a downbeat note. “These figures point to a jobs market struggling under the strain of soaring energy bills and employment costs, with more firms limiting hiring and holding down pay, especially for younger workers,” he said. The cooling he describes echoes the picture in our earlier coverage of how the UK jobs market is slowing as wage growth eases and vacancies fall amid higher business taxes.

Thiru argued that weaker wage growth would reassure policymakers that any inflationary spillover from the conflict involving Iran could be contained. “These figures seal the deal on a midday interest rate hold by reassuring rate-setters that a softening labour market can help keep this Iran-driven inflation shock short-lived by dampening demand across the economy,” he said, adding that the Committee’s vote split and accompanying minutes could take on a slightly more dovish tone.

The claimant count told its own story. The number of people claiming unemployment benefits rose by 31,200 in May, ahead of forecasts for an increase of 25,800 and following a revised rise of 8,300 in April. Employment grew by 100,000 in the three months to April, down from 148,000 in the previous period but still ahead of expectations for growth of 80,000.

Thiru warned that falling vacancies suggested demand for workers was weakening at an uncomfortable pace, as businesses absorbed mounting financial pressures and automation reshaped the workforce. That theme of a stalling hiring engine has been building for some time, as our reporting on long-term unemployment climbing to a decade high made clear.

“While the US-Iran peace deal has halted hostilities, the damage to the UK’s labour market is already done,” he said, predicting that unemployment could drift towards six per cent if higher energy costs continue to weigh on employers’ hiring plans.

For now, the headline rate is moving in the right direction. The harder question for businesses and policymakers alike is whether that holds once the full weight of higher costs and weaker demand works its way through.

Amy Ingham

Amy is a newly qualified journalist specialising in business journalism at Business Matters with responsibility for news content for what is now the UK’s largest print and online source of current business news.

This article was written by

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Taxi drivers, stockbrokers and the bloke propping up the bar at your local have all, at one time or another, served as a source of share tips. Now there is a fresh seam of supposed wisdom for retail investors to mine: chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude.

These artificial intelligence tools, known in the trade as large language models (LLMs), are increasingly being pressed into service by amateur and professional investors alike to generate investment ideas. Yet for all the awe AI has inspired, the jury is still out on whether the machines are actually any good at making money.

Back in 1973, the academic Burton Malkiel argued in his now-famous book that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at the financial pages of a newspaper could pick a portfolio just as profitable as one chosen by highly paid professionals. His point, the bedrock of the efficient market hypothesis, was that returns on the stock market are essentially random and unpredictable, and that nobody can hold a lasting edge over anyone else.

The notion that LLMs might be superior stock pickers to humans would, of course, blow a hole in that theory. A clutch of start-ups has already set AI to work trading and investing, with markedly mixed results.

According to a recent test run by the US research lab Nof1, six of the eight most popular AI models lost money investing in American technology shares. Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet shed almost 60 per cent of its initial $10,000 (£7,500) stake, while Google’s Gemini gave up more than $5,000. Only two came out ahead: ChatGPT, which made nearly $900, and Elon Musk’s Grok, which roughly broke even.

To the technology’s believers, however, it is only a matter of time before LLMs start besting the very best of Wall Street.

Faizan Ahmad, a former Meta engineer, is co-founder of Rallies, a start-up that uses AI to help people choose shares. His own experiments have thrown up some eyebrow-raising results, with the machines displaying a flash of ingenuity in navigating choppy markets.

Claude, for instance, deftly handled the fallout from the conflict with Iran by rotating out of growth shares and into defence stocks. ChatGPT, meanwhile, plumped for Credo Technology Group, a high-speed connectivity firm, as a likely beneficiary of the global build-out of internet infrastructure around seven months ago. The shares have since climbed by more than 75 per cent.

“No one had heard about that stock, and I hadn’t,” says Ahmad. “That stock was starting to show very early signs of becoming core to Nvidia’s and other players’ infrastructure.

“These models get access to all of the research and can go through entire SEC [US Securities and Exchange Commission] filings. The ability to parse a plethora of information and then find a stock that actually went up quite a lot was amazing.”

Rallies has launched its AI portfolios on a service that lets retail traders copy its trades. It now has $10m of retail money shadowing ChatGPT’s picks and $14m across all of its AI portfolios. And it is not only the small investor taking an interest.

Far from the living rooms and box bedrooms of ordinary punters, the gleaming towers of the City and the professional money men are dabbling too. Algorithmic trading has long been a feature of institutional investing, a subject Michael Lewis brought to wider attention with his 2014 book Flash Boys, but the arrival of LLMs has now piqued the interest of hedge funds.

At Man Group, the world’s largest listed hedge fund, LLMs have already been behind a number of profitable trade ideas.

“We have, right now, several examples where we’ve had an idea proposed by an LLM and have passed it through our diligence process before ultimately being accepted by the investment committee,” says Tushara Fernando, head of data and AI at the firm. “If it can come up with an accepted proposal, that’s fantastic, and then the resulting code goes into production and can trade real money.”

Unlike some of the start-ups letting AI loose unsupervised, Man uses the technology to generate ideas that still require a human stamp of approval. Even so, Fernando says the sheer speed of LLMs lets fund managers kick around far more ideas than they otherwise could.

“[A fund manager] might previously have tested two to three investment ideas a day, for example, modelling different scenarios with the aim of proving out new trades,” he says. “Now they’re able to explore and backtest hundreds in a very short space of time. While they’ve gone for a coffee, the agent’s running a backtest, which uses historical data to evaluate how a potential trade would likely perform under differing conditions.”

Many of the largest hedge funds were early adopters of AI and machine learning long before LLMs went mainstream. Bridgewater Associates, the US fund founded by Ray Dalio, launched a vehicle using machine learning as the primary basis of its decision-making two years ago. In 2018, Two Sigma poached Mike Schuster, an AI specialist, from Google’s Brain team to spearhead its efforts.

Balyasny Asset Management, one of the biggest hedge funds in the US, said recently that 95 per cent of its investment teams were using OpenAI. Agents are set to work analysing and synthesising tens of thousands of documents, from company filings to research notes and earnings reports. The firm has also used AI to monitor and update the probability of mergers and acquisitions completing, and to dissect speeches by central bankers. Balyasny said the technology had slashed the time taken to work out the economic implications of those speeches from two days to 30 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, simply having access to the latest and greatest models is not enough. It is proprietary data that gives the hedge funds their edge. Anthropic announced a partnership with Man Group in February to deploy its Claude model across the firm’s investment process, both to surface new insights from data and to speed up coding tasks.

That, though, presents its own headache for firms such as Man, which must bolt cutting-edge LLMs onto their own highly sophisticated technology stacks.

“LLMs are fantastic at using public knowledge. They may know the last 12 songs on the Taylor Swift album and how to solve a Rubik’s cube, but they don’t know Man Group: our strategies, how much we trade, or our databases or execution platform,” says Gary Collier, chief technology officer at Man Group.

For the largest and most established hedge funds, then, people remain firmly at the controls. Ahmad, who intends to launch a hedge fund through Rallies in due course, is convinced that fully AI-managed funds are not far off.

“We are very bullish that eventually, three or two years down the line, there are going to be hedge funds that are entirely run by AI, that are provided with data and anything the models need, which then go ahead and trade,” he says.

Forget the cabbie’s hot tip. The AI chatbot, it seems, may yet become the next font of all stock-picking wisdom. Whether it proves any more reliable than Malkiel’s dart-throwing monkey is, for now, anyone’s guess.

With AI now driving the lion’s share of global trading volume, the technology’s grip on markets is only tightening. For context on the wider boom, see how Britain’s AI investment hit a record £8.3bn and why Big Short investor Michael Burry is betting $1.1bn against AI stocks.

Jamie Young

Jamie is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, bringing over a decade of experience in UK SME business reporting.
Jamie holds a degree in Business Administration and regularly participates in industry conferences and workshops.

When not reporting on the latest business developments, Jamie is passionate about mentoring up-and-coming journalists and entrepreneurs to inspire the next generation of business leaders.

Marc Guay

Well, welcome, everybody. Good morning. Welcome to the 2026 Annual General and Special Meeting of Unitholders of Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund. My name is Marc Guay, and I am a trustee of the Fund. I would like to call the 2026 Annual General and Special Meeting of the Unitholders of Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund to order.

As a trustee of the fund, I will act as Chair of this meeting. Jonathan Jeske of Boston Pizza International Inc. will act as Secretary of the meeting. Also Yanni Yu of Computershare Investor Services will act as scrutineer for this meeting.

I would like to welcome and thank you for taking the time to attend this meeting. Before proceeding with the formal business of the meeting, I would like to introduce the other trustee of Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund, who is in attendance, Shelley Williams, Trustee. I would also like to note that Paulina Hiebert, Trustee is unable to attend today’s meeting due to medical reasons. On behalf of the fund, we extend our best wishes to Paulina and look forward to her return.

In addition, I would like to introduce the following representative of Boston Pizza International, who is participating in today’s meeting: Mr. Jordan Holm, President of BPI and Boston Pizza GP. I have before me an affidavit from [ Michael Kim ] of Computershare attesting that the notice calling this meeting together with the management information circular were mailed to registered shareholders and intermediaries in accordance with the National Instrument 54-101.

Therefore, I conclude that the meeting has been properly called. With your consent, I will not read the formal notice of meeting that was sent to unitholders. — your

A washout spring has done more damage to Britain’s supermarket tills than any World Cup win, according to the boss of Tesco, after the country’s biggest retailer saw UK sales growth more than halve over a quarter blighted by rain and the fallout from the Middle East conflict.

Ken Murphy, chief executive of Tesco, said the grey, wet conditions that dominated much of this spring, set against a long run of sunshine a year earlier, had weighed on shopping habits far more heavily than either the football or the Iran war, even if the latter had created “ongoing uncertainty for many households”.

“The biggest impact on the market would be the weather,” Murphy said, with sunshine encouraging households to “eat together more, celebrate more and spend more on groceries”. On the tournament itself, he was warmer still: “It will be fantastic for the country if [England and Scotland] did well. It would give the country a real lift.”

There were, at least, flashes of the feel-good factor in the numbers. Sales through Tesco’s Whoosh rapid-delivery service jumped 40% around the England-Croatia game on Wednesday night, and climbed even faster in Scotland around Sunday’s win over Haiti. Sales of Irn-Bru, the fizzy drink beloved north of the border, rose by 50%, while canned cocktails surged 185% before the Haiti match. “The weather effect is the big difference,” Murphy insisted.

The retailer’s caution chimes with the wider read on the tournament. Football fans are expected to deliver a £267.7m boost to retail sales ahead of England’s second World Cup match on Tuesday evening, with close to £70m forecast to be spent in pubs and other venues, according to research from GlobalData for VoucherCodes. Industry forecasters have separately pencilled in a far larger windfall across the whole competition, with analysis published by The Grocer pointing to a record £2.9bn boost for UK retailers over the course of the tournament.

Yet the lessons of recent tournaments temper the optimism. Data from Euro 2024, in which England reached the final, suggests the overall sales uplift for supermarkets during a major championship is likely to be marginal. The market research firm Circana said cost-of-living pressures, heavy discounting and more time spent at home meant households were unlikely to spend “much more” than usual on food and drink. It is a pattern Business Matters has tracked before, with pubs, bookmakers and takeaways tipped to capture the lion’s share of the World Cup spend.

Tesco said comparable sales rose 1.8% to £13.4bn in the three months to the end of May, well below both the 4.2% logged in the previous quarter and the 2.3% growth City analysts had pencilled in. The figures were flattered by an 8.9% rise in online sales, with group sales up 1% to £16.8bn.

Murphy said consumer confidence remained low amid worries over the Middle East conflict, which has pushed up petrol prices and threatens to feed through to household energy bills later this year, though he stressed this had not yet translated into any significant change in shopping behaviour.

The chief executive added that growth had also been dampened by slowing grocery inflation, as the price of commodities such as coffee and cocoa eased and many food producers put measures in place to shield themselves from the earlier surge in energy costs. He said he did not expect grocery inflation to climb to the 9% levels suggested by some industry bodies, and that pump prices were “falling as we speak” amid hopes of a lasting peace deal between the US and Iran. The sensitivity of the basket to the seasons is well established, with a record May heatwave having lifted UK retail sales by 3.7% only weeks earlier.

Tesco said it had extended its pledge to match German discounter Aldi on leading lines to more than 2,000 of its smaller Express stores and had launched 520 new products, leaving it “well placed to build on our progress to date”. The renewed emphasis on price echoes the discounting battle the chain flagged heading into Christmas, as household budgets stayed under strain.

Not every corner of the business held up. Sales at Tesco’s Booker wholesale arm fell 3.2%, with takings from independent retailers and catering businesses sliding amid tough conditions on the high street.

Tesco, which holds its annual shareholder meeting later on Thursday, said it still expected to meet profit forecasts for the year, with analysts looking for around £3.25bn. Even so, the shares fell 2.4% in early trading. In April, the retailer warned of a possible dip in annual profits, which would mark the first fall since 2023. Reuters reported that the group’s Irish arm grew like-for-like sales by 3.3% to €967m over the same period, a reminder that the wider group is still expanding.

In the year to 28 February, profits rose 8.5% to £2.4bn as sales grew 4.3% to £66.6bn, including strong growth in the UK.

Paul Jones

Harvard alumni and former New York Times journalist. Editor of Business Matters for over 15 years, the UKs largest business magazine. I am also head of Capital Business Media’s automotive division working for clients such as Red Bull Racing, Honda, Aston Martin and Infiniti.

Apple is poised for one of its most consequential fall product launches in years, with the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the company’s long-anticipated first foldable iPhone all expected to go on sale in September 2026 — a trifecta of hardware that insiders and analysts say signals a fundamental shift in Apple’s smartphone strategy.

The launch cycle was effectively set in motion on June 8 at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where the company unveiled iOS 27 and released its first developer beta. The public beta is expected to go live in July, aligning with last year’s schedule and keeping the iPhone release timetable firmly on track.

A September Keynote — With a Twist

The special event keynote, where the new devices will be unveiled, is tentatively set for Wednesday, September 9, to avoid the Labor Day holiday on September 7. Apple rarely holds a keynote the day after a holiday, as it requires flying press and special guests to Cupertino.

If the announcement happens on Wednesday, September 9, pre-orders would begin on September 11, and new models would arrive on Friday, September 18. That timeline would represent a near-exact repeat of the previous year’s cadence, offering consumers and investors a predictable window for Apple’s biggest revenue quarter.

There is a caveat: if there are production hurdles with the foldable phone, possibly called the iPhone Ultra, that model may be announced alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max but held back from going on sale by a few weeks — a strategy Apple employed with the Face ID-equipped iPhone X in 2017.

A Split Lineup Unlike Any Before

Perhaps the most significant strategic departure is not the hardware itself, but who gets it and when. Rather than launching the entire iPhone 18 lineup at once, Apple is reportedly planning to release only its premium models in September 2026 — the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, a new foldable iPhone, and potentially an updated iPhone Air — while the standard iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e would follow in spring 2027.

If accurate, this would mark the biggest change to Apple’s iPhone launch schedule since the lineup expanded beyond a single annual release. The move would effectively ensure that every device introduced at the September event starts at $999 or more, concentrating Apple’s flagship push squarely on the premium segment during the critical holiday shopping season.

The strategy reflects Apple’s shift toward premium positioning in its primary launch window and its focus on maximizing the debut impact of its first foldable device.

The A20 Chip and Under-Display Face ID

On the hardware side, the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are expected to arrive with several meaningful upgrades. The anticipated launch will feature Apple’s new 2nm A20 chip, promising roughly 15% faster performance compared to the A19 Pro, along with improved efficiency for Apple Intelligence features, Apple’s new C2 modem, and a shift to under-display Face ID technology that will shrink the Dynamic Island for the first time.

Screen sizes are expected to remain unchanged at 6.3 inches for the Pro and 6.9 inches for the Pro Max.

The most talked-about camera upgrade is a variable aperture system on the Pro Max — a first for any iPhone. Where every previous iPhone camera has operated with a fixed aperture and relied on software to compensate for varying light conditions, the variable aperture mechanism would allow real hardware control over depth of field and low-light performance.

iOS 27 beta updates have also pointed to significant Siri AI upgrades and a further-refined Dynamic Island design.

New Colors, Familiar Frame

A Macworld source confirmed in April 2026 that there will be a new Dark Cherry color for the 2026 iPhone Pro, replacing the iPhone 17 Pro’s Cosmic Orange option. Other shades are said to include Light Blue, Dark Gray, and Silver.

The titanium frame and triple-lens camera layout will carry over from the iPhone 17 Pro. This is not a redesign year — it is an internals year.

Apple’s First Foldable iPhone

Alongside the Pro lineup, Apple’s first foldable iPhone is expected to debut in September with the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. It is said to be a book-style foldable with a wide 4:3 aspect ratio, diverging from the more square design associated with Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold line.

Samsung Display has secured an exclusive deal to produce the foldable OLED panels, and Apple has reportedly finalized its design ahead of mass production. The device is widely expected to carry a price tag above $2,000.

Whether the folding model launches simultaneously with the Pro devices or follows weeks later will be revealed at the keynote. Industry analysts caution that first-generation foldable devices typically see more meaningful refinements in follow-up releases, a dynamic that early adopters will need to weigh.

iOS 27 and the Road to General Release

The iOS 27 software will move from developer and public betas to general release around the Monday following the keynote. If the keynote takes place on September 9, the software is expected to land on September 14 or 15, making it available to any iPhone 11 or later.

First reviews of the new iPhones are expected to appear on or around September 15 or 16, with Apple likely sending early review units out to a small number of media on the day of the keynote to allow time for in-depth testing.

What It Means for Consumers

For buyers who typically choose the base iPhone model, the message from Apple this fall is straightforward: wait until spring 2027. For buyers on an iPhone 15 or older, or those who want the Pro model, September 2026 represents a genuine generational leap — the 2nm chip, the C2 modem, and under-display Face ID together constitute the most substantive hardware advance in several years.

Apple has not confirmed any details about the iPhone 18 lineup. The company is expected to make official announcements at its September special event.