Written before the event — This was published on the morning of 9 September as a preview of that evening's Apple event, which has since taken place. It is kept as a record of what was expected rather than what was announced — Apple's own newsroom has the products that shipped. What to do in the weeks after a phone launch, which is the decision most people reading a preview are actually facing, follows the original article.
Apple’s September event is the one the whole phone industry schedules around, and this year’s carries extra weight: it is the first major launch under the company’s new chief executive, John Ternus. The event, titled “Surprise and Shine”, takes place at Apple Park in Cupertino on Wednesday 9 September and begins at 11pm Bangladesh time.
How to watch from Bangladesh
- Open apple.com in any browser — the stream runs on the homepage and in the Apple Events section; no app needed.
- On an iPhone, iPad or Mac, the Apple TV app shows the event under Events.
- YouTube: Apple’s official channel streams live and keeps the replay.
The stream usually runs a little under two hours. Bangladeshi carriers and retailers will not have pricing on the night; grey-market prices in Dhaka typically appear within a day or two of US availability.
iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max
Apple has confirmed nothing, but reports converge on an A20 Pro chip built on a 2-nanometre process, which should mean better performance per watt, cooler running and improved battery management. The Pro Max is rumoured to gain a variable-aperture main camera — a mechanical iris that controls how much light enters, something compact cameras have had for decades and phones have mostly faked with software. The design is expected to stay close to last year’s, with a somewhat larger camera module. On price, the guesses point up: rising component costs, especially memory, could push the iPhone 18 Pro to a starting price of around $1,199.
The foldable
The potential headline is Apple’s first folding phone, widely referred to as the iPhone Ultra. The rumoured spec is a book-style fold with a 7.8-inch inner display and a roughly 5.3-inch outer screen, the A20 Pro chip, 12 GB of memory and two 48-megapixel rear cameras — but no telephoto lens, which would be an unusual omission on a flagship. Samsung has had seven years of folding phones to work out hinges and creases; Apple’s pitch will have to be that it has done something with the format that justifies arriving late.
Everything else
New Apple Watch models, updated AirPods and a few smart-home products are also expected. For Bangladesh the practical interest is narrower: the Pro models arrive here quickly through unofficial channels, foldables arrive slowly and expensively, and the real question for most buyers is how far last year’s iPhone 17 drops in price once the 18 is on sale.
The decision a launch actually puts in front of you
Almost nobody reading a launch preview is choosing between this year's phone and nothing. They are choosing between the new model, last year's model at a lower price, and keeping what they have for another year. A launch changes the price of all three at once, and the useful knowledge is about timing rather than specifications.
The old model is the story
The largest, most predictable effect of any flagship launch is what it does to the previous generation. The moment a new model exists, last year's becomes the value option — and in a market supplied through unofficial channels, that drop arrives in two distinct steps.
The first is immediate and modest: sellers holding stock adjust to the new reality. The second is larger and comes weeks later, when the new model is actually arriving in quantity and the remaining old stock has to clear to free up capital. A buyer who wants last year's phone and moves on launch night pays more than one who waits for the second step.
That previous-generation phone is also, on the evidence of the last several years, a better purchase than the headline suggests. Year-on-year improvements in mainstream phones have been incremental for a while, the older model gets software updates for years yet, and the price gap is the largest single difference between them.
Why grey-market prices move the way they do
Where phones arrive through unofficial channels rather than an official launch, the price curve has a shape worth knowing.
The first units command a significant premium, because scarcity is the product and a handful of buyers will pay for being early. That premium decays over roughly four to eight weeks as supply normalises, and it decays faster for the ordinary model than the top one, since the highest configurations stay scarce longest.
So the worst time to buy a new flagship here is the first fortnight, and the second-worst is the day a shipment lands and everyone knows it has. Waiting a month is not a strategy for the patient; it is the difference between paying the scarcity premium and not.
What to wait for besides a lower price
There is a second reason not to buy in the first weeks, and it has nothing to do with money.
A phone's reviews at launch are written after a few days with a pre-release unit. What they cannot contain is everything that only appears at scale and over time: battery behaviour after a hundred cycles, thermal throttling in a hot climate rather than an air-conditioned review room, the software bug that affects one configuration, the manufacturing issue in an early production batch. Those surface in the second month, from ordinary owners, and they are the reports worth reading.
A new generation on a new manufacturing process, or a first-generation form factor of any kind, deserves more of that patience rather than less. First-generation hardware is where a manufacturer learns what it got wrong, and the people who find out are the ones who bought early.
The questions that actually decide it
Stripped of the launch coverage, the decision comes down to four things, and none of them is the chip.
Is the phone you have failing at something? Battery that will not last the day, storage permanently full, a camera you avoid using. A specific failure justifies a purchase; a general sense that the phone is old does not.
How long will it be supported? Security updates are what determine when a working phone stops being safe to use, and they run from the model's release rather than your purchase date — so buying a two-year-old model buys a shorter remaining window, however good the price.
What do you lose that you did not expect? Accessories, a case, a charger that no longer fits, the cost of moving data. Small individually and routinely absent from the comparison.
What is the old phone worth, and to whom? Trading in at the moment of launch, when the model is still current and resale demand is highest, recovers materially more than selling it four months later from a drawer. The best day to sell the old phone is usually before the best day to buy the new one.
