- Return the Fund
- Posts
- Ready for Apple's September Event
Ready for Apple's September Event
Expectations for September 9th, and reflecting on last year's Apple analysis
Prerit Das
August 31, 2025
In today’s edition
What to expect from Apple on September 7th
Evaluating Apple’s AI plan
Reflecting on RTF one year ago: On Apple Running the Table
BEFORE WE START — THANKS TO PACASO
Put This “Unlisted” Stock on Your Watchlist
They’re a private company, but Pacaso just reserved the Nasdaq ticker “$PCSO.”
Created by a former Zillow exec who sold his first venture for $120M, Pacaso brings co-ownership to the $1.3T vacation home industry.
They’ve generated $1B+ worth of luxury home transactions and service fees across 2,000+ owners. That’s good for more than $110M in gross profits to date, including 41% YoY growth last year alone.
No surprise the same firms that backed Uber and Venmo already invested in Pacaso. But you don’t have to be a Wall Street firm to invest. Pacaso is giving the same opportunity to everyday investors, and 10,000+ people have already joined them.
And you can invest today for just $2.90/share. But don’t wait too long. Invest in Pacaso before the opportunity ends September 18.
Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.
On the 9th, Apple will take the stage for their iconic September event. Here’s what I’m expecting.
iPhone 17 Air
This is what happens when you plug Ozempic into an iPhone.
Apple’s expected to release the thinnest iPhone ever made. But like Ozempic, there are important tradeoffs. Battery life is probably going to suck—iPhone will tire easily. Performance will likely be throttled—iPhone will be losing some muscle.
If your iPhone being 1.4mm too thick keeps you up at night, I’m glad to offer you some existential relief. Wait no longer.
iPhone 17
The regular iPhone variant should come with a slightly larger 6.3” display, the same size as last year’s iPhone 16 Pro.
IMO, the most significant upgrade to the base iPhone 17 is its refresh rate.
(Refresh rate: how fast the screen updates itself. Low refresh rates make scrolling feel sluggish and laggy.)
The iPhone 17 should come with a 120hz refresh rate, compared to 60hz from last year’s iPhone 16. We’ll no longer need to shell out for a Pro for a silky smooth UX.
Apple may significantly upgrade the front-facing camera by doubling the megapixel count from 12 to 24. Performance should increase thanks in part to 8GB RAM on a new A19 chip (iPhone 16 has A18s).
Expect a couple new colors too—purple, and green, as you can see in the mockups above.
iPhone 17 Pro
Changes to the iPhone 17 Pro should be marginal. The most notable difference is the A19 Pro chip with better performance across the board, and 12GB RAM vs. the previous year’s 8.
This phone’s back is getting a slick new design, but only to distract from the entire chassis downgrading from titanium to aluminum. Ouch!
Perhaps to drop weight, or, to cut costs? Apple is expected to hike all iPhone prices this year to play around tariffs and general inflation. The change may be a compromise, but as of now, it’s unclear.
iPhone 17 Pro Max: The larger Pro Max phone should be getting a massive 5,000 mAh battery that’ll easily last all day. The zoom lens will increase 4x in megapixel count, from 12 MP to 48. I’m hoping for a physically zooming camera lens, though I’ve only seen this rumored…
Apple Watch
For the Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3, the most significant upgrade I anticipate is the inclusion of a 5G modem, providing rapid cellular connectivity when out of iPhone range.
Both devices should come with blood pressure monitoring—another AI advantage, as I’ll discuss later.
Apple’s also expected to release a new Watch SE, with an always-on display and maybe even a chip upgrade. The Series 11 and Ultra 3 will be getting a new S11 chip, but I’m not convinced the new SE model will be blessed with such power.
AirPods Pro 3
At last—Apple’s refreshing the AirPods Pro.
This particular variant of AirPods gets an upgrade only once every three years. Last year, we saw the AirPods 4 (non Pro) get a very Pro-like design, very Pro-like active noise cancellation (ANC), and very Pro-like otic health monitoring.
It’s time for Apple to lay down the gauntlet in advancing AirPods’ frontier capabilities.
Right?
Disappointment is on the menu. The rumors for September 9th tell of a slightly smaller case, slightly improved noise cancellation, and a slightly improved chip. Meh.
I’m expecting Apple to introduce (and majorly oversell) on-device live translation. Possibly even with a dedicated feature video. I just don’t find live translation to be a technological breakthrough.
They may even say that live translation is “only possible because of the new H3 chip.” Doubt!
Extras
The Home Hub has been rumored for almost a year now.
For smart homes, the Home Hub would be a centralized orchestrator of HomeKit devices, coming with a tvOS-like interface for controlling speakers/multimedia, security systems, lights, etc.
I can’t see myself buying one of them, but I do see the value. In the smart home world, device bridging/hosting is a notorious problem.
A smart home requires a centralized hub to manage all interconnected devices. It’s the HomeKit hub, not each individual device, that interfaces with Apple Home’s cloud, letting you dim your lights from 2,000 miles away. (A first-world necessity, of course.)
To facilitate middle-of-the-curve smart home setups, Apple designed a few of their traditional devices to secondarily operate as HomeKit hubs. Apple TV, iPad, and HomePod fall into that bucket.
Now, in (maybe) releasing the Home Hub, Apple gives smart homes a dedicated HomeKit orchestrator and a convenient display akin to that of Amazon’s Alexa devices.
Again, wouldn’t buy it, but I can see the value of the Home Hub in Apple’s lineup.
Beyond smart home tech, we may see a refreshed Apple TV 4K with a better Wi-Fi chip and lower price point. I’m not convinced Apple will announce this in September, but it has been rumored.
Finally, AirTag may be getting a boost in range.
And that should just about do it.
KEEPING SCORE
Apple’s AI Strategy
I think most of last year’s WWDC viewers took a bathroom break during Craig Federighi’s Private Cloud Compute announcement, as if it was an ad during an NFL game.
After the event, opinions on PCC were few and far between. Quite frankly, this boggled my mind. Here’s what I wrote:
My biggest takeaway from this week’s 98-minute event came in just 10 seconds—Private Cloud. This summer, Apple brought their ecosystem-wide privacy focus to datacenters, built with their own chips. You read that correctly—an Apple cloud and datacenter powered by Apple chips. (Talk about controlling the entire stack.)
Apple Private Cloud Compute (PCC) is built to extend the processing power of Apple devices while ensuring that personal user data is not accessible to anyone other than the user—not even Apple. This property is independently verifiable.
So, when your iPhone needs a computational boost to run a language model or process a horde of data, PCC is on standby. These jobs are processed by Apple chips in one of Apple’s datacenters, providing the same performance, privacy, and efficiency benefits as when Apple replaced on-device Intel chips with their own.
How is nobody talking about this?
When public markets were pummeling Apple shares, and finance gurus were proclaiming Apple to be a value stock instead of a growth stock, I couldn’t help but feel we were all missing something.
$AAPL ( ▲ 3.81% ) is still ~10% off it’s all-time highs.
Apple has something no other tech company has. Take Google, primarily in the public eye for AI—Veo 3, Gemini. And Meta, watched for their AI company acquisitions and AI lab acquihires.
Meanwhile, Apple plays the consumer. Directly. And they do it better than anyone.
Not long ago, Apple was subject to harsh criticism for neglecting to train their own foundational language models at the same scale as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta.
As labs invested hundreds of billions of dollars into multiplying parameter counts to increase benchmarks by bips, Apple built chips, datacenters, and horizontally expanded on-device data collection.
After this September event, Apple devices will know everything from your writing habits to your blood pressure.
It’s abundantly clear now, and quite frankly was clear years ago, that step-function increases in AI usefulness come from comprehensive personalized data and deeply-integrated agentic capabilities.
Apple can afford to let everyone else “make AI better,” while they continue readying themselves for the next 10 years.
Apple controls the entire stack. They own the hardware, the software, the integration and distribution on third-party apps, the on-device data, and the consumer (the blue bubble still reigns supreme).
In the modern AI arms race, we’re consumed by our desire for new models. We define winners and losers by who creates these models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, etc.) and by who infrastructs them (Nvidia).
We focus less on who can best leverage an AI system with their existing products, ecosystem, and distribution.
My thesis: Apple is generally understood to be a laggard in the modern AI race. I agree with this take, but only through the lens of how we currently value existing AI behemoths (more models, more features). But Apple has decided to avoid that game entirely. Don’t sleep on their ability to innovate with targeted airstrikes as opposed to scorching the Earth.
Granted, I am extremely biased towards Apple (if you couldn’t tell). With that said, through what I’ve seen in this space and in my own companies, there are a few distinct approaches to AI:
Play the hyperscale game, marginally improving foundational technology to capture downstream B2B usage and prosumers through subscriptions
Play infrastructure, building data moats and empowering interconnection of services.
Play end users, shipping software (and hardware) that leverages the first two points to create meaningful, valuable UXs that inspire consumer adoration.
This is an oversimplified view of the AI infrastructure world at large, as detailed in this prior RTF edition: “Investment Opportunities in AI Agent Infrastructure”
The order presented—from hyperscale to infrastructure to end users—is intentional. Improvements to marginal foundational technology are accretive to infrastructure, and improvements to infrastructure are accretive to end users.
In simpler terms: you can either fight with OpenAI or build something that gets better as OpenAI does. Let Anthropic fight with OpenAI, and let Google fight with Meta. It’s good for everyone. Apple decided it’s good for them, too.
They’re doubling down on a uniquely held consumer advantage, and I’m bullish on their success. Apple’s building around the puzzle pieces slowly falling in place. Datacenters, chipsets, on-device data collection, on-device app data, your ears, your pocket, your wrist, your eyes, your car, your desk, your home.
Sounds scary; but, in an arms race to capture the behavior of 8 billion humans, no company can afford to sit idly by.
Not even Apple.
Reply