For years, Apple events have followed a reassuringly predictable formula. The iPhone gets faster, the cameras get better, the Watch learns another thing about our bodies, and we collectively pretend that moving a button three millimetres counts as a revolution. Then we complain about the prices, open the Apple Store app and order everything anyway. This year is different.

Apple's September presentation gave us the usual annual upgrades, but it also introduced something the company has resisted while practically every major Android manufacturer experimented with it: an entirely new iPhone form factor. The iPhone Duo is Apple's first foldable smartphone, and suddenly the annual question isn't simply whether your current phone is good enough for another year. It is whether the object we've called an iPhone for nearly two decades is about to become something else entirely.

Alongside it comes the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, with a much more serious camera system and A20 Pro chip; AirPods 5, which bring proper Active Noise Cancellation to Apple's regular open-ear earbuds; and Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, which push Apple much further into recovery, health and physiological monitoring.

Last year, Apple's new products felt like better tools for lives that were already absurdly busy. This year, they feel more ambitious. Apple isn't simply upgrading the devices around us. It is trying to make them understand more of what we are doing with them.

Let's start with the obvious one. Apple made a foldable iPhone.

After years of watching Samsung, Google, Honor and practically everyone else experiment with folding screens while Apple calmly behaved as though the entire category didn't exist, we finally have the iPhone Duo. And Apple being Apple, it hasn't positioned the device as an experimental alternative to the normal iPhone. It has treated it as a completely new way of using one.

Closed, Duo has a 5.4-inch outer Super Retina XDR display, giving it more than 90 percent of the screen area of an iPhone 18 Pro. Open it and you get a 7.6-inch inner display, the largest Apple has ever put into an iPhone and 50 percent larger than the iPhone 18 Pro Max. Both displays have ProMotion and Always-On technology, while the inner screen gets a nano-texture finish designed to reduce glare and make the inevitable fold crease less visible.

That immediately makes Duo interesting for people who actually work from their phones rather than merely scroll Instagram while pretending to answer emails. iOS 27 has been reworked around the folding format, with side-by-side apps and different layouts depending on how the device is positioned. You can keep reference material open beside a document, watch something while working in another app, or partially fold the phone and use it almost like a tiny laptop. And later this year, it will support Apple Pencil.

For editors, photographers, designers and anyone who has ever tried to mark up a PDF on an iPhone while questioning every decision that led them to that moment, that combination is potentially huge. It starts blurring the increasingly arbitrary line between an iPhone and an iPad mini.

The hardware is appropriately excessive. There is an A20 Pro chip with vapor-chamber cooling, a dual-battery architecture and a grade 5 titanium frame built around a hinge containing more than 100 components. Apple claims up to 44 hours of video playback when using the outer screen, although using the huge inner display naturally brings that figure down.

The camera system is slightly less extravagant than the 18 Pro's, but still serious: a 48MP Fusion Main camera and 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide, with optical-quality 2x zoom. The folding design also introduces some genuinely useful tricks. Duo Preview lets the person you are photographing see the shot on the outer display, while the phone can effectively become its own stand for hands-free photos and video.

There is even an under-display FaceTime camera hidden beneath the inner screen, because apparently Apple has decided that visible cameras are aesthetically offensive now.

The compromise is price. In the UAE, iPhone Duo starts at 8,499 AED for 256GB, climbs to 9,349 AED for 512GB and 11,049 AED for 1TB, while the 2TB version reaches a fairly deranged 13,599 AED. It comes in Star White and Night Sky, with UAE pre-orders beginning October 16 and availability from October 23.

This isn't the sensible iPhone. It is the one you buy because, for the first time in years, an iPhone feels genuinely new.

If Duo is Apple's experiment with what an iPhone could become, the iPhone 18 Pro is Apple doubling down on what the iPhone already does exceptionally well. And this year, that means photography.

The headline upgrade is a new 48MP Fusion Main camera with variable aperture, a first for an iPhone. Instead of relying entirely on computational photography to simulate depth and control exposure, the camera can physically adjust its aperture, giving photographers more control over depth of field and improving low-light shooting.

It is joined by a 48MP Ultra Wide and 48MP Telephoto, creating a complete 48MP Pro Fusion camera system with up to 8x optical-quality zoom. Apple has also added more Pro controls inside the Camera app, while video remains appropriately ridiculous for something that also receives calls from your mother: Dolby Vision up to 4K at 120 fps, improved low-light video, focus tracking and increasingly sophisticated cinematic controls.

For most people, this is massive overkill. For people working in media, it increasingly isn't.

There are days when half of The Sandy Times is effectively produced from a phone: interviews recorded on it, photos shot on it, Reels edited on it, copy reviewed on it, WhatsApp conversations conducted on it and last-minute client disasters politely solved through it. The distinction between "phone camera" and "professional camera" matters considerably less when the image is ultimately being consumed on another phone.

Underneath all of that sits the A20 Pro, paired with a next-generation vapor chamber and dual 16-core Neural Engine designed particularly around AI workloads. Siri AI and Apple Intelligence are therefore becoming less like additional features and more like part of the basic architecture of the device.

Battery life has also received a significant upgrade. Apple claims up to 45 hours of video playback on the iPhone 18 Pro Max, the longest battery life ever offered by an iPhone, with the Max gaining up to six additional hours over the previous generation.

That may sound like the least glamorous upgrade of the entire presentation, but anyone who has spent a 14-hour workday moving between meetings, shooting content, navigating Dubai and desperately hunting for a USB-C cable knows that battery life eventually becomes more exciting than another camera filter.

The iPhone 18 Pro comes in Burgundy, Glacier, Silver and Black, with 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch sizes. UAE pricing starts at 5,099 AED, with pre-orders opening September 12 and availability from September 18.

Duo may be the device everyone wants to play with. The 18 Pro is probably still the one I would trust with my working life.

AirPods have quietly become one of those products you don't realise you depend on until you leave the house without them. Then suddenly the entire city is unbearably loud.

This year, Apple has brought one of the defining features of AirPods Pro into the standard line: Active Noise Cancellation is included on every AirPods 5 model. Apple says the new system removes up to 50 percent more external noise than AirPods 4 with ANC, while retaining the open-ear design for people who dislike silicone tips.

The acoustic architecture has also been redesigned, with next-generation Adaptive EQ adjusting sound to different ears and listening environments. Transparency mode has become more natural, Adaptive Audio automatically blends ANC and outside sound depending on your surroundings, and Conversation Awareness lowers whatever you are listening to when you start speaking.

Basically, AirPods are becoming increasingly good at deciding what you should hear without requiring you to touch them. The more interesting development, however, is Siri AI.

When paired with an Apple Intelligence-compatible iPhone, AirPods 5 can access personal context from messages, emails and other information on your phone. You could theoretically ask Siri to find the restaurant reservation buried somewhere in your inbox or play the song somebody recommended to you in a message without pulling the phone out of your pocket.

Live Translation also remains one of Apple's most useful recent ideas, particularly if you live somewhere like Dubai, where a normal Tuesday can involve conversations in five languages before lunch.

There are two versions. Standard AirPods 5 cost 549 AED, while the 629 AED model gets a Wireless Charging Case, up to five hours of listening with ANC rather than four, up to 22 hours through the case, and finally a volume swipe on the stem.

Which is a very Apple sentence: the technology can translate languages and understand your personal context, but apparently moving the volume up and down from the earbud itself still required another product tier.

This may actually be the most interesting launch for anyone obsessed with health data. And unfortunately I know exactly how dangerous that sentence is.

Apple Watch Series 12 introduces an entirely new Health Sensing System with redesigned optical and electrical heart sensors. Apple says it tested the system against competing wearables in a study involving more than 1,000 participants and found it delivered the highest heart-rate accuracy across the devices tested.

More importantly, the Watch now measures background heart rate every five seconds throughout the day. That higher-frequency monitoring also produces more HRV data, allowing Apple to offer daytime vitals alongside overnight measurements and analyse recovery HRV against your personal baseline.

And finally, Apple has introduced something athletes have been waiting for: Readiness.

The new score combines recent activity, training load, vitals and sleep to estimate your capacity for the day ahead. In other words, Apple Watch is finally moving beyond simply telling you what you did yesterday and beginning to interpret whether your body might appreciate you not behaving like an idiot today. There is a broader shift happening here.

For years, Apple's approach to fitness was built around activity: Move, Exercise, Stand, close the rings, do more. Series 12 increasingly understands that health isn't simply the accumulation of movement. Recovery matters. Sleep matters. HRV matters. Training load matters. Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do isn't close another ring.

The redesigned Health app coming later this year pushes this even further with a Longevity section and Health Age, comparing your metrics with what might be expected for your chronological age. Whether humanity needed another number to develop anxiety about remains debatable, but the direction is fascinating. Then things become slightly more science-fiction.

The S11 chip enables a new group of Audio Intelligence features. Live Rewind can help retrieve something you just missed in conversation, while Siri Recap can generate summaries of conversations you have had. Sound Recognition can identify things such as alarms, sirens, doorbells or a baby crying.

The Watch is no longer merely trying to understand your body. It is starting to understand the environment around it.

Apple Watch Series 12 starts at 1,599 AED in the UAE for the 42mm aluminum GPS version, with titanium and a genuinely beautiful new ceramic version sitting higher in the range. Pre-orders are already open, with availability from September 18.

And then there is my section. The Ultra.

Apple Watch Ultra has always occupied a strange place between smartwatch and serious sports computer. Previous generations were excellent for everyday training, navigation and health tracking, but endurance athletes could still find its battery life and data depth limiting compared with dedicated Garmin, COROS or cycling hardware. Ultra 4 attacks both problems.

It receives the same new Health Sensing System, higher-frequency heart-rate and HRV measurements, recovery data and Readiness score as Series 12, but combines them with the hardware built for people who consider spending eight hours outside a perfectly reasonable weekend activity.

Apple now claims up to 45 hours of extended outdoor workout tracking, alongside what it calls the most accurate on-device GPS in a sports watch. The 49mm titanium case remains, the display reaches up to 3,000 nits, satellite communications remain available, and the new S11 chip brings Siri AI and Audio Intelligence to the Ultra as well.

For endurance athletes, the most important change isn't any individual specification. It is that Apple finally appears to understand that collecting training data isn't enough. The watch needs to help interpret it.

Recovery HRV, daytime vitals, training load and Readiness move Ultra much closer to the philosophy behind dedicated performance platforms, where the question isn't simply "How hard did you train?" but "What should you do next?"

As someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of time staring at HRV graphs, resting heart rate and training data, I find this both exciting and mildly threatening. The healthiest development in my own relationship with fitness technology has actually been learning when not to look at the numbers. Giving Apple more numbers to show me is therefore either excellent progress or the beginning of another problem. Probably both.

Apple Watch Ultra 4 starts at 3,199 AED in the UAE and comes in natural or black titanium. Like Series 12, it is available for pre-order now and reaches stores on September 18.

This year's Apple lineup is unusual because the answer isn't simply "the newest version of whatever you already own."

Taken together, these launches reveal where Apple seems to be heading. The company isn't simply adding more technology to the objects we carry. It is trying to remove more decisions from the moments when we use them.

The phone unfolds when we need more space. The AirPods decide how much of the outside world we should hear. The Watch decides whether today is a day to train or recover. Siri increasingly understands the context around the question rather than waiting for a perfectly formulated command.

Convenience has always been Apple's real luxury. This year, that luxury looks increasingly like having your devices understand what you need before you have to explain it.