iPhone 12

Is Apple coming out with a new phone in 2019? Of course it is! In fact we expect three new iPhones (with three different screen sizes) to be announced in September 2019. The on-sale date will be one to two weeks later.

It's now almost certain that the iPhone 11 announcement will happen on 10 September.

This already looked likely - CNET reporter Lynn La had committed to that date based on the timing of Labor Day - but seems to have been confirmed (Portuguese-language site) by the discovery of an asset in the seventh beta of iOS 13 that is named HoldForRelease and shows 10 September. (Last year, the equivalent asset showed the date 12 September, which is when the iPhone XS was unveiled.)

As for the on-sale date, SoftBank Mobile President Ken Miyauchi appears to have accidentally spilled the beans there, commenting that the new iPhone will launch 10 days before the start of October (when a new telecoms law comes into effect). This puts it at or around 21 September.

This is backed up by a report by Wedbush analyst Dan Ives based on supply chain information. In previous years when launching three handsets at once, Apple has pushed back the release date of at least one model until a later month: the iPhone X was delayed until November 2017, and the XR didn't come out until October 2018. But Ives predicts that all three of this year's phones will appear in September 2019.

Looking further ahead, it's believed that four new iPhones will be released in 2020, to include a low-cost version as well as models with 5G capabilities.