Apple Readies Bigger IPhones, Smarter Watches

(Bloomberg) -- On Aug. 2, Apple Inc. became the U.S’s first publicly traded company to sustain a market valuation of $ 1 trillion. But today, Sept. 12, is actually Apple’s most important day of the year.

At 10 a.m., Tim Cook will take the stage at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California, to unveil the company’s iPhone and Apple Watch strategy for the next year. Individually, each new phone isn’t a significant upgrade. They’ll all look and act like the iPhone X, except there will be two bigger versions: a premium model selling for about $1,000 and another that costs less.

But in totality, they’re significant: The three new phones will work together to help drive up Apple’s revenue as iPhones contribute about two-thirds of the company’s sales. The bigger model, likely to be called the iPhone Xs Max, will excite people looking for one device able to satisfy most of their computing needs, while the cheaper one will bring the iPhone X’s edge-to-edge screen and facial recognition features to more people. More substantial changes will have to wait until next year.

The iPhones won’t be the only Apple products going bigger, however. There will be two new Apple Watches with larger, edge-to-edge screens that can show more content. They’ll be the first major revamp to the Apple Watch’s design since it was introduced in 2014. The Watch isn’t the sales engine that the iPhone has become, but people like it. Critics regard it as the best smartwatch on the market.

Even with upgrades to a pair of its most important product categories, nothing that Apple shows off today will be particularly revolutionary. The company is continuing a stream of updates while it awaits the debut of its next big thing, whether that’s a pair of augmented reality glasses or a self-driving car. But those still remain pretty far off.