Sequels and Sequelae: A Clinical Guide to What Apple's September Keynote Does to Last Year's Prices

The Editorial Staff convened to consider an event that has not yet happened and whose contents we do not know. This is, we concede, an unusual basis for a guide. It is also the only honest one. Apple's September keynote arrives with the regularity of a tax deadline, and while the products on stage change annually, what the keynote does to the products already on shelves does not. That second thing is the subject of this document. The first thing is the subject of every other document published this week, and they are welcome to it.

We will not tell you what Apple is announcing. We do not know, and neither, despite their confidence, do the people who say they do. We will tell you what the announcement does to the price of the device you were about to buy, because that part has repeated often enough to be described as a pattern rather than a prediction.

The Calendar, Which Does Not Negotiate

Apple has held its iPhone event in September for well over a decade, with one pandemic-shaped exception in 2020, when it slipped to October. New iPhones and new Apple Watches are announced together. Pre-orders follow within days, shipments within a week or two of that. The Staff finds this predictability almost restful. Most of consumer electronics pricing is weather; this one part of it is a train timetable.

Predictability is an asset only if you use it. The device you are considering in the first week of September will, by the third week, be either a current model or a previous one, and the entire difference between those two words is money.

The Three Fates of a Device on Stage

When the new lineup is announced, everything it replaces is assigned one of three fates. We have observed no fourth.

It stays, demoted. Apple's customary move is to keep last year's base iPhone in its own lineup at a lower official price. The cut is announced the same day; the product does not change; only its rank does. This is the cleanest price drop in consumer electronics, because Apple itself performs it and every retailer must follow.

It disappears from Apple, and lingers everywhere else. Last year's Pro models are typically removed from Apple's store outright. They do not, however, cease to exist. Third-party retailers still hold stock, and stock that the manufacturer has stopped supporting with marketing is stock that must be sold rather than displayed. These are the listings worth watching in the weeks after the keynote, and the ones where the discount is decided by inventory rather than by decree.

It vanishes entirely. The oldest model still on the official list is the one usually retired without ceremony. Whatever remains is closeout, and closeout does not restock.

The Apple Watch follows the same script with smaller numbers: the new Series arrives, the previous Series leaves Apple's store, the SE model generally stays as the entry point, and the departed Series becomes a retailer clearance item. The Staff notes this with the mild satisfaction of people who like it when a pattern holds.

The Average That Briefly Stops Telling the Truth

Here we must flag a hazard in our own instrument. This site compares live prices against a trailing 90-day average, and in ordinary weeks that is the most useful number on the page. In the weeks after a keynote it is temporarily misleading, for a reason that is purely arithmetical.

Consider a hypothetical phone whose official price has sat at $799 for the entire preceding 90 days, and which Apple demotes to $699 on keynote day. We are choosing round numbers to make the machinery visible, not reporting any actual product. On the day of the cut, the 90-day average is still $799, because none of those 90 days has yet occurred at the new price. A retailer listing the demoted phone at exactly $699 — the new official price, with no discount whatsoever — appears to be 12.5 percent below average. Thirty days later, the average has drifted to about $766, and the same undiscounted $699 still reads as roughly 8.7 percent below. Only after a full 90 days at the new price does the average catch up and the phantom discount reach zero.

The Staff computed these figures because we compute everything, and we present them so you will distrust the badge for a while. In the weeks after a keynote, the number to beat on a demoted device is not the trailing average. It is the new official price. A listing at that price is not a deal; it is the shelf. A listing meaningfully below it is a retailer clearing inventory, which is the only kind of discount that was ever real.

The Used Market, Which Has Its Own Keynote

One further consequence is worth stating plainly, because it works against you if you ignore it. When the new models ship, a large number of people upgrade, and a large number of one-year-old phones enter the used market at once. Supply rises. Prices for used and trade-in devices tend to soften accordingly. If you intend to sell your current phone to fund the next one, the value of what you are holding is generally at its firmest before the keynote and softer after it.

This creates a tension the Staff cannot resolve for you: the best moment to sell is before the announcement, and the best moment to buy is after it, and most people prefer not to spend the intervening fortnight without a telephone. We note the tension. We do not have a spare phone to lend you.

The Survival Procedure

The procedure is short. Its brevity should not be mistaken for optionality.

First: do not buy a current-generation iPhone or Apple Watch at full price in the days before the keynote. If you can wait two weeks, the device will either be cheaper or will have been replaced by something you may prefer. Both outcomes favor waiting; neither favors buying now.

Second: on keynote day, record the new official price of the model you actually want. That number replaces every "was" price and every trailing average for the next several weeks.

Third: for base models that were demoted, treat the new official price as the floor of normal. For Pro models that were withdrawn, watch third-party listings for the inventory-driven drops, and expect them to come and go without warning as stock depletes.

Fourth: for anything the keynote did not touch — the iPad and Mac lines have their own seasons and have historically been mostly absent from the September stage — do not expect movement, and do not accept a "September Savings" banner as evidence of any.

Fifth: if you own the outgoing model and plan to sell it, know that the clock is running in the other direction.

Nothing about this procedure is exciting. That is, we have come to believe, the point.

Shop Current Deals

We track live prices against each product's 90-day Amazon average, so you can tell a real discount from a banner. Browse today's deals →

— The BuyGetRewards Editorial Staff