Apple Could Discontinue 11 Products

Apple’s September 9 event is shaping up to be as much about subtraction as addition. Alongside whatever new hardware gets announced, a new report lays out 11 current products that could quietly disappear from Apple’s online store the same day, and the reasoning behind each one says a lot about how predictable Apple’s own patterns have become, and where this year breaks from them.

The safest bets are the ones that follow Apple’s most consistent habit: killing off the previous Pro iPhone the moment a new one shows up. The iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max sit at the top of the list for exactly that reason. Apple doesn’t typically keep last year’s Pro models around at a discount the way it does with standard iPhones, it just removes them once the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max take their place. The same logic applies to the Apple Watch Series 11 and Apple Watch Ultra 3, both expected to be replaced outright by the Series 12 and Ultra 4 rather than demoted to budget options.

Where things get genuinely uncertain is the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus, and this is really the most interesting part of the whole story. Normally Apple’s ladder is simple: new flagship arrives, last year’s flagship gets a price cut, and the phone two generations back gets discontinued. That would usually mean the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus are on the chopping block once the 18-series lands. Except this year, the standard iPhone 18 and 18 Plus are reportedly being pushed to early 2027, with September’s event focused instead on the 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max, and the foldable iPhone Ultra. If Apple pulls the iPhone 16 now anyway, it leaves an awkward gap in the lineup with no direct successor sitting underneath the Pro models. That’s a real structural problem, not just a minor scheduling quirk, and it’s the clearest reason these two phones are genuine wildcards rather than safe predictions.

There’s a second complication layered on top of that timing issue: pricing. Component costs and memory-related pressures have reportedly been pushing Apple’s prices up across the board this year. That matters here specifically because Apple’s usual move, sliding the previous flagship down to fill the entry-level slot, works a lot better when the new flagship isn’t dramatically more expensive. If the 18 Pro lineup costs meaningfully more than the 17 Pro did, Apple may have more incentive to keep the iPhone 16 around longer as an actual affordable option, rather than losing that price tier entirely.

AirPods 4 and the ANC version land in a middle tier of likelihood. AirPods 5, in standard and ANC configurations, are expected around the same event, which would normally point to the AirPods 4 lineup getting phased out. But Apple has a track record of keeping older AirPods models on sale at reduced prices rather than pulling them outright, so this one’s more of a coin flip than the iPhone Pro predictions.

The smart home products round out the list with the least certainty attached. The Apple TV 4K’s third generation could get replaced if Apple’s rumored faster, AI-capable successor actually ships alongside everything else, though the timing here is looser than for the Pro iPhones. The original HomePod mini has been sitting untouched for years now, making it a reasonable candidate if a second-generation model finally shows up. The second-generation HomePod is the shakiest prediction of all eleven, tied to reports of a display-equipped smart home device that may not be positioned as a direct HomePod replacement anyway.

Zoom out and the bigger picture here isn’t really about any single product, it’s about scale. Apple is reportedly prepping more than 15 new products for this fall across iPhones, Watches, AirPods, Macs, and iPads, which is an unusually large wave even by Apple’s standards. Clearing out 11 older products in one event would be a correspondingly large cleanup, and this also happens to be the first major hardware event under new CEO John Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook on September 1. Whether that leadership change has any bearing on how aggressively Apple prunes its lineup is pure speculation, but the timing is hard to ignore.

Worth remembering too: discontinued by Apple doesn’t mean gone everywhere. Third-party retailers typically keep selling remaining inventory well after Apple pulls a product from its own store, and existing owners keep getting software support under Apple’s normal policies regardless of what happens on stage. So even the “very likely” discontinuations on this list won’t make those phones or watches disappear overnight, they’ll just stop being something you can buy directly from Apple.