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It’s Apple’s Most Important Day of the Year. Here’s What to Expect

Apple became first U.S company to sustain market cap of $ 1 trillion on Aug. 2. But today is its most important day of the year.

It’s Apple’s Most Important Day of the Year. Here’s What to Expect
Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., speaks during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, U.S. (Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

(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.

And here’s what you need to know in global technology news

Elon Musk’s top lieutenant at SpaceX said her boss is as capable as ever. Gwynne Shotwell, the operating chief at Musk’s rocket company, lamented that people are focusing on “triviality” instead of what the billionaire has actually done.

Amazon said business sales are on pace for $10 billion annually. Workplaces are embracing the website as a destination for buying supplies, and the business may soon provide as much revenue as Amazon Web Services. But beneath Amazon’s success, drivers are suffering subpar working conditions, Business Insider reported.

Google shot down efforts by France’s privacy watchdog to globalize the “right to forgotten.” The search giant told European Union judges that the regulator “is out on a limb.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Milian at mmilian@bloomberg.net

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