Image: Apple

Apple has announced that it will hold a 'special event' on September 9th at 1 PM ET (10 AM PT). The tagline for the event, shown on the invitation sent to members of the press, is "it's glowtime."

In its usual style, Apple hasn't explicitly said it'll announce new iPhones at this event. If history is anything to go by*, we'll almost certainly get our first look at the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro lineup at this event.

While there are a number of rumors swirling around the new phones' photographic capabilities, it seems like it may be a relatively quiet year for Apple's camera hardware, as it was for Google's recent Pixel phones. With the iPhone 14 Pro, Apple moved from a conventional Bayer sensor to one that defaults to delivering 24MP images from a 48MP Quad Bayer chip. The 15 Pro introduced the 5x telephoto lens on the Max model. So far, it doesn't seem like we'll see anything on that level this year, though there is a chance that 5x lens will come to the smaller Pro phone, replacing the 3x one found on the 15 Pro.

The main rumor is that the new crop of phones will include a 'capture button,' which is expected to let you launch a camera app of your choice and then act as an autofocus / shutter button. Currently, you can configure the iPhone 15 Pro's 'Action' button to launch the camera and take pictures, but this new hardware is expected to come to all the phones, and could let Pro owners use the Action button for something else.

There's also a chance that there'll be some significant changes to the iPhone photography experience on the software side – details about how the OS and apps work don't tend to leak as frequently as ones about hardware do. Nowadays, the increasingly advanced processing and availability of AI features set phones' cameras apart almost as much as the hardware, so there's always the possibility that we'll hear about some new 'Apple Intelligence' camera features exclusive to the new models.

* Details for nerds: except for the iPhone 12 models in 2020, Apple's iPhone announcements have all been in September since 2012. Before that, it was more free-form; the 4s was announced in October, the original iPhone in January, and the ones in-between at the Worldwide Developer's Conference in the summer.