iPhone 17 release date: All the possibilities for this year's phone launch

Plenty of factors around this year's iPhone 17 models remain shrouded in mystery. The iPhone 17 release date is really one of them.

To be clear, Apple hasn't officially announced any launch plans for its upcoming phones or confirmed any details about devices that are in its pipeline. And that's par for the course at Apple, where questions about future product plans are typically met with a terse "no comment."

But in a sense, Apple has told us when to expect new iPhones by way of its track record of releasing past models. Using that historical release data — and supplementing it with any rumors about release plans — we can make a pretty good guess about the iPhone 17 release date. In fact, with the help of a calendar, we can pretty much point to a particular day and have a good chance of being proven right in a few months' time.

Apple's iPhone release schedule won't always be so easy to predict if a rumor of the company staggering its iPhone releases in future years turns out to be accurate. But for the iPhone 17 release, historical data on past iPhone launches paints a pretty detailed picture.

Past iPhone releases

If you want to know when to expect an iPhone release, you'll be on pretty solid footing if you turn your attention to September. Apple certainly has a penchant for announcing its latest phones in that particular month.

I'm not pulling that release window out of thin air. I've been covering Apple longer than the iPhone has existed, and I was there when Steve Jobs showed off Apple's first stab at a smartphone. That was in January, by the way, with the phone itself arriving in stores by the end of June.

But things have changed dramatically since then, as you can see by looking at the chart above that displays iPhone launches dating back a decade. Skim the column for the date in which Apple held its iPhone launch event, and you'll see one month appearing again and again — September.

There is an exception, of course, and it's the iPhone 12 launch, where Apple announced those phones in October. That was 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which threw a lot of things into chaos, including iPhone assembly. While there's a certain amount of turbulence in the world these days — tariffs and trade wars, anyone? — that isn't expected to impact the release schedule for phones. (Prices could be another matter.)

Drilling further into that announce date data, it should become pretty clear that Apple doesn't just like September for iPhone launches, it also likes to show off its new phones in the first half of the month. Given that there's typically a lag of 10 days or so between the point in which Apple announces its phone and when they go on sale, a launch event in the first half of the month means that the phones hit retail shelves before the end of September. That gives Apple a full quarter of new iPhone sales during the holiday season, Apple's most important quarter of the year.

There are a few instances of iPhones that didn't ship in September, though. The iPhone 14 Plus went on sale in October 2022, about two weeks after the rest of the iPhone 14 lineup. In 2018, the iPhone XR didn't go on sale until the end of October, while the iPhone X saw its sales pushed back until November 2017 after a September 12 launch event.

Those three models have something in common — they marked the first time Apple has used those particular designs for its phone lineup. The fact that new types of iPhones sometimes see staggered release dates could prove to be relevant this year, when Apple is rumored to be adding an iPhone 17 Air to its lineup.

What the rumors say about the iPhone 17 release date

There's no specific rumor claiming to reveal the iPhone 17 release date. That's not unexpected. We're still many months away from the iPhone launch as of this writing, and release date rumors tend to appear closer to the event itself.

That said, a scan of various iPhone 17 rumor round-ups reveals a consensus date of September 2025 for Apple's iPhone event. Again that doesn't appear to be based on any specific rumor or revelation, but rather an understanding that history tends to repeat itself when it comes to iPhone launches. And all past evidence indicates a September launch.

When I think the iPhone 17 release will be

With all that in mind, only a fool would be so bold as to predict a specific date for an iPhone 17 release. And given how many years I've been covering the iPhone, that fool may as well be me.

Let's assume that Apple is going to stick to a September release window in general, with an eye toward getting the phone on sale by the end of the month. That would narrow things down to the first two weeks of September 2025.

I can tell you from attending my share of Apple events that Apple seems to prefer holding its launch events on Tuesdays. There are two Tuesdays in the first half of September — September 2 and September 9.

That first date falls the day after Labor Day in the U.S., and I imagine Apple wouldn't want to prep for a big launch event over a holiday weekend. That leaves September 9 as the most likely date for an iPhone 17 event, with September 10 as a possibility if Apple throws us a curveball and decides to launch its phones on a Wednesday instead.

Using the usual 10-day gap between the phone announcement and the start of retail sales, a September 9 launch day would mean that the iPhone 17 models would land in stores on September 19. That date would also assume that there's no staggered release for the iPhone 17 Air, something I'm not even foolish enough to guess about at this point.

I should reiterate again that these are all guesses based largely on the way Apple's done things over and over again, and that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

At the end of the day, Apple could surprise everyone by picking a totally different date for the iPhone 17 release that bears no resemblance to anything the company has done in the past.

All the same, I'm keeping September 9 free on my calendar. We'll see how accurate that is later this year.

More from Tom's Guide

• Apple's rumored iPhone release date shake-up is good news for the iPhone 17 – here's why
• Trump tariffs could impact iPhone 17 prices — should you upgrade now?
• Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge vs. iPhone 17 Air: What we know so far