Credit: Apple

CUPERTINO, Calif.—If you’re buying one of the new iPhones or the other hardware that Apple announced today, your new devices will ship with Apple’s latest operating system updates already installed. But if you’re not looking to spend a bunch of money on Apple’s latest and greatest, the new updates will land on Apple’s other supported devices on September 15.

Apple is shifting to a year-based numbering system starting this year, wiping away the previous grab bag of all-over-the-place version numbers. No corner of Apple’s ecosystem is going untouched: we’re getting iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26 Tahoe, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, visionOS 26, and even version 26 of whatever Apple is calling the HomePod’s software these days, all on the same day.

The headliner across all of the updates is Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” UI overhaul, which adds glass-inspired transparency and translucency and bouncy animations throughout all of Apple’s software. Inspired in part by the way that UI elements in visionOS float over top of your real-world surroundings, Liquid Glass is Apple’s most comprehensive UI overhaul since the release of iOS 7 back in 2013.

Other new features include a redesigned Phone app that also supports macOS; expanded options for filtering spam calls and texts; custom backgrounds in Messages group chats; a new version of the Metal graphics API; and all kinds of platform-specific odds and ends. The “more personal Siri” that Apple delayed earlier this year is still a work in progress—Apple has said it’s coming in iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26, but not when.

Whether your device can install the update depends on which software we’re talking about. For the Apple Watch, Apple TV, and HomePod, compatibility remains exactly the same as with last year’s releases (though only the second- and third-gen Apple TV 4K boxes get Liquid Glass). For iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, Apple has dropped just a handful of the oldest models supported by iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. But macOS 26 drops support for all but a handful of the remaining Intel Macs, and next year’s macOS 27 will drop Intel support entirely.

For those who don’t want to install the updates, Apple generally continues to offer security-only patches for its last-generation operating systems for at least a couple of months after release. This gives users the option to wait out the new-release bugs that sometimes ship alongside all the new features in any major update.