Apple's Sept. 12 iPhone Event Is Probably in Cupertino

The Wall Street Journal says Apple is announcing its new iPhones—and, probably, a new Apple Watch and Apple TV—on Sept. 12, and there's no reason to disbelieve them. Apple's iPhone events have been on a Tuesday or Wednesday during the first two weeks of September for the past several years.

With invitations sent out a week in advance, it's already too late for invitations to have gone out for a Sept. 6 event, so Sept. 12 looks like the date. That begs the question: will it be in San Francisco or at the new Apple Park campus in Cupertino?

This is an interesting question because there hasn't been a lot of public access to Apple Park yet, and especially to its new, 1,000-seat Steve Jobs Theater. If the event is held at the theater, it would be the first major event Apple has had there.

Apple typically brings a few hundred developers, partners, and friends to its product launches, and it needs rooms for them. For Sept. 11, Expedia shows every hotel in Cupertino to be sold out. Check a week earlier, on Sept. 6, and there are rooms available at four major chain hotels near the Apple campus.

There's a small convention nearby in Santa Clara called PCB West, but the hotels along El Camino Real in Santa Clara aren't sold out; there are still rooms at the Ramada and Quality Inn in the area, the kind of chains frequented by conventioneers. But the universal, grayed-out status of hotels in Cupertino says there's going to be a lot of action around the Apple campus.

Apple's typical second choice, recently, has been the larger Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco; it has also done events at the California Theatre in San Jose. Hotel availability around those areas looks much better on Expedia, with plenty of affordable rooms. Now, San Francisco has a lot more rooms than Cupertino does in general, but Expedia isn't even saying it's a particularly busy day for San Francisco.

Downtown San Jose, at the lower right-hand corner of the graphic below, looks pretty booked up, but there's a lot of availability up by the airport. Downtown being booked up is a little suspicious because there's no convention going on in San Jose that week, so I'm sticking with the Cupertino idea.