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Apple turned "is this real" into a hardware feature, and stayed out of the standard everyone else agreed on | Thursday, September 10, 2026

At its "Surprise and Shine" event on September 9, John Ternus' first as chief executive, Apple unveiled the iPhone 18 Pro, a foldable iPhone Duo, and a far more capable Siri, and introduced Apple Reference Image, which signs a photo's sensor data at the moment of capture to prove the image came off a real camera and was not generated or edited by AI.