iOS 7 Will Be Available For iPads And iPhones On September 18

At their event this morning in Cupertino, Apple’s Craig Federighi announced that iOS 7 will be available to everyone beginning on September 18th. iOS 7 was first announced back at WWDC in June, and has spent the last three months in a developer-only (wink, wink) Beta testing mode.

As expected, the update will be available for the iPhone 4 and later, the iPad 2 and later, the iPad mini, and the 5th gen iPod touch.

“Since we make updates easy, and available to as many customers as possible,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said. “iOS 7 will quickly become the world’s most popular mobile operating system.”

Those are some bold words, considering how dramatic a shift iOS 7 is away from the norm. If you’ve somehow missed it, iOS 7 is a pretty massive departure from iOS’ past iterations. Almost every core visual of the OS — from the icons, to the typography, to the overall style itself — has been changed, moving from the look we’ve grown accustomed to over the past 6 years to something quite different. Gone are the gradients, the drop shadows, and the heavy use of texture; instead, iOS 7’s design language focuses on a degree of minimalism, with a focus on bold color and simple lines.

They’ve been some very divisive changes, so it’ll be interesting to see how the general public will react to Apple’s new mobile software direction — thankfully, we’ll only have a few days to wait before those first consumer impressions start trickling in. By now though, it’s hard to think of iOS 7 as anything but a known quantity — it’s been dissected and criticized and lambasted and adored ever since the first beta was released to developers earlier this year. Now that Apple has pulled back the curtains on the new iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C, it’s time for iOS 7 to start making the rounds in earnest.

Sadly, Federighi’s iOS 7 segment didn’t offer up much in the way of new details — it was largely a recap of the stuff Apple talked up at WWDC a few months ago.

In case you’re not completely up to date on what Apple’s updated mobile operating brings to the table, we did a deeper look at everything that was new to iOS 7 back when the update was first announced.