iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max pre-orders open in more than 65 countries and regions at 5 a.m. PT today, and Apple names 18 of them. The rest of that list is not published anywhere we could find, which leaves a lot of readers checking a store page rather than a press release to learn whether today is their day.
This is a preparation question rather than a detail. Apple’s pre-order sentence and its availability sentence cover different groups of countries, and the 20 markets in the later group are given a date for going on sale without a matching sentence about pre-ordering.
Key facts on the published country lists
| Item | What Apple publishes |
|---|---|
| Pre-order reach | More than 65 countries and regions, beginning at 5 a.m. PT on Saturday, September 12 |
| Countries Apple names | 18, in a list introduced by the word including |
| Full first-wave list | Not published |
| Availability | Friday, September 18 for that first group |
| Second group | 20 other countries and regions from Friday, September 25, with no list and no pre-order sentence |
| Storefronts with quotable pre-order times | Ten, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, Singapore, India and the UAE |
The 18 countries Apple names in its press release
Apple’s wording is that customers in more than 65 countries and regions, including the following, will be able to pre-order from 5 a.m. PT this Saturday, September 12, with availability beginning Friday, September 18.
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- Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia
- France, Germany, India, Japan, Malaysia
- Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Türkiye
- the UAE, the UK, the United States, Vietnam
The word including is doing a lot of work there. Apple has published a named list of 18 and a total of more than 65, and it has not published the roughly 47 countries in between.
The second group is thinner still. Apple’s next sentence says iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will be available in 20 other countries and regions beginning Friday, September 25. That sentence gives a date for going on sale and says nothing about pre-ordering, so whether a buyer in one of those 20 markets can place an order today is simply not addressed on any Apple page we read. Apple has not named those 20 countries either.
Apple’s other country lists do not match this one
Apple publishes a second, quite different country list for the same phones, in its eSIM section. Twelve markets get models with no SIM tray, and seven of those twelve are not named in the pre-order sentence at all, which is a useful reminder that Apple’s product documentation reaches further than its launch copy.
| Apple’s eSIM-only market | Named in the pre-order sentence |
|---|---|
| Canada, Japan, Mexico, UAE, United States | Yes |
| Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia | No |
| Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands | No |
Being on the eSIM list says nothing about which wave a market falls into, and Apple does not connect the two lists. It does mean a buyer in those markets has one extra thing to check before ordering, because Apple’s footnote says eSIM use requires a carrier that supports eSIM and a service plan.
What to do if Apple has not named your country
The storefront is the authority. Every regional Apple Store page we read that is in the first group carries its own pre-order sentence with a local time, and three of them, India, Singapore and the UAE, also print the availability date. Where a store page says nothing about pre-ordering today, Apple has published nothing for that market and we will not fill the gap with a guess.
Ten storefronts carry a quotable pre-order time: the US at 5:00 a.m. PT, the UK at 1:00 pm BST, India at 5:30 PM IST, Canada at 5:00 am PT, Australia at 10:00 pm AEST, Germany at 14:00 MESZ, France at 14 h CEST, Japan at 9 p.m., Singapore at 8pm SGT and the UAE at 4:00 p.m. local time. They all describe the same moment, so a market absent from that set is not a market running late. It is a market Apple has not written about in the same detail.
The decisions that do not depend on geography can be made now. Storage, finish, size and payment route are all published per market, and Apple’s $1,199 and $1,299 US starting prices depend on selecting a carrier at checkout, a structure that does not exist in the UK, where one price covers both routes.
What Apple has not said
Apple has not published the full list of first-wave countries, the list of 20 second-wave countries, or any statement about whether second-wave buyers can pre-order today. It has published no UTC time, no pre-order queue, no feature it calls Express checkout, and no per-customer order limit outside Singapore, whose store page caps buyers at two of each model. The widely repeated advice about saving a configuration in advance traces to Apple’s user forums, which are user-generated rather than Apple documentation, so we do not attribute it to Apple.
Pre-orders open at 5 a.m. PT today, September 12, with availability on Friday, September 18 and 20 further countries on Friday, September 25. iOS 27 arrives free on Monday, September 14, the iPhone Duo pre-orders on October 16 in more than 70 countries, and our event recap covers the rest of the lineup.
