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

At its event this morning in Cupertino, Apple announced that iOS 7 will be available to everyone beginning on. 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. Apple’s Craig Federighi just announced that iOS 7 will be available to the masses on September 18.

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.

We did a deeper look at everything that was new to iOS 7 back when the update was first announced.