Apple held its big annual iPhone event Tuesday, showing off the upcoming ultrathin iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, AirPods Pro 3, Apple Watch Series 11, the Apple Watch SE 3 and the Apple Watch Ultra 3. There were a few mentions of video games during the show, but in one sequence showing off the new camera for the iPhone 17, it was hard to ignore that this particular shot looked like something out of the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.
Megan Nash, product manager for iPhone, spoke during the event about the iPhone 17’s new 48-megapixel main camera that Apple calls Dual Fusion, which can take sharp photos at full resolution or take 2x crop-zoomed images at 24 megapixels. Behind her was an iconic backdrop of a strip from Miami that made some GTA fans wonder if maybe Apple was going to announce a deal with Rockstar Games.
A thread on the GTA subreddit titled Did Apple just tease GTA VI on iPhone? appeared shortly after Nash’s sequence in the iPhone event. Most posters on the thread joked and reminded everyone that the fictional Vice City is based on the real Miami. The upcoming GTA 6 takes place in the fictional state of Leonida, a parody of Florida, with one of the cities players can visit being Vice City.
Watch this: Everything Announced at Apple’s iPhone 17 Event in 7 Minutes
CNET did reach out to Apple and Rockstar Games just in case. Neither company immediately responded to a request for comment.
GTA 6 was slated to come out this year, but Rockstar Games announced in May that it was delayed. The new date is currently set for May 26, 2026. This would mean that if there were an iOS version of the game, it would be playable on an iPhone 17. Even though the new iPhone 17 will come with an A19 chip’s five-core GPU that can improve gaming, it’s unlikely it could run the next GTA game without some modifications.
On the other hand, the iPhone Air, iPhone Pro and Pro Max have A19 Pro chips with a more powerful six-core GPU (at least for the latter two), which Apple said has “MacBook Pro levels of compute … perfect for GPU-intensive AI workloads.” If Apple is comparing the A19 Pro’s performance to that of a MacBook Pro (though which MacBook Pro, specifically, we don’t know), it’s possible GTA 6 could be playable.
GTA 6 is arguably the most anticipated game coming for the current generation of consoles, and there has been speculation that it could be priced at $100. This is much higher than the current price tag of $70 for most games, although Nintendo did start releasing new games for $80 on its Switch 2.
Preorders for the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone 17 Air will start at 5 a.m. PT on Friday, Sept. 12.
