This is not really news, any more than the fact of Apple holding a September event is news. Both are connected, obviously, and both come like clockwork. But I did find this interesting:

My mom is an import / export broker and told me they were notified that Apple has reserved almost all air freight going from China -> USA for the upcoming weeks. And the note was “Product Launch” so either they’re placing iPhones in the states, or there is something else happening.

And, from the comments:

The funny thing is, those iPhones seriously add up in terms of value per cubic meter.

Imagine a regular living room, maybe 6 x 6 meters, with 2.75 m ceilings. That’s 99 cubic meters of space. An iPhone X box is 16x5x8.8 cm which translates to 704 cubic cm, or 0.000704 cubic meter.

So your average living room can hold over 140,000 iPhone X boxes. That’s a cool $140M of retail value right there.

Imagine the value of a cargo plane filled with iPhones.