Yesterday saw two conflicting reports about next year’s 20th anniversary iPhone, said to embody Apple’s long-term vision of “a single slab of glass.”
There have already been contradictory reports about exactly what we should expect, but yesterday’s disagreement was the biggest yet …
The story so far
Former Apple design chief Jony Ive frequently referred to his long-term vision of the iPhone effectively becoming a single slab of glass. The company is widely believed to have retained this vision beyond Ive’s departure.
While Apple generally isn’t noted for making a big deal of its various product birthdays, the consensus view is that it’s aiming to get as close as possible to this vision in time for the iPhone’s 20th anniversary. This is likely to include embedding the Face ID tech beneath the display, with the possibility of the front-facing camera likewise being hidden beneath the screen.
We’ve already seen conflicting reports about what to expect, however. While it was initially thought that this would be a standalone model along the lines of the iPhone Air and upcoming iPhone Ultra, more recent reporting has suggested that this design will instead be used for next year’s iPhone Pro models.
Sequentially, this would be the iPhone 19 Pro, but it’s possible Apple may want to mark the anniversary by skipping this and jumping straight to the iPhone 20 naming.
Yesterday’s conflicting reports
Things got a little more confusing yesterday when an analyst suggested that Apple had given up on the idea of launching an all-glass iPhone next year.
While Jefferies once viewed the release of an all-glass iPhone as plausible, Lee believes development has come to a halt. According to the analyst, supply chain checks suggest the project was cancelled due to low yield.
However, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman was quick to contradict this.
Apple Inc. is still planning to offer a glass-centric overhaul of the iPhone for the device’s 20th anniversary, people familiar with the matter said, countering an analyst report that the move had been canceled […] Though Apple’s vision for an iPhone with uninterrupted glass has proven challenging to execute, [its] product road map hasn’t changed.
The likely reality
The key point here is that there is not a single final destination for Apple’s vision of the iPhone. Whatever the company plans for next year, it will only ever be one or more steps closer to that sci-fi vision of “a single slab of glass.”
The question is not whether that box will be ticked next year, but instead how much progress we see the company make toward its vision. But whether it is one step closer or several, it certainly won’t be the last one in the evolution of the iPhone design.
Indeed, Gurman indicated that Apple has taken a step back from the point it had originally hoped to reach by next year.
A more aspirational version championed by Apple’s design studio used even more glass, instead of metal, but was scrapped early on. With that approach, the company encountered problems connecting the glass panels together. The design didn’t hold up when Apple had to figure out how to produce it at large volumes, according to the people.
It’s very likely that the Jefferies analyst heard the same thing, but only relatively recently, and took this to mean complete abandonment of the plan.
My own expectation is that next year’s design will be a major step forward – the equivalent of the launch of the iPhone X – but that there will be much more to come in subsequent years. The big question to me is whether the 2027 iPhone will be a sufficient leap for Apple to apply some special branding, be that labelling it as a 20th anniversary iPhone (very unlikely, in my view), giving it some other special name, or skipping a generation to call it the iPhone 20.
What’s your expectation? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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