Apple has done the anniversary thing once before, and it went well enough that the company has clearly decided to do it again.
In 2017 the iPhone turned ten, Apple skipped a number, and the iPhone X arrived with no Home button and a screen that ran to the edges. That phone set the visual template for everything Apple has sold since. Eight years of iPhones have essentially been iterations on a decision made for a birthday.
2027 is the twentieth anniversary, and the rumours all point the same way: Apple is planning to do it again, with a phone widely expected to be called the iPhone 20 rather than the iPhone 19. It should land in the autumn of 2027, sharing a stage with the second-generation foldable and, if Mark Gurman’s reporting on Apple’s 2027 slate holds up, AirPods with cameras in them.
Here is everything currently expected of the design, what the evidence behind each claim actually is, and which single piece of it is most likely to fall over before launch.
The Goal Is a Phone That Looks Like One Piece of Glass
Everything else on this list follows from a single ambition, so it is worth stating plainly. Apple wants to build an iPhone that reads as a single, continuous slab of glass. No visible seams, no cutouts in the screen, no obvious joins between materials.
Gurman has described the phone as mostly glass and curved, with a glass back returning and the front glass wrapping around all four edges. That is not a new idea inside Apple. It is close to what Jony Ive talked about for years before he left, the iPhone as a pure object with no visible interruptions, and Apple has been quietly engineering towards it since 2007 while waiting for manufacturing to catch up.
The most persuasive evidence is not a render. It is money. Weibo leaker Fixed Focus Digital reported that the relevant supply chain facilities have already finished retooling and are waiting on machining to begin. Renders cost nothing to produce and prove nothing. Factories being stripped out and rebuilt eighteen months ahead of a launch means somebody has committed real capital to a design decision that is, as far as the public is concerned, still a rumour.
Build quality is said to be in the same class as the first-generation iPhone Air, which is a useful comparison. That phone was Apple showing off what it could do with tolerances and materials, the culmination of a long run at making iPhones thinner, whatever you think of how the Air line has gone since.
Curved, but Not the Way Android Did It
The word “curved” is doing a lot of work in these rumours, and it is worth being precise, because Android already ran this experiment and mostly abandoned it.
Samsung spent years shipping waterfall displays, where the panel rolls steeply down the sides of the phone. They photographed beautifully and were a nuisance to live with. Palm rejection never quite worked, so you would trigger things with the base of your thumb. Content near the edge of the screen distorted. Screen protectors became a specialist purchase. Samsung has been walking the idea back for several generations now.
What Apple is reportedly chasing is different: an equal-depth quad-curved panel, curving by the same shallow amount on all four sides, using micro-curves rather than a steep roll. The curve is meant to be gentle enough that you notice the absence of a hard edge without ever really seeing a curve.
Done properly, that fixes the things that made waterfall screens annoying. Swipes inward from the edge become a smoother gesture instead of a small cliff. Content stays undistorted because the deviation is tiny. And the phone sits softer in the hand, which matters more than it sounds when you are holding the thing for hours a day.
Some of the Effect May Be an Optical Trick
This is the strangest claim in the whole pile, and the one worth watching most closely.
Ice Universe has suggested the effect does not come from physical curvature alone, and that it is not comparable to existing quad-curved panels or any Android curved screen. The suggestion is a combination of optical refraction, light-guiding structures inside the stack, and deliberately engineered visual illusion, all working to make the frame appear to recede until the display looks like it runs off the edge of the object.
If that sounds like marketing, remember that Apple has form here. The rounded corners of iOS content are cut to match the physical corner radius of the hardware. The Dynamic Island exists because Apple decided a hardware compromise should be dressed up as a software feature. Making the physical edge of a phone visually disappear is exactly the sort of thing Apple would spend years on.
One report claims Apple could market the panel as a Liquid Glass Display, tying the hardware to the Liquid Glass software language it introduced with iOS 26. That would be tidy, and it is the sort of alignment Apple loves. Treat the name itself as unconfirmed.
Treat the bezel numbers with more caution still. A mock-up doing the rounds put the surround at 1.1mm against roughly 1.44mm on the iPhone 17 Pro. It came from an account with no track record worth speaking of. The direction is almost certainly right. The decimal places are somebody’s guess.
The Front Is the Part That Might Not Happen
Here is the bit everyone glosses over. A phone with zero cutouts in the display needs somewhere to put Face ID and the selfie camera, and the honest answer is that nobody has solved that well yet.
The plan reportedly involves moving both under the panel, with one description mentioning a spliced micro-transparent glass window that lets Face ID’s infrared sensors see through the display. Under-display cameras exist on Android phones today, and the image quality is uniformly poor, because you are shooting through a layer of pixels. Face ID is harder again, since it projects and reads a structured infrared pattern that has to stay accurate enough to authenticate payments.
Ross Young of DSCC, who has one of the better records in display supply chain reporting, does not think the technology will be fully ready for 2027. Apple is still testing an under-screen camera, but a small hole-punch surviving looks entirely plausible, as does a further shrunken version of the Dynamic Island.
That would not be a first. Under-screen Face ID has been rumoured, and then quietly dropped, more than once already. It showed up in iPhone 18 Pro leaks before the story settled into what we now expect: a Dynamic Island roughly 35 percent smaller rather than gone. Shrinking the cutout is the pattern. Eliminating it keeps slipping.
So if you take one thing from this article, take this: the all-glass body is well evidenced and being tooled for right now. The uninterrupted front is an aspiration that has already missed several deadlines.
Two Sizes, One of Them Sold as a 7-Inch Phone
Apple is said to be planning two anniversary models at roughly 6.3 and 6.9 inches, the same pairing as the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max.
The interesting wrinkle is that the larger model could creep up fractionally and be marketed as a 7-inch phone, purely because thinner bezels let more screen fit inside a body of about the same size. Nothing in your pocket changes. The number on the spec sheet goes up.
That is not a criticism so much as a prediction. “Seven inches” is a headline. Apple will use it.
The Frame Is Really an Argument About Heat
Around the glass sits a thin polished band, and the material for it is genuinely unsettled.
Some rumours have Apple moving away from the aluminium it currently uses. Fixed Focus Digital has pushed back hard on both of the popular theories, arguing that a return to titanium is not happening and that Liquid Metal is not happening either, because aluminium remains the only practical option once you account for the heat on-device AI processing generates. Aluminium moves heat away from the chip better than titanium does, which is the unglamorous reason Apple walked back from titanium after the 15 Pro and 16 Pro in the first place.
Thermals are becoming the constraint that quietly decides everything. It is the reason the iPhone 18 Pro Max is rumoured to be picking up a stainless steel vapour chamber and some weight with it, and it is the reason a phone wrapped in glass raises eyebrows among people who understand that glass is a worse conductor than metal.
There is a caveat that cuts the other way, though. The same leaker described aluminium as the right material for straight-edged phones specifically. The anniversary model is the one phone in the roadmap that is not straight-edged, which leaves the door open for something different on this device alone.
Buttons That Do Not Move
The last piece is one Apple has tried and shelved before, which makes it both credible and easy to overpromise.
Project Bongo was an internal effort to replace the iPhone’s mechanical buttons with solid-state haptic equivalents. It was rumoured for the iPhone 15 Pro, then dropped late in development. It is now said to be back for the anniversary phone, covering the Side button, the volume buttons, the Action button and Camera Control, all built into the frame with no physical movement when you press them. You would feel a click generated by a haptic engine rather than a switch.
The logic is obvious once you connect it to the glass. Mechanical buttons need openings in the body. Openings are seams, and seams ruin a phone that is supposed to look like one unbroken object. Solid-state buttons let Apple seal the thing.
The reported testing is more encouraging than last time. The buttons are said to have passed with gloves on, with wet hands, at temperature extremes, and with a case fitted, which was reportedly where earlier attempts came unstuck. There is also an ultra-low energy microprocessor said to keep them responsive when the phone is powered off or the battery is flat, which answers the obvious objection about a dead phone becoming a brick with no way to force a restart.
Answers it on paper, at least. Ask anyone who used a Home button on an iPhone 7 how convincing a fake click felt on day one.
What It Means If You Are Buying Sooner Than 2027
Most people reading this will replace a phone at least once before the anniversary model exists, so here is the practical read.
A redesign this large makes the phones either side of it awkward. The iPhone 18 Pro is a strong iterative update and, on the current rumours, not worth jumping to from a 17 Pro. The generation after it lands in the shadow of a twentieth anniversary phone that Apple will want everyone talking about. If you are on a two or three year cycle and you care about owning the version that gets remembered, buying in 2026 puts your next natural upgrade right on top of the 2027 launch.
The counter-argument is the one the iPhone X taught everybody. First-generation redesigns ship with first-generation problems, they cost more, and the version that arrives twelve months later is usually the one worth owning. The iPhone X was a landmark. The iPhone XS was the better phone.
Nobody has leaked a price yet, and anyone quoting one is guessing. What can be said is that curved glass, an under-display sensor stack and solid-state buttons are all expensive, none of them make the phone cheaper to build, and Apple has not historically absorbed that sort of thing quietly.
How Much of This Should You Believe
Sorting it by how much evidence sits behind each claim:
- Very likely: a major redesign in autumn 2027, an all-glass body with curved edges, two sizes around 6.3 and 6.9 inches, and heavily reduced bezels. Multiple independent sources, plus factories being retooled.
- Plausible: solid-state haptic buttons and the shallow micro-curve approach. Both are well sourced, both have failed to ship before.
- Doubtful: a completely uninterrupted front with Face ID and the selfie camera fully hidden. The display analyst with the best track record on exactly this question says the technology will not be ready.
- Guesswork: the 1.1mm bezel figure, the Liquid Glass Display name, the frame material, and every price you will see quoted between now and 2027.
Eighteen months is a long time. Apple has cut features later than this, and the phone that gets held up on stage in 2027 will not match every rumour on this page. But the shape of it is now clear enough to plan around, and it is the biggest change to what an iPhone looks like since the last time Apple decided a birthday was a good reason to start over.
Over to You
Is a phone that looks like a single piece of glass something you actually want, or does it read as a design exercise that will be harder to hold and more expensive to repair? And would you give up clicky buttons for a haptic fake, or is that a step too far? Tell us below.
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