Report: Apple’s 20th Anniversary iPhone Will Have Curved Glass Sides

Apple’s annual WWDC keynote, which will kick off in less than an hour, will set the stage for a new unified design effort that will affect all of the company’s platforms. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is reporting today that the new interface elements we’ll see today are dubbed “Liquid Glass,” and they will introduce various transparency and shine effects across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

According to Gurman, Liquid Glass is also inspiring the design of Apple’s 20th anniversary iPhone, which will be released in 2027. This is expected to be the biggest iPhone redesign since the release of the iPhone X back in 2017.

“That 20th anniversary iPhone will expand on the glass concept, Gurman wrote. “It will have curved glass sides around the entire phone, even at the edges. There will be extraordinarily slim bezels and no cutout section in the screen. Inside Apple, the 2027 iPhone is called the “Glasswing,” in reference to the type of butterfly that has transparent wings.”

It’s a bit hard to imagine how a phone with curved glass sides will look like, and it also raises some questions about durability. However, the possibility of this new iPhone featuring almost no bezels and no cutout area on the front to hide the front-facing camera and Face ID sensors will be a significant change. And it also doesn’t mean that the quite elegant “Dynamic Island” feature on recent iPhones will be going away.

Gurman believes that Apple’s Liquid Glass design philosophy is likely to impact its other products as well. However, the company will first need to get the software aspect right at a time when it’s clearly lagging behind the competition in the AI race.