Apple may release a ‘mostly glass, curved iPhone’ in 2027
This morning, while summarizing an Apple “product blitz” he expects for 2027, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter that Apple is planning a “mostly glass, curved iPhone” with no display cutouts for that year, which happens to be the iPhone’s 20th anniversary.
That follows a report last weekend from The Information, which said that “at least one 2027 iPhone model that will place the front-facing camera underneath the screen to enable a truly edge-to-edge display.” Late last year, a report from The Elec said Apple is working with its display partners to create a bezel-less iPhone, but not one that curves the display down the side of the phone — a trick companies like Samsung and Vivo have employed in the past.
But the “mostly glass, curved” part of Gurman’s prediction is more interesting to me, because what the heck does that mean? After all, I’d describe the iPhone 15 Pro sitting on my desk right now as “mostly glass,” with the only exterior metal being around the camera lenses and in its titanium edge, which the front and back curve down to. Assuming he’s not describing a banana-shaped iPhone, the closest hints are probably in Apple patents revealed over the years, like one from 2019 that describes a phone encased in glass that “forms a continuous loop” around the device.
Apart from a changing iPhone, Gurman describes what sounds like a big year for Apple. He reiterates past reports that the first foldable iPhone should be out by 2027, and that the company’s first smart glasses competitor to Meta Ray-Bans will be along that year. So will those rumored camera-equipped AirPods and Apple Watches, he says.
Gurman also suggests that Apple’s home robot — a tabletop robot that features “an AI assistant with its own personality” — will come in 2027. On that “personality” mention, it’s hard not to think about the adorable robotic lamp Apple’s internal researchers have been tinkering with.
Finally, Gurman writes that by 2027 Apple could finally ship an LLM-powered Siri and may have created new chips for its server-side AI processing. A December report from The Information covered such a development and suggested that the team handling Apple’s new AI chips is the same Israel-based silicon design group that was “instrumental in designing” the Apple silicon chips that let the company ditch Intel chips for its Macs in 2020.