A Major Redesign After 3 Years! The iPhone Is Going to Be Made as One Solid Piece of Glass

Whenever I browse leaks from consumer tech launch events, the first thing I look at isn’t the spec sheet, but whether this “map” has any new terrain on it. If you flip through the generations of iPhone, you’ll find that over the years Apple has mostly been repaving familiar city streets again and again—the roads got smoother, but there weren’t many new forks. But this time feels different. The information released by Mark Gurman is like suddenly seeing an unopened area appear on Google Maps: Apple is preparing to overhaul the iPhone from 2025 all the way to 2027 in a three-year redesign cycle, led by Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus. For someone like me, long since numbed by the aesthetics of candy-bar phones, a redesign on this scale finally feels like discovering there’s another village beyond the mountain.

Let’s start with what’s already set for September 2025: Apple will introduce the iPhone 17 Pro series and the all-new iPhone Air. The former will switch to an aluminum alloy body, a brand-new horizontal rear camera module, and a Ceramic Shield back panel—clearly a reorganization of its design language rather than just minor cosmetic tweaks. The latter feels more like a small side road that suddenly appears, with a thickness of only about 5.5mm, making it the thinnest iPhone ever. Looked at in this direction, Apple isn’t simply changing the skin; it’s redrawing these two product lines on the map entirely: “Pro for recognizability, Air for lightness and thinness.”

By September 2026, the point that really gets people excited arrives: Apple plans to release its first foldable-screen iPhone. It will use a book-style inward-folding design, with a 7.7-inch inner display and a 5.3-inch outer display. This size combination suggests Apple isn’t chasing gimmicks, but trying to find a balance between portability and usable screen area when unfolded.

But beyond the map, there are also parts that make me a little uneasy. This foldable will switch to a side-mounted Touch ID and remove Face ID entirely, which shows Apple has made quite a few compromises for the folding structure. And the price is even less forgiving: it will start at $2000, with the top configuration reaching $2799—well beyond the kind of territory ordinary users can casually step into. Compared with many current foldable products, Apple’s main advantage will most likely still be system integration and ecosystem synergy. But first-generation models are usually the ones that feel most like trial runs, so unless you really want to be among the first wave of pathfinders, waiting for the second generation may be the safer move.

If you look a little farther ahead, you’ll find that Apple’s true finale isn’t the foldable, but the 20th anniversary model planned for September 2027. Its goal is a full-screen display with no cutouts, using a seamless curved glass body and hiding both the front camera and Face ID components under the display, leaving no visible holes on the front at all. What’s most interesting about this isn’t just the sheer level of technology involved, but that it finally reconnects with Apple’s early design ideals. The reports mention that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had long wanted to create a “seamlessly connected” iPhone—a device with as little bezel as possible, like one clean sheet of glass.

If you connect these three years together, Apple is really clearing this map in three steps. In 2025, it redraws the exterior outline. In 2026, it tries opening up new foldable terrain. And in 2027, it makes a run at the true “final area”—a full-screen device that looks like one whole piece of glass. My take is that the 2027 anniversary edition is the one most worth watching for ordinary users, because it represents a directional shift. The 2026 foldable, meanwhile, is best suited to early adopters—provided you can accept the high price and the uncertainty of a first-generation product. For someone like me who can’t stand seeing question marks on a map, Apple is finally not just adding streetlights to the same old road this time—it’s actually expanded the boundaries of the iPhone map.