iOS 26 is giving us a glass-like UI, but Apple’s long-term vision for the iPhone hardware is what former design chief Jony Ive referred to as a “single slab of glass.”
A new Apple patent application appears to refer to work on this, describing a “six-sided glass enclosure” …
An all-glass iPhone
Ive may be long gone from his role at Apple, but the company is believed to be still working toward his vision of a device which would look like a single slab of glass.
The company’s first major step toward that was the launch of the iPhone X back in 2017, but progress since then has been incremental. Bezels have gradually decreased in width, but are still very much in evidence.
Eliminating them altogether would require a curved display which bends around the sides of the device. The Apple Watch kind of fakes this look, by hiding the bezels beneath curved glass, but the company’s goal for the iPhone is for the display to be active all the way into those curved edges.
Samsung achieved this with the sides of its earlier Galaxy Edge series, but the trade-off was very substantial forehead and chin areas, and the company changed its goal to simply making the thinnest possible bezels.
However, Apple is believed to want to go beyond this, essentially making the entire iPhone appear to be just one solid slab of glass.
Latest patent describes six sides of glass
A patent application for a glass enclosure describes how Apple could get close to this.
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