iPhone 20 in 2027: All-Glass, Buttonless, and Highly Unlikely
iPhone 20 in 2027: All-Glass, Buttonless, and Highly Unlikely
Publish Date: 2026-03-12 13:20:00
Source Domain: www.yankodesign.com
The iPhone turns 20 in 2027, and Apple apparently wants to throw a party that people will remember. Sources believe that the company is targeting a radical redesign for what will likely be called the iPhone 20, skipping “iPhone 19” the same way it jumped directly to the iPhone X back in 2017. More than just a naming trick, it came with the full-screen OLED design, Face ID, and the removal of the home button, a move that felt genuinely shocking at the time. The expectation building around the iPhone 20 is that history is supposed to repeat itself, only bigger.
The appetite is clearly there. Interest in bold Apple hardware has been riding high on the back of iPhone Fold rumors, and the search interest in “iPhone 20 design” has shot up by over 3,100% year-over-year. People are hungry for a leap, not an incremental shuffle. What Apple is reportedly planning, an all-glass unibody with no physical buttons and no visible cutouts anywhere on the device, is exactly the kind of leap that generates excitement. Whether it generates anything more than that is a genuinely open question.
Images courtesy of: AppleTrack
iPhone X (2017)
What it isn’t: an all-screen phone
Before the imagination runs completely wild, it helps to be specific about what “all-glass” is not. This is not a Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha situation, where the display wraps entirely around the phone like a very expensive, very fragile bracelet. That concept, for all its visual drama, would introduce a cascade of problems: iOS and most apps are built on the assumption that the back of a phone is inert. Making the entire surface interactive requires a fundamental rethinking of how software handles accidental input, palm rejection, and basic navigation, none of which Apple appears to be pursuing here.
Designer: Xiaomi
The more useful comparison is the Vivo APEX from 2019, a concept phone that was genuinely all-glass and buttonless without wrapping the display around the…
