We're approaching the dawn of the iPhone 18 Pro, but a new report is addressing what to expect from the iPhone 20. Here's what to expect, so far.
From the earliest days of Apple's iPhone there has been that graphic showing the sea change it brought to smartphones. Before it, nothing looked like the iPhone, and after it, everything looked like it.
It wasn't as clear cut when the iPhone celebrated its tenth anniversary with the iPhone X. But when you first used it, or now if you use an older one, you see the huge difference.
Apple made the Home button a key part of the original iPhone and then threw it away. It changed how we used our iPhones completely.
And there have long been rumors that it aims to do the same thing for the 20th anniversary. But we couldn't imagine the iPhone before we had it, and we couldn't imagine the iPhone X before it was launched, so we've just been trusting that Apple can pull it off again.
According to Bloomberg, it will and it's right on track to do so. In a report listing what Apple will launch in the next couple of years, it says that the 20th anniversary iPhone will be the biggest overhaul to the device, and the most groundbreaking model in years.
The only further detail it has is that we should expect the iPhone 20 to have a curved glass chassis, and thinner bezels. So far that doesn't seem as revolutionary as when the iPhone X made us learn a new set of swipes, though.
Perhaps this why there has been speculation that Apple won't do an anniversary iPhone because it really can't. Yet right back at the launch of the iPhone X, Tim Cook said that it would "set the path for technology for the next decade."
Apple's iPhone X in 2017 was genuinely revolutionary - image credit: Apple.
He was certainly right about it being a new path, and as well as every iPhone eventually adopting the new style, so did every Android phone. In 2027, it will be time to see whether he was right about how long the technology would, or should, last.
iPhone 9, iPhone 19
The original iPhone was not called the iPhone 1, and the second was not called the iPhone 2. It was the iPhone 3G, and then there was the 3GS, the 4, the 4s, and so it went on until the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus.
Those were released to great fanfare by Apple in 2017, only to be pushed from everyone's mind by the iPhone X that was announced in the same event. If you watched that event at the time, you wanted an iPhone 8, until you then saw the iPhone X.
The iPhone 8 looks so dated now that it's hard to believe it launched on the same day as the iPhone X.
It's not clear whether a similar thing will happen again for the 20th anniversary. That's because we're about to see the iPhone 18 range, so Apple would ordinarily be expected to release the iPhone 19 lineup in 2027.
Previous reports have said that it will skip the 19 and go straight to the iPhone 20, in recognition of the anniversary. But that would suggest that the whole lineup will be the iPhone 20 range, rather than Apple singling out one single model.
What we'll see
There will certainly be an iPhone released on the 20th anniversary of the original. It would seem odd if it weren't commemorating that anniversary, and the new report backs up the idea that it will.
But beyond that, the new claim also backs up AppleInsider reports that Apple has been attempting an all-glass iPhone since at least 2020.
"For example, glass backs and glass sides may be transparent, allowing the electronic device to include additional displays that are viewable through the sides and/or the back," said an Apple patent. "Moreover, the side- and back-viewable displays may be made touch and/or force sensitive using touch- and/or force-sensing systems, effectively turning the side and back surfaces into additional input devices or surfaces with which a user may interact to control the electronic device."
There is the question of how this would feel in the hand, and of how case manufacturers would work with it. There is the question of just how breakable the glass is if there isn't a metal frame to it.
Other reports about the use of glass in the anniversary iPhone have claimed that Apple wants to entirely get rid of the bezel around the display. The new report only goes so far as to say that bezels will be thinner, but Apple has been reducing their size for years and years.
Lessons learned from the iPhone Air
The 2025 iPhone Air is not all glass and it doesn't have unusually thin bezels, but still it was clearly a proving ground for Apple designs. It may most obviously have affected the design of the foldable iPhone Ultra, for instance.
Apple's current iPhone Air.
But the ability to engineer such a small and light iPhone made the iPhone Air feel like a glimpse of the future. It's already been claimed that the iPhone 20's chassis will use the same or a similar glass assembly, even if it will be more rounded.
iPhone 20 needs a visible change
Strictly speaking, the iPhone 20 does not need anything but to be better in some ways than the phones that precede it. But if Apple is to get the same attention it did for the iPhone X, the changes can't be as simple as a more powerful processor.
Every year's phones get more powerful processors. Then it's less of an annual universal rule, but iPhones over the years have had their bezels decreasing.
So that wouldn't feel special and it wouldn't be noticeable to the general buying public, unless it was a spectacular difference. Such as there being no bezel at all, and instead a wraparound OLED screen that displayed information on the edges.
Consequently, the iPhone 20 is surely going to have to look markedly and very appealingly different to its predecessors - while remaining clearly an iPhone. It's an enormous task, and it's been easy to think Apple might not be able to do it.
So if the new report is chiefly regurgitating old rumors, its insistence that the iPhone 20 is on track is a relief.
