But First, On Flying Cars And Holograms

This is not a sci-fi article. The iPhone of 2007 and the iPhone of 2017 look generally similar to one another, so let’s talk about some off-the-wall futuristic iPhone ideas and why I don’t believe we’ll be seeing them in 2027.

Why still a rectangle and not a square? Or a circle? First, books are not squares or circles, they’re rectangles. Humans read text on a page in a particular way and I believe a portrait screen ratio will be sticking around for at least the next ten years.

Why still think there will even be an iPhone? What about AR glasses and VR goggles and flying cars? Technology doesn’t move as fast as people think. 100 years ago people were convinced we’d be living in colonies on Mars and food would materialize from pills. Instead we haven’t put a person on a new celestial body in 50 years and Soylent not only tastes bad but made people sick. The iPhone will still be around in 2027 and will still mostly look like the smartphones we use today.

That’s not to say that VR goggles and AR glasses won’t exist in 10 years, they just won’t be replacing the devices in our pockets.

What about holographic displays and hand-wavey Minority Report stuff? In 2027, we’ll still be using computers on desks with monitors and phones we hold in our hands. Truly futuristic hand-wavey interfaces with floating digital representations of data that can manipulated in any direction and flung to other devices won’t be here by then.

What about foldable, rollable or completely flexible displays? I think this is the most likely wildcard out of all the futuristic scenarios. Samsung has been working on flexible displays for almost a decade, and their head of mobile products said the Galaxy X with a flexible display is coming in 2018. No one knows if the whole phone will be flexible (needing a flexible battery and internal components) or maybe just the screen area (with a thick chin holding the inflexible components) but either way, if Samsung introduces a groundbreaking flexible smartphone it could start an arms race in the industry, driving Apple in that direction too. Time will tell.

With that out of the way, let’s get into what the iPhone XX could look like.