And thinking about it, I have to wonder: Is Apple making such an enormous and potentially unpopular change this year so that next year’s iPhone — you know, the one that might have an all-glass display and an ultra-sharp AMOLED screen — won’t suffer? That’s the phone that might ditch the home button altogether. It’s also the phone that will coincidentally be released the same year as the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone.
And there will be backlash. The backlash will be angrier than when Apple changed from the 30-pin connector to the Lightning port (making all of those old dock accessories obsolete) and the rallying cry from pundits is already louder than it was when Apple decided to not include a floppy drive on the original iMac.
Anyway, the 2017 iPhone, according to Kuo, will be made primarily from glass, including curved glass bodywork designed to replicate the shape of the iPhone 4s. This claim has been repeated several times, and now an industry insider has made comments which go some way to supporting the idea.
Catcher Technology is an Apple supplier, a firm which builds smartphone bodies and has made them for previous iPhone models where it has created the metal components, but now the company’s chairman and CEO, Allen Horng, has commented on the glass body rumours.
In addition, reports from Patently Apple have suggested that the future iPhone will have a curved display, forming active sidewalls with virtual buttons. Also, rumours suggests that Apple may launch an all glass iPhone with an OLED curved edge display, adding more credibility to the recent reports.