Apple is reportedly working on two major iPhone redesigns for the next few years: a foldable iPhone and a truly edge-to-edge model with no visible cutouts.
On paper, those sound like big hardware upgrades. In practice, they’re probably more about Apple trying to keep the iPhone interesting in a market where smartphones have mostly stopped being surprising.
The reality is that Apple doesn’t really win on hardware specs anymore. It wins on ecosystem, services revenue, and the fact that once you own an iPhone, you’re much more likely to own AirPods, an Apple Watch, a Mac, and pay for iCloud storage forever.
The iPhone is still the center of that entire business, so Apple has to keep reinventing it just enough to keep people upgrading.
A foldable iPhone would be Apple entering a market it has intentionally ignored for years. Samsung, Google, and others have already spent multiple generations figuring out hinges, screens, and durability issues.
Apple often lets other companies experiment first and then shows up later with a more polished version that becomes the mainstream version of the product. The company did this with smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, and even MP3 players.
But the interesting part of a foldable iPhone isn’t the hinge, it’s what it would do to iOS. A folding screen changes how apps work, how multitasking works, and how close the iPhone gets to the iPad.
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Apple has been slowly pushing its platforms closer together for years, and a foldable device would blur those lines even more.
The edge-to-edge anniversary iPhone points in a different direction, but it follows Apple’s long-term design pattern.
Apple removes things slowly: the floppy drive, the headphone jack, the home button, the notch. The company likes these long arcs where a product becomes simpler and more minimal over time until the old design looks outdated.
Of course, both of these ideas come with risk. Foldable phones still have durability problems, and under-display cameras still aren’t great.
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Apple usually avoids shipping new hardware categories until it believes it can control the entire experience, which is why it tends to enter markets later than its competitors.
What’s notable is that both rumored designs foldable and all-screen are Apple looking for ways to make the iPhone feel new again without changing what the iPhone actually is.
The smartphone market is mature, upgrades are slowing down, and Apple still makes most of its money from one product.
So the company keeps redesigning the iPhone, not because the current one is bad, but because the iPhone still has to feel like the most important device Apple makes.
