I’m sitting at a restaurant with a few pals, enjoying dim sum, when a friend asks whether he should upgrade to the iPhone 16. I ask him which iPhone he has. My friend ponders aloud, “The iPhone 14? Or is it the 13? I don’t know; they all look the same.” He then pulls out his phone, an iPhone 12, and hands it to me to verify, as if I were one of the guys on the show Pawn Stars.
My friend brilliantly and unintentionally makes a valid point. Recent iPhone models look conspicuously similar. It’s a sentiment I’ve heard from family members, friends and Apple enthusiasts, and seen opined across the tech journalism sphere with headlines calling the iPhone boring, or saying the new iPhone looks just like the old one.
Of course, boring is in the eye of the beholder, and such criticism might not be apropos in 2025 as rumors indicate that Apple will launch a new, thinner-style phone, nicknamed the iPhone 17 Slim. The phone’s primary appeal would be its svelte design, forgoing the camera-dominant allure of current Pro and Pro Max models.
But I have to wonder whether an iPhone that looked like it took Ozempic would actually excite Apple enthusiasts, who yearn for a truly major update. Current iterations of the iPhone already have a bounty of features and services that are both vital to our daily lives and nifty but often overlooked. Therefore, a slimmer phone would be unlikely to shake things up, especially at a time when Apple emphasizes the iPhone’s utility-centric design, which makes the device as impressive as it is mundane.
When Apple released its earnings report last month, it showed signs of growth and stagnation. iPhone sales rose 6% for the fourth quarter of 2024 but were nearly flat for the fiscal year and showed just a 3% increase over the fourth quarter of 2023. Most companies would love to have those financials. But Apple is held to a different standard, and some observers see less than record-breaking results as a weakness.
It’s difficult to know how much those numbers were impacted by customers who’ve grown indifferent to Apple’s design aesthetic and held off on getting a new phone, or others who’ve jumped brands for a foldable phone, like the Motorola Razr Plus. Clearly, there’s pressure on Apple to innovate (look at the launch of Apple Intelligence this year) and there will always be a burden on the company to be a consumer product leader for enthusiasts and shareholders alike. Since phones are still the biggest product Apple sells, a majority of that pressure falls on pushing forward the iPhone’s design and development while artfully pleasing its massive and diverse user base.
That can be a bit of balancing act. Take it from tech writer John Gruber, who publishes the site Daring Fireball. He says: If you ask “the mainstream people, the people who make up most of the billion people on the planet using Apple devices, ‘Do you want a radically new iPhone that you have to learn again?’ … the answer is, ‘Are you out of your mind?'”
The iPhone X defined what a modern phone should be
The iPhone X marked a turning point in smartphone design.
But how did we get here? The iPhone’s current design is the result of 17 years of refinements. Over its first nine years, the iPhone went through a lot of changes, some quite revolutionary: It got taller, bigger and then thinner. It lost the headphone jack but gained an extra rear camera. The back went from aluminum to plastic to glass to aluminum again, and then returned to glass with the iPhone X, remaining that way ever since.
It’s as if Apple had been tailoring mock-ups of the ideal phone for nearly a decade, only to lock everything down with the release of the iPhone X.
“Apple being Apple kind of got to this basic form factor with the iPhone X,” said Gruber. “At that point, it’s like, ‘Yeah, here’s the way they should be.'”
The iPhone’s design has certainly changed in small ways since the iPhone X debuted in 2017. The iPhone X, XS, XR and 11/11 Pro had curved sides. The iPhone 12 and newer models have flat edges. The camera bump seems to grow in size every year and, since the iPhone 11 Pro’s arrival, houses three different lenses on the Pro models. But in terms of the iPhone X, the soul of its design became an archetype for what a modern smartphone should be and is today: a metal chassis to house the phone’s internals, sandwiched between two pieces of glass, one for the display and the other with a camera bump.
It’s not just Apple. Samsung, Google, OnePlus and others have all gotten to a similar minimalistic glass-sandwich design with rounded corners for their smartphones. A lazy criticism would be to say that they’re copying Apple, which is not really the case. But much in the same way that laptops now all have a similar fundamental aesthetic (compared with the wild early years of notebook computers with trackballs, in the ’90s and early 2000s), it feels like phones are starting to settle into a universal look. And this ubiquity, as humdrum as some might find it, proves that the iPhone, and smartphones in general, have finally become a mature consumer product, in the same way laptops or automobiles have over decades.
Samsung’s Galaxy S24 stands to the left of an iPhone 15. Yep, the camera arrays are different — but not much else.
Apple’s earnings clearly prove that the company is doing just fine with its current approach and doesn’t need to disrupt a good thing for the sake of change. And much in the same way that a breakthrough in touchscreen technology was fundamental to launching the original iPhone, it would likely take another innovation to truly transform things.
“Whether or not [Apple’s] up for a radical shift in design is anybody’s guess,” said Paul Snyder, chair of transportation design for undergraduate studies at the College of Creative Studies in Detroit. “You can’t go more minimal than minimal.”
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Believe it or not, iPhones used to be quite fun
With a 3.5-inch display and that flat glass sandwich design, the iPhone 4 was as much a tiny jewel as it was a phone.
If the iPhone’s current design is considered boring, you have to wonder when the device was exciting. In 2010, when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 4, he described the design as “glass on the front and the rear, and stainless steel running around. And the precision of which this is made is beyond any consumer product we’ve seen. It’s closest kin is like a beautiful, old Leica camera.”
The previous two models, the iPhone 3G and 3GS, had plastic backs that were contoured to fit in your palm. So it was profound to see Apple make the jump to the iPhone 4’s flat glass sandwich design. And for many people, including myself, the iPhone 4, and the nearly identical iPhone 4S, are the pinnacle of Apple design. The stainless steel band made the phone look and feel premium, especially with the band encircling that back of glossy black glass.
“You had Steve Jobs on stage geeking out about how the industrial design of the iPhone 4 was evocative of a Leica camera,” said Michael Fisher, a tech reviewer who helms the MrMobile channel on YouTube. “It was just so gorgeous, and it was such a lovingly crafted phone that I had left iOS behind in favor of the Palm Pre and wanted to jump back.”
This is the iPhone 5S, which launched in 2013 and looks nearly identical to the iPhone 5. Notice the chamfered edges.
After the iPhone 4 and 4S, Apple launched the iPhone 5, which had a taller, 4-inch screen, compared with the 3.5-inch one on previous models (it’s wild how small either of those displays seems today). Apple replaced the glass back on the 4 series with an aluminum one for the launch of the iPhone 5, which made the phone even thinner.
Then the iPhone 6 arrived. It was slim and had a large (at the time) 4.7-inch screen, curved edges and an aluminum back that wrapped around the sides and sported antenna lines. Apple released a second version, called the iPhone 6 Plus, with a bigger, 5.5-inch screen. But let’s put it this way: No one compared the iPhone 6 to a Leica. If the iPhone 4 exemplified the heights Apple design could reach, the iPhone 6 showed how the company could turn a product into a daily utility that everyone needed — cue the record years of iPhone sales.
A pile o’ iPhones. From the top down: the iPhone 5S, the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus.
If you were to mash up the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 6, you’d start to see where something like the iPhone X and the current iPhone 16 series came from.
“We’ve settled into this era now where phones are a utility. They’re a commodity,” said Fisher. “They are about as sexy to buy as a new microwave oven.”
Laptops, phones and automobiles
Here’s a display window in Prague with several Apple PowerBook 100 models.
In 1992, my father, who was an architect, brought home one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. It was the PowerBook 100 that Apple launched in 1991, and it had a 9-inch black-and-white screen, a lead battery, and a trackball (where today you might find a trackpad). It weighed more than 5 pounds and cost $2,500 (the equivalent of $5,800 today). Thankfully, my dad’s firm bought it for him to run the program AutoCAD.
The PowerBook — though it bears some squint-your-eyes resemblance to the MacBook Pro I’m writing this story on — looks ridiculous. There was a very obvious gap when it was closed, to accommodate the trackball, and it was chunky: 1.8 inches thick when it was closed. But 17 years after that first Apple laptop launched, we got the very first MacBook Air, which, much like the iPhone X, cemented what a contemporary laptop should be.
Laptops, like cars, have had their design refined over decades. And smartphones are approaching that two-decade mark.
“It’s an unsatisfying answer to say that boring year-over-year revisions for years, between major updates, are really the way to go,” said Gruber. “But it’s the truth, and it’s the way everything goes. Cars had decades of innovation, and then reached a point where — can you really tell a 10-year-old car on the road?”
Of course, automobiles, especially in the US, are heavily regulated, which in turn is reflected in a car’s design. No matter the manufacturer, if you’re trying to make a vehicle, you have to take into consideration multiple factors, like the aerodynamics for fuel efficiency, and safety features for a crash, and you’re going to end up in the same general area as other companies in terms of design.
“I think what the customer sees is like the silhouette. You look at a midsized CUV, for example, and the silhouettes are very similar,” said Snyder.
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And even though phones aren’t regulated to the extreme that vehicles are, both smartphones and cars have become devices that house our various ecosystems and software. Apple’s revenue from its services grew by 12% in the fourth quarter of 2024, and that’s from things like the App Store, Apple Music and iCloud.
“It’s not a phone anymore, right? It’s actually a horrible phone, because I have to take five steps to actually make a call,” said Greg Darby, who, like Snyder, is at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, as chair and associate professor for product design. “That’s what’s happening within an automotive interior. It’s the fact that it’s more than just, ‘I just want to sit in a car and drive someplace.’ Although I think people are starting to become too saturated with technology.”
iPhone Fold, Slim or hello, Moto?
Former CNET writer Stephen Shankland tries out Adobe Lightroom on the Apple Vision Pro.
When you look at the scale and size of Apple’s customer base and you factor in the iPhone’s ubiquity, it raises the question of what can Apple do, if anything, with new iPhone models beyond refinements. And the answer might be to look at the innovative interfaces that yielded other significant Apple products. The original Macintosh was a breakthrough primarily because of its mouse and graphical user interface. The iPod took off because of the scroll wheel, which is sadly no more. And the iPhone was defined by its touchscreen and software.
“We’ve already seen the next interface, and indeed, we have rejected it,” said Horace Dediu, an Apple analyst and tech commentator. “It is, of course, the Apple Vision Pro.”
Dediu, who’s a fan of Apple’s headset, is right about the Vision Pro. But we’ve only seen the first version. Just because a new interface can be innovative and compelling doesn’t mean it’ll quickly achieve wide adoption. It took years for the iPhone to really take off with consumers. Though I think a greater number of people at this point would be more thrilled by an iPhone Slim than a Vision Pro.
Here’s a mock-up of what iOS might look like on a foldable iPhone modeled on Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip.
What if there was another option, though? Over the last five years, Apple’s competitors have been experimenting with a new phone design that seems like it came straight from an episode of Westworld: foldable phones.
“In order to get any kind of fun these days from a phone, in terms of a hardware perspective, you really have to look at foldables,” said Fisher.
Foldable phones arrived in 2019 and improved on some of their initial wonkiness, particularly durability issues and software, only over the last couple of years. They typically come in two forms. The first is a flip style, where the phone folds in half to become smaller, much like the clamshell flip phones of the late-’90s and early-2000s, but with a foldable screen. And then there’s the fold-style option that opens out into a mini-tablet-size screen.
In recent years, the foldable phone space has seen rapid growth. A March report from IDC estimated that there’d be 37.6% more foldables shipped in 2024 compared with 2023. The same report projects that companies will ship 45.7 million foldable phones in 2028. Keep in mind, that’s still a relatively small number, when you consider that the same firm estimated in November that there’d be 1.24 billion smartphones shipped in 2024. Now that we’re into 2025, it’ll be interesting to see how those estimates pan out.
The Motorola Razr Plus (2024) is positioned half open, with its 4-inch exterior screen lit up.
But as some Apple enthusiasts hope for a possible foldable iPhone or even an iPhone Slim, other companies, like Motorola, are seizing the moment to convert iPhone owners into first-time buyers of a foldable phone.
“When we talk about the Razr Plus, we’re seeing that 25% of consumers are actually coming from iPhone devices,” said Majo Martin, Motorola’s North America marketing director.
By comparison, Martin told me that 20% of new Motorola Razr owners in 2023 switched over from an iPhone. She said that growth is driven by emotional response. When I reviewed the Motorola Razr Plus (2024), I had trouble remembering the last time I’d used a phone that was as fun as the Razr. Motorola prioritized the experience of using the Razr Plus over pretty much everything else, and there’s a lot of value in that for people who want to have their phone be another way to express themselves and their personality.
Will Apple ever release a foldable? And will it be popular? I mean, the names “iPhone Flip” and “iPhone Fold” do have a nice ring.
“The foldable thing is a future possibility that Apple would go do and that would go mainstream,” said Gruber. “And if and when it happens, it will inevitably be the exact same story that we have covered so many times, where Apple waited and waited and waited and waited, and now they have a foldable. And they’re not going to to say, ‘This is the first foldable phone,’ but they’re going to present it like, ‘This is the first good foldable phone.'”
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