Hype is building ahead of this fall’s iPhone launches, which are expected to include both the straightforward quality of the iPhone 18 Pro and the more radical breakthroughs of the iPhone Ultra. But as ever the rumor mill refuses to limit itself to the immediate future, and we’ve heard a fascinating tidbit about next year’s iPhone 19 Pro.
According to a Weibo post and subsequent comments by the leaker Digital Chat Station this week (via MacRumors), the iPhone 19 Pro series is already undergoing evaluation testing and is rumored in the supply chain to “feature a quad-curved screen design.” The latter phrase also contains an emoji of a person eating melon seeds, and your guess is as good as ours.
(We’ll add in passing that the leaker also says in a reply to a comment that the 19 Pro “is in mass production,” which seems extremely far-fetched 16 months ahead of launch. The iPhone 17e, for example, is believed to have entered mass production in January, before launching in March. The comment may be a mistranslation, but it’s another reminder that we should take Weibo reports with a grain of salt.)
The leaker offers little further detail, but a quad-curved design generally means a screen that curves over on all four edges, effectively removing bezels from the design and giving the impression of a phone that’s all screen. In this case, that impression will be assisted by the replacement of the Dynamic Island by an even smaller hole-punch cutout at the top of the screen for the front-facing camera, with the Face ID sensor array moved under the display–something which users have wanted for years but which has always presented technical and cost difficulties.
There have been multiple rumors before now that Apple will go for a curved design on the 20th-anniversary iPhone in 2027. Last month the leaker Ice Universe speculated that this could be branded as a Liquid Glass display, emphasising that the curvature would be “extremely subtle” and describing a handset in which “the bezel nearly disappears from sight, while edge viewing remains natural and undisturbed.” But the idea goes back much further than that, with several reports in spring 2025 also asserting that the design would arrive in 2027 (even if the specific branding was unclear at that point).
It remains to be seen how Apple decides to mark the 20th anniversary of its most successful product, and it’s worth adding that plans change, particularly when they’re made this far in advance. The reception accorded to the iPhone Ultra this fall is also sure to influence the design of subsequent generations. We’ll see you in 2027.
