Thoughts on iPhone 10. Part 1: Hardware

The iPhone’s evolution through 10 major releases since 2007 has checked one box after another on people’s wish lists. It’s amazing to think the original iPhone launched without so many of the key features we now take for granted: GPS, 3G support, third-party apps, video recording, a front/selfie camera, and even copy-and-paste.

Today’s latest iPhones, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus , boast hardware features and technical specs that most of us 8 years ago would have placed in fantasyland. Year after year, incremental innovations making them faster, lighter, and thinner have added up to huge changes. The entire device has radically evolved, both inside and out. Improved displays, cameras, and battery life. Added sensors such as a gyroscope, fingerprint scanner, NFC, barometer, and motion co-processor. New, higher-end industrial design.

So now in 2015, I wonder: how could the iPhone radically improve from here? Are there any big things left? Will future iPhones continue to push the needle… or will the next 8 years be mainly incrementally boring optimizations?

As a thought experiment, I’ll share with you a vision for a theoretical iPhone 10, a future phone 8 years away. The sheer size of the market and the financial & organizational muscle of today’s Apple suggest that these next 8 years could see more rapid innovation than the previous 8. So with a focus on hardware and a blatant disregard for current technical constraints, here’s a short list of major ways the future iPhone 10 could be even better:

1. “Unlimited” battery life

In the future, hopefully “battery life” will become an obscure, irrelevant metric. Our iPhones will almost never run out of juice. And when they do need a charge, you’ll be able to fast-charge them wirelessly almost instantly. Or even better, they’ll self-charge somehow: perhaps with solar or kinetic charging. The steps to get here are long, but even without major breakthroughs the compounded effect of innovation over the years adds up. For example, 8 years ago, the original iPhone had less than half the battery life of the iPhone 6, yet drove only 15% as many pixels and ran at 1/50th the speed. To completely vanquish battery life issues, the next 8 years will need to yield even greater gains.

And incremental innovation in this area hasn’t stopped. The just-announced Samsung Galaxy S6 already has wireless charging with a charging plate (although it doesn’t include a plate in the box, likely relegating it to be a fringe feature). It also has 1.5x faster charging than the previous Galaxy S5; they claim with just 10 min of charging you can get 4 hours of use.

Efficiency improvements through software optimizations and more power-efficient chips are also in the works. iOS 9’s central focus will be stability & optimization. And next-generation chips may yield up to 60% power savings. Impressive. Now imagine 8 generations of advances into the future…

Some battery constraints are less likely to change significantly, such as physical volume. With the iPhone 6 at 6.9 mm thin, we’ve likely reached Peak Thinness™… much thinner isn’t really desirable unless you want to cut things. As well, the other dimensions of the iPhone 6 feel dialed in your hand. Extrapolating from that, future iPhone batteries will likely need to fit in roughly the same device dimensions. Based on the limits of lithium-ion battery technology, we’ll clearly need other significant innovations to reach a time of battery-life irrelevance. Rest assured that everyone and their grandfather is working around-the-clock on the next big battery breakthrough.

2. Hub & spoke device model

With Apple Watch, the iPhone is taking on a new role as the central hub in your device network. It feeds critical information from its GPS and Wi-Fi sensors to Apple Watch apps. In the future, this hub-and-spoke idea could be greatly expanded.

On the side of pushing information out to other devices, the vast majority of people will be able to seamlessly use only an iPhone for all of their computing needs. Mobile devices are certainly powerful enough now. For example, consider that the new A8X processor in the iPad Air 2 has roughly the same speed test scores as the mid-2013 13-inch MacBook Air.

iPhones could completely eliminate the need for laptops by wirelessly syncing with all of your input and output devices: external monitors, keyboards, trackpads, VR googles, projectors etc. Wherever you go, displays of all sizes could be “powered” simply by the iPhone in your pocket. This extends to TVs (which could basically be dumb screens powered by your phone) to projectors on large surfaces.

On the pull side, the iPhone could become your personal hub aggregating and synthesizing data streams from a sea of external sensors, such as health sensors, home management & security sensors, appliance sensors, car sensors, etc. The Internet of Things may flow to the iPhone in various ways, either directly or through the cloud, but the iPhone will be the central piece of hardware in the system. An iPhone will be the one absolutely essential device that every person needs to aggregate the data of their lives. To call it a phone at all drastically de-emphasizes its importance to us in the future; a name like Apple Hub is more fitting. Or something a bit catchier.

3. Virtually indestructable

Dropping your phone and getting a smashed glass bullseye is almost a rite-of-passage. Apple had considered launching the iPhone 6/6 Plus with sapphire-crystal screens (potentially the same material as the Apple Watch’s screen) but manufacturing issues and potentially other drawbacks changed the plan. Whatever the technology, our iPhone screens of the future will almost never smash or scratch — unless we try to do so intentionally. On the back side of the phone, Liquidmetal and other strong, lightweight materials may replace aluminum as the metal of choice and allow a thinner body with room for a bigger battery or other advanced internals.

While not as common, jumping in a lake and forgetting your phone’s in your pocket (or dropping it in the toilet) is also a major bummer. A waterproof, dustproof phone — a feature Samsung sold hard with the Galaxy S5 but axed in the Galaxy S6 — will likely return.

With these far more durable phones of the future, a case will be 100% unnecessary and a thing of the past.

4. Haptic feedback

Future iPhones will have haptic feedback — use of the sense of touch to provide information to the user — in an extremely integrated and believable way. The upcoming Apple Watch’s Taptic Engine is a huge step toward making haptic feedback a part of the mainstream. A similar technology could be used in the iPhone for things like providing physical feedback when typing on the keyboard. Perhaps this technology will evolve so far beyond the gimmicky implementations to date that we’ll almost believe we’re pressing physical buttons on a flat screen.

5. Force touch

Apple Watch’s Force Touch — technology that differentiates between a tap and a press — could potentially open up entirely new UI paradigms in iPhone software. On the hardware side, the addition of Force Touch could eliminate the iPhone’s physical buttons with instantly accessible interfaces for adjusting volume, muting, power on/off, and potentially even the home button (but this would require a rethinking of the integrated Touch ID fingerprint scanning technology). Combined with haptic feedback, this could provide a way to safely eliminate all physical buttons, the enduring pet peeves of Steve Jobs.

6. Fullscreen display

Since the original iPhone, we’ve grown used to seeing either black or white non-functional areas on the sides, top, and bottom of the iPhone screen. These bezels have slimmed somewhat, but still on the iPhone 6 roughly 20% of the phone’s front surface isn’t part of the display.

Imagine a future phone with a display stretching across the entire front surface of the phone. Here are some concept mocks of iPhones with no side bezels and also of a fullscreen display. In line with this idea, the just-announced Galaxy S6 Edge goes beyond just eliminating the side bezels and wraps the display itself down around the edges. Besides aesthetics, the benefits of an edge-to-edge display could either allow the form factor of the phone to shrink or allow a bigger display in the same form factor.

How would a fullscreen display design accommodate the speaker, front camera, and home button with integrated fingerprint scanner? A lot of challenges to solve here, but perhaps the entire screen could be a fingerprint reader someday. Or maybe there’ll be an even easier way to unlock the phone that doesn’t require fingerprints (facial recognition or Heart ID?). And the screen could somehow allow sensors to work from underneath.

Also on the topic of screens, something like the Amazon Fire Phone’s largely-dismissed-as-gimmicky Dynamic Perspective technology could evolve into something with more compelling applications. Recent patents by Apple detailing 3D photo capture and refocusable photos (similar to Lytro’s camera or the HTC One M8) suggests a future of new display paradigms that could render a more immersive representation of reality than traditional photos and videos.

7. What else do you foresee?

Did I miss any other major things we’ll likely see after 8 more years of smartphone evolution? Please leave your comments here.

So… will any of this move the needle?

Smartphones are already among the most important, compelling, and useful possessions we have ever owned… my phone would easily be the first thing I’d grab out of my house in a fire (although everything’s backed up in iCloud, so maybe not). And they’re only going to grow in their importance to us. The sheer scale of money and attention being funneled toward these tiny devices on both the hardware and software sides is unprecedented in human history.

Perhaps it will prove impossible to top the major leaps we’ve experienced on mobile so far: maps & navigation on your phone for the first time, texting, emailing, social networking, taking photos. These were killer mobile apps all made possible and mainstream with a cavalcade of hardware breakthroughs.

What will the smartphone hardware breakthroughs of the next 8 years enable? Will innovation continue to move the needle at the same pace and solidify the smartphone’s status as the most important thing any of us will ever own? Everything certainly seems to be going in that direction.

This look into the future of the iPhone is only half complete. In my next post I’ll explore mobile software innovations that we’ll see on the iPhone 10 — 8 years into the future — and their impact on us, our relationships, and society.