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Every day I read a lot of gadget news. And, mixed in with all that gadget news, there are always a few plausible iPhone 7 and fantastical iPhone 8 rumors. iPhone rumors are notoriously difficult to deal with — they're in such hot demand, there's a high incentive for people to make shit up. So they make a lot of shit up. And here's poor old me, trying to suss it all out.
Anyway, there's this one rumor I keep coming back to: the bezel-less iPhone. The rumor got started, as far as I can tell, because Apple filed for a patent that would make a fingerprint sensor transparent and embedded in the screen. No visible fingerprint sensor means no need for a home button, right? And no need for a home button means no need for bezels! It's perfectly obvious. Transparent OLEDs are kind of a thing, so I guess the front-facing camera could shoot through that? And speakers, well, who needs speakers when you have aesthetics to worry about?
To lend fuel to my bezel-free fever, John Gruber has heard "scuttlebutt" about a bezel-less iPhone in 2017 (presumably that would be the iPhone 8, since it seems weird to call a total redesign the iPhone 7S). So that's something. But to be honest, I don't really care about the veracity of rumors right now. It's just too hard to tell, too hard to know, and too early to guess. I just like looking at these renders by Marek Weidlich, which he made back in October of last year, before these rumors got hot. Isn't that a strange coincidence?
Anyway, look at this. Isn't it cool?
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There's also another, possibly related rumor that the 2017 iPhone could have curved edges, like the Galaxy S7 Edge, but with an Apple logo. I dislike this rumor immensely. It gets an "F" grade from me, and the "F" stands for "Fart." Here's a mockup of what this could look like, in a render by Martin Hajek:
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No thanks! Good work on the render Martin, but two bezels is too many bezels. Sharp actually made a phone with one bezel back in 2014:
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But am I satisfied? Nope. I'm ready to embrace the future. A future where I don't know exactly how to hold my phone, and where app developers are totally confused about proper layouts. It's going to be magical.
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