The iPhone's Turning 10. What Will It Look Like at 20?

Inside your 2027 smartphone.
Image may contain Human and Person
Li Muzi Xinhua/Redux

You wake up refreshed. Ever since you got that alarm clock that adapts to your sleep cycle, your calendar, and the traffic report, you practically leap out of bed. You exercise, focusing on the muscles that the biometric sensor in your shirt says need some help. Not 10 seconds after you finish, the oven beeps—breakfast is ready. Healthy stuff. You need it, after all the drinking last weekend. As you eat, the TV streams headlines tailored to your interests. Suddenly, your smartwatch buzzes with an alert: Pileup on the freeway. You need to leave, like now, or you're going to be late to work. You have that presentation today. You can't be late.

Most people in tech agree that life probably will look something like this in 2027. Omnipresent technology will touch nearly every moment of your day, invisibly making life faster, more efficient, more attuned to your wants and needs and feelings. This raises an interesting question: In a gloriously connected, flawlessly optimized world where everything is a computer, what do you need with a smartphone?

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, which hit store shelves on June 29, 2007. (It might be more accurate to say they grazed store shelves before landing in the hands of buyers, who spent days camped outside Apple Stores.) Now, any number of statistics speak to the seismic shift the iPhone caused. Four billion people own a smartphone. The devices generate hundreds of billions in revenue each year. They gave rise to entire industries, like smart homes and drones. Hell—you're probably reading this on your phone.

It won't last. Nothing does. The phone in your pocket could give way to a watch on your wrist, glasses on your face, or headphones in your ears. When Siri and Google Assistant finally reach their potential, everything will respond to voice commands. Actually, skip that. Go straight to brain interfaces. You think; it happens. At that point, all you need is a killer pair of Wayfarer-style augmented-reality glasses. If an app in your AR glasses can put a virtual TV on your wall, why bother with a real TV? Seems like a lot of unnecessary hammering.

And yet, nearly everyone in the industry believes that pane of glass in your pocket is here to stay, at least for a while. Something about that in-between, do-everything device just feels so ... right. "While there will be experimentation with rolling, folding, and perhaps holographic displays, the basic slab form factor will remain the default," says Avi Greengart, research director for Global Data. "It offers the best tradeoff between information density, interaction, and portability."

By 2027, your smartphone will be no thicker than a pane of glass, with no bezel, buttons, or breaking. You'll charge it wirelessly, and measure battery life in weeks, not days. The camera will blow your mind, as will the processor. A 5G network, more reliable than anything you're used to now, will make everything orders of magnitude faster. This reads like every phone nerd's wish list. But it's all under development. Corning can already embed circuitry into Gorilla Glass that is both flexible and nearly indestructible. Qualcomm's spinning up 5G, and says you'll see it everywhere in the next decade. Everything you've ever wanted is coming.

Rather than usurp other gadgets, the smartphone of 2027 will augment them. "It's your personal internet bubble," says Andy Rubin, who founded Android and now leads Essential. "The smartphone brings connectivity within 1 foot of you, 24 hours a day seven days a week." Think of it as a collection of features available to every other gadget: a wireless router, a secure authenticator, a camera, a microphone, a set of data and preferences.

But the biggest change will come when artificial intelligence takes over your life. AI will guide your car, manage your home, and so much more. You'll find it in your smartphone, your tablet, your wristwatch, your laptop, your AR headset, your water heater, your shoes, your wine decanter. AI will become more important than any gadget, because it will infiltrate and animate every gadget.

Your phone fits into this world when you think about computing in terms of screens, not computers. By 2027, your primary computer will be that omnipresent AI running on a crazy-fast 5G network and Snapdragon Whatever processors. You'll interact with it using voice (which won't be frustrating), gestures (which won't be weird), keyboards (which won't be gone), or... well, just about anything you like. But you'll still need a screen. Screens are like clothes for your AI, or bodies it can inhabit.

Gadi Amit, president of New Deal Design, believes everyone eventually will have three screens. One will be huge, like a TV. Another will be small, like a wearable. And the third will be something very much like a smartphone. Maybe it folds to fit in your pocket. Perhaps it unfurls. It could be two detachable screens. Whatever it looks like, you'll use this third screen the most—to read, chat with friends, play games, do your job. AR will subsume a lot of this, but not all of it, and certainly not in the next decade.

You know what you won't have in 2027, though? Apps. Not as icons sitting alongside each other on a screen, inhabiting its own universe. "Right now it's so dumb," says Iqbal Arshad, who works on phones from the Razr to the Droid as head of product at Motorola. "You have all these icons on the phone, you have all these dumb notifications." As these devices mature along with the AI that powers them, Arshad says, "both the voice and the display interfaces are going to be much more intelligent." You know the thing on the iPhone where you swipe down and Siri tries to guess what app you'd like to open? Imagine that, for everything.

As tech infiltrates every object and surface on the planet, you can imagine not needing a device at all. You'd just walk up to the nearest window or table, log in with facial recognition, and get to work. But people will always want a personal device, Arshad says. As processors get faster, more of the machine-learning AI stuff can happen on your phone, rather than the cloud. You should demand this, rather than tolerate surveillance from the largest companies in the world. You'll want something in your pocket that's easily retrievable, that you know how to use, that you can fiddle with to pass the time between other things. A device that communicates something about your fashion sense and station in life. A personal computer.

The most enduring legacy of The iPhone Decade will be how sharply it changed human behavior. People got used to typing and tapping on screens, carrying them everywhere, and using them for everything. So much has changed, so many new things are possible, and yet the latest smartphones still look pretty much like the first smartphone. Almost everything about your phone will change by 2027, but two things will stay the same: Your phone will be the most important gadget you own, and it will fit nicely in the back pocket of your jeans.