Wafer-thin iPhone 7 concept combines elegance with ugliness

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iPhone 7 concept by Mesut G Designs
Can you even see this unofficial iPhone 7?
Photo: Mesut G Design

We aren’t going to find out what the next iPhone looks like until Apple shows us (probably in September), but that isn’t stopping designers from dreaming up some concepts.

Here’s a pretty bold one that imagines the next Apple smartphone as a mix between a Samsung Galaxy Edge and a Club Cracker. You can check it out in the video below.

This mock-up comes from Mesut G. Designs (via MeltStyle), and it is only 5mm thick — about the size of one of the numbers on a credit card.

It also has two cameras: a 20 MP on the back, and an 8 MP facing the front. Everything we’ve heard suggests that the next version of the iPhone 6 will sport a “mere” 12 megapixel camera, so that feature is unlikely even on the actual iPhone 7. But hey, if we’re dreaming up half-centimeter-thick cases, we might as well go all out.

The screen on the concept takes up the entire front of the phone, which means that the Home button is virtual, and the entire handset is basically a sheet of glass on top of a sheet of metal. And if that has you wondering where the speakers and mic are going to go on this thing that still has to function as a phone, check out those three dots on the back.

That speaker placement is probably the least Apple thing in this whole idea. The company is all about elegance and symmetry, and putting three conspicuous (and uncentered) gaps in its sleek case would probably give Jony Ive an aneurysm.

And speaking of cases, how would those look on this imaginary phone? The speaker holes alone would look weird enough, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine what the Otter Box would look like. Maybe it would just be a sleeve?

Still, this is an interesting enough concept, although I’d really worry about snapping this iPhone in half. And it would also require both the strongest metal and the strongest glass ever made due to its lack of a housing around the breakable bits. Otherwise, Bendgate would become Pocket-full-of-broken-glass-gate in no time.

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