And the ugly camera bulge is gone too. Photo: Eric Huismann
Designer Eric Huismann has an an awesome idea of what the iPhone 7 might be like. It’s one that supports recent rumors. Get ready, because if he concept design ever becomes reality, your next iPhone might be missing one crucial hardware feature: the headphone jack.
Could future iPhones get rid of the bezel? Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
We’re around seven months away from the first glimpse of iOS 10 and almost one year from the launch of the iPhone 7, but since when has that been enough to stop forward-looking Apple fans?
With that in mind, designers at DeepMind (not the AI company Google acquired last year) have put together a nifty concept video showing a next-gen Apple handset, running a future version of iOS, optimized for a bezel-less iPhone.
A dual-screen iPhone wouldn't be such a bad idea. Photo: Martin Hajek
Apple started a smartphone revolution with the introduction of the original iPhone in 2007, but despite the rise of high-powered phones, people in Japan are still clinging to their flip phones.
The closest Apple ever got to making a flip phone was the disastrous Rokr the company developed in partnership with Motorola, so concept designer Martin Hajek decided to reimagine what it would look like if Apple made a flip phone just for the Japanese market. The concept Apple flip phone comes with two screens — one for typing and another for content — as well as an obligatory lanyard and three color options.
Would you buy this Nintendo phone concept? Photo: Curved
Nintendo has been incredibly slow to embrace mobile gaming, but this Wii M concept design has me wishing the company would get serious and make their own smartphone.
This mockup is so beautiful I think I’d gladly give up my eight-year membership in the iPhone club to have a portable gaming device like this at all times.
It’s iPhone rumor season which means concept artists are busting out their best guesses as to what Jony Ive’s next smartphone design changes might entail. We’ve already seen some super thin iPhone redesigns, but concept designers Ivo Marić and Tomislav have taken a different approach.
Instead of changing the iPhone’s form factor, the designers’ iPhone 7 concept looks just like an iPhone 6. It comes with all the features we’d expect to see — sapphire glass, an A10 processor, 16 Megapixel camera sensor, QHD Retina display — but the duo have dreamed up a super special wireless dock that does a lot more than just wireless charging.
To paraphrase Steve Jobs, these are not two separate devices. Photo: Jermaine Smit
The iPhone 6s is on the way, but that’s not going to stop forward-looking Apple watchers from speculating about future phones — like, say, 2018’s iPhone 8.
Alongside regularly-demanded features like wireless charging, designer Jermaine Smit has come up with an unusual dual-screen concept reminiscent of Russia’s YotaPhone — which would offer a 2K display on one side and a low-power screen on the other.
John Sculley drew a 'Mac phone' concept for Steve Jobs back in the 80s. Photo: Web Summit/Flickr CC
Former Apple CEO John Sculley dropped some interesting new tidbits about Apple’s history in a recent interview. He said that all the way back in 1984, Jobs was dreaming up the idea of a “Mac phone.”
This “Mac phone” would be a desktop device that acted as a phone, but ran a version of the Mac’s software.
Apple has become the most valuable company in the world thanks to the incredible success of the iPhone. Over half a billion iPhones have been sold since the original was released in 2007, but do you ever wonder what the smartphone would look like had Apple made it back in 1984?
Pierre Cerveau reimagined Apple’s flagship product in his neat “Macintosh Phone Concept” that takes inspiration from one of Apple’s other killer products — the Macintosh 512k.
Designer Frank Costa uses his iPhone 6 Plus for lots of things, but he noticed that when typing on it one-handed, the anatomy of his thumb use wasn’t as ergonomic as it could be.
Costa decided to design a new kind of keyboard for the thumbs, one that would only need you to tap and then move your thumb a short distance away from wherever you tapped. This would require less stretch and — perhaps — less stress on the thumb joints.
“So, being a designer,” Costa writes on Medium, “I played with the idea of a keyboard thought (out) for the thumb. A keyboard requiring only a single tap and some short swiping to construct words and sentences.”
A possible glimpse of the future? Photo: Oval Picture
Four months down the line, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus still feel like new devices, but that’s not stopping enthusiastic, design-minded techies from creating concept showing how they hope Apple’s next generation iPhone will look.
This concept, created by Netherlands-based graphic designer Yasser Farahi, shows a sleeker iPhone with thinner bezel and profile, and a few of the less popular design features of the iPhone 6 taken out. Most enticing of all is Farahi’s dream of wireless charging: a technology which has been often rumored over the years, but not as of yet implemented by Apple.
Given that Farahi has chosen to name it the iPhone 7, this particular model would likely arrive in 2016, since this year will probably see the iPhone 6s, with the majority of changes being under the hood. Personally, I’m not mad keen on some of Farahi’s subdued color choices, but it’s still a tantalizing glimpse at what we could have to look forward to next year.
Check out more pictures, and a video, after the jump.
The Macintosh will celebrate its 31st anniversary in 11 more days, and while Apple’s design team has moved on from the tiny all-in-one form factor of the first Macintosh, our friends at Curved decided to bring a facelift to Steve Jobs’ creation that led the PC revolution.
For their futuristic redesign, the Curved team slapped an 11-inch MacBook Air screen into a thin brushed aluminum frame that mimics the original shape of the Macintosh. Instead of running regular OS X, the new Macintosh packs touchscreen controls to go with 128GB of storage and 8 GB of RAM.
Take a look at some of the mockups below to see if you’d like this concept to grace your desktop.
Your skinny non-fat latte is just wrist tap away. Photo: Impekable
We’re months away from being able to shackle our wrists to the Apple Watch, but the UI designers at Impekable have been busy dreaming up new app experiences that will delight wearers once the timepiece is finally available.
“Our concept was to re-envision how Apple Watch could enhance the Starbucks customer experience by providing an even better way to order rather than standing in a long line,” Impekable’s founder Pek Pongpaet told Cult of Mac. “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could just go grab a table, order one of my usual drinks, pay for it using Apple Pay or my Starbucks card and get notified when my drink is ready – all from my phone without leaving the comfort of my seat?”
Will the iPhone look like this by 2017? Photo: Steel Drake/Behance
Pre-orders for the iPhone 6 began just over two months ago, but I’m already looking forward to shelling out cash for the iPhone 8 now that Steel Drake published this glass unibody iPhone concept.
The design keeps its familiar form factor but wraps the bottom and top edges with a glass display. Given Apple’s success rate with Sapphire glass, making this thing might not be conceivable until 2018, but there’s still plenty of time for Jony to make it happen. The designer decided to swap out the rear aluminum shell with a stiffening plate on the sides. The finished look is simple, a little curvy, and drop dead gorgeous.
With Yosemite, OS X is getting its biggest visual overhaul yet, courtesy of Apple design head Jony Ive. But not everything is changing. Case in point: OS X’s File Inspector function.
Shown when you right click on a file in Finder and click ‘Get Info,’ Inspector shows you the nitty-gritty details of a file: it’s size, what file it is set to open with, it’s permissions, and so on. But in Yosemite, it looks pretty much as it ever did.
On Behance, user Ramotion has come up with a Yosemite-inspired redesign of OS X’s ‘Get Info’ menu that makes it more useful, intuitive, attractive, and flexible, especially when dealing with multiple files.
It’s gorgeous work, fitting of OS X Yosemite’s slick new design ethos as a whole. Take a look at the complete concept below.
This portable Pippin design is just one of the faux Apple products in Mike Donovan's portfolio of retro reveries. Images: Mike Donovan
Imagine a world in which an Apple portable called Pippin rules the video game industry. Nintendo and Sony are nothing more than petrified corpses after a surprise attack from Cupertino vaporizes their platforms with a portable device so simple, so magical, that Michael Spindler would have let John Sculley waterboard him with Pepsi to make it a reality.
That’s the world imagined by Mike Donovan, a New York City designer who draws faux prototypes of everything from retro iPads to iPhones based on the iMac G3. His retrotastic mockup of the gaming gadget that never was, which he shared exclusively with Cult of Mac, takes the concept of Apple’s failed Pippin video game platform to its logical, period-appropriate extension.
“We’re inundated with new tech choices at almost every turn but there is something so alluring about the fun and simplicity of those early ’80s and ’90s gadgets,” Donovan told Cult of Mac. “Plus, who doesn’t love a good throwback?”
Apple’s rumored iWatch could give the watch industry a much needed shot in the wrist once its finally revealed, but what if Apple decided to make iWatch a platform like CarPlay instead of an actual product?
It sounds crazy but putting Apple’s tech in the hands of the world’s classiest watchmakers could yield better results than if Cupertino dives into the fashion world alone. In its newest concept, Curved imagined what Rolex could do with the iWatch and the result is the manliest smart chronometer a non-geek could want.
The icon-tiled interface of iOS could use more than just a flat facelift from Jony Ive to feel more modern and even though jailbreakers have enjoyed widgets for years, maybe it’s time Apple added them in Control Center.
This iOS 8 concept from Ryan Gilsdorf envisions widgets coming to iOS 8 through Control Center where users can swipe between music, calendar, weather and third-party widgets to control apps from the homescreen.
An 'EasyPay' concept that imagines how Apple could handle mobile payments.
Apple is working on its own mobile payments solution, per multiple reports from places like The Wall Street Journal. Exactly how the company plans to implement such a service remains to be seen.
Tim Cook has made it clear that Touch ID was created with mobile payments in mind, which makes sense when you consider that it’s such a secure form of authentication.
A new concept called EasyPay takes the Apple approach to mobile payments on the iPhone, and it looks great.
When Tim Cook takes the stage at WWDC in a couple months, everyone is expecting him to unveil the latest iteration of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 8… the first major update to the OS since Jony Ive drastically overhauled it.
Most of us at this point have come around to iOS 7 being an improvement on iOS 6, but even so, there’s lots of room for improvement. And if iOS 8 ends up looking anything nearly as good as this concept video from TechRadar, I think we’ll all be very pleased indeed.
We’re still months away from the big reveal of the iPhone 6, which means concept designers still have plenty of time to toss around fanciful dreams of what Apple might do for the redesign of the iPhone.
Teaming up with Martin Hajeck, iCulture created the following concept mockups that would see the iPhone taking some design cues from the iPod Nano, with curved edges, a narrower bezel, and larger screen to boot.
The last Apple TV concept we saw had us swooning for a redesigned Apple remote/gaming pad, but if Apple decides to reduce the Apple TV’s size to take on the Chromecast and the new Roku stick, this Apple TV Air concept from Curved might be spot on.
Rather than running an HDMI cable to Apple’s little black box, the Apple TV Air concept would plug directly into your HDMI port, allowing you to instantly beam video from your iPhone to your big screen TV over AirPlay.
a) A derogatory term used by older English people to insult Italians?
b) An electronic collar which uses a tie as a flexible screen – kind of like an iPhone, only a tie?
c) All of the above?
The answer is of course c), and we have the pictures to prove it.
The Settings app in iOS is starting feel a bit crowded as each new update seems to bringing new tweaks and options to the main board and deeper menu. Control Center added quick access to key parts of the Settings maze, but we wouldn’t mind if Apple added this simple ‘Search Settings’ feature to iOS 8.
Rather than plunging multiple steps deep into the Settings app, this concept from Christoph Fahlbusch would bring the pull-down search bar into the Settings app, making it consistent with the ‘Search iPhone’ UI. It’d come in handy for quick tweaks, especially for less advanced users who are still trying to figure out where to turn on emjois.
Here’s another one, in a dramatic mock advertisement that uses a much more dramatic electronic score than the poppier serenades usually favored by Cupertino. Check out the video below!
Of all the Apple rumors out there, one that comes from particularly far out in left field is the iPad Pro. There have been some reports that Apple is planning to release a larger tablet, but nothing substantial.
Like always, that hasn’t kept concept designers from imagining what a 12.9-inch, bezeless iPad Pro could look like. This one comes from the same people behind the Apple TV touch remote concept from last week.