Apple iPhone 12 Could Be Notch-Less As Company Moves Toward Full Edge-to-Edge Display: Report

Apple’s next iPhone iteration may be the one that has been awaited for a decade – the iPhone 12 may be the first from the family with a full edge-to-edge display.

The tech giant has been hesitant when it comes to changing the form factor of its phones. Whether it be switching from 4-inch displays to 5-inch displays, or junking the home button, it took its own sweet time to make these changes, introduced by rivals and embraced by the market.

The company is now accelerating such changes as evidenced by a patent. Dutch tech site LetsGoDigital has unearthed several illustrations from an Apple patent application, filed at the Japanese Patent Office on Dec. 23, which point toward a notch-less display.

The display cutouts listed in the patent show iPhones with no notch at the top. This entails that the hardware for the selfie camera and the 3D Face ID recognition system will be housed under the display. However, the images do not show any front-facing camera. An educated guess is the device could have an in-display selfie camera, probably similar to the punch-hole camera on Samsung Galaxy Note 10.

This also means that the front-facing speaker, currently housed inside the notch, could be placed in a discreet gap above the display, similar to how it has been done on phones such as the OnePlus 7T.

Another feature that is visible from the images is the device seems to have rectangular corners instead of the circular ones found on most phones these days. Apple has alluded to such a design in the past, but it remains to be seen how soon it will be executed.

Rumors of an iPhone with a continuous edge-to-edge display have rippled across the market since circa-2005 when the company was at the forefront of smartphone innovation. However, Apple now seems to be following in the footsteps of Android phones such as the Galaxy Note 10, when it comes to having such a display.

The reason is Apple waits for the technology to improve to a level that it doesn’t suffer from the introductory glitches and issues. That is why it has waited for long before replacing TouchID with Face ID. Apple now innovates on existing features and scales them up to the premium Apple standard before introducing them.