More Details About Apple’s All-Glass iPhone With Wraparound Display Emerge

Apple may be working on technologies for a new and radical iPhone featuring an all-glass body and a wraparound display, two new patents reveal.

Glass Enclosure

The first of two patents published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is for the device casing and is aptly titled “Glass Enclosure.”

Apple describes a “handheld computing device that includes an enclosure having structural walls formed from a glass material that can be radio-transparent.” The patent indicates how the device, presumably an iPhone, will be able to come in an all-glass body.

The patent, which was filed in August last year, claims that the glass enclosure “includes a tube like main body” made out of extruded glass. The tube-like body will house and protect the device's important components while allowing for improved radio or wireless communications.

Patent illustrations show a glass enclosure that looks similar to older iPod models. This indicates that the company could focus on creating the tube-like body first, then cut openings in the glass for other important components.

Apple might poke holes for certain parts, such as speakers and microphones, if needed.

The patent states that the tube-like glass body will be sealed by caps using laser frit bonding processes, resulting in a seamless enclosure.

Apple might also make certain portions of the glass enclosure transparent, translucent or opaque, depending on the need. It might be transparent to allow for better radio communication and opaque to hide internal components as needed.

Wraparound display

The second patent, “Electronic device with wrapped display,” talks about a flexible display wrapped in a longitudinal axis that can be placed inside a “rigid transparent display cover structure.”

This is different from an earlier patent that described the use of convex displays, but both can be expected to result in devices that do not look like those currently in the market.

While the words in the second patent seem to describe the glass enclosure above, it's worth noting that the technology was invented by a different group of people. It was also filed was back in December of 2017.

Both patents were only recently granted and published.