iPhone 6: An edgy concept
behance.netFolks, stop bitching and complaining about this or that idea being good/bad/impractical etc, etc. It's a designer's demo portfolio work.
Designers do this stuff because they have ideas about how devices and interfaces can change and they explore those ideas. It doesn't seem to me that Johnny is making claims about inside information. He's using his visual talents to create mockups of what might be possible in the future.
The medium is different, but the process isn't any different than sci-fi writers setting stories in the future or me making UI wireframes for an application. It's just ways of exploring what could be done.
The last point is to realize that this is most likely just personal portfolio work. Some of us have github profiles and others have PSD's. Just think about the exposure Johnny is getting out of this and how it might get him more work in the future. That's the best reason for him to make this.
Perhaps the response would be similar if he had a design for two headed baby clothes, or superhero outfits.
There is this notion of the 'uncanny valley' where a rendering/expression of a human gets too close to the real thing. There is a similar space in design where dissonance between what is possible and what is shown jars the senses.
Escher used this to great effect, creating scenes that you eyes initially perceived as 'normal' but began to sense a 'wrongness' or 'otherness' which as you looked more closely became apparent.
This would have worked better as an exercise if he had done an advertising type pitch for a tri-corder or what ever the Stargate equivalent is. But by using the next generation of a product that is already out there and known for its design, and adding in features which are currently science fiction (and physically impossible [1]) the designer causes the brain to go "urrrk?" and the whole thing collapses.
[1] For example, iPhones use a touch screen based on capacitance. Graphene is a conductor. A transparent graphene cover would shield the phone from being able to see any change in electric field (it would, at best, be diffuse across the conductor) and render the touch screen inoperable. Try this fun experiment, put a piece of paper over an iPad and watch your gestures go right "thru" it, put a piece of foil over your ipad, and note how you can do anything.
You may be taking this a bit too literally. I saw it as a designer's attempt to build marketing for a fictional device that is fun to imagine. If you've ever read science fiction, there's a certain joy in imagining new devices with capabilities that currently seem impossible. Without this sort of imagination, like the tricorder that you point out, a whole lot of contemporary engineers might have never found this inspiration.
Graphene isn't the best choice, but the point was to illustrate a currently unseen level of tensile strength, not as a blueprint for manufacture. Wouldn't that be a fun device to have?
We tend to ignore humor on HN, but this is one person's imagination at work, and I applaud that.
That is the nature of the uncanny valley, it is where the result is 'real enough' that one part of your brain classifies it as 'real' but it still has enough flaws that another part of your brain yells 'wrong'. That dissonance is uncomfortable.
Per my point about a tri-corder (a clearly fictional device) had he made his project "more clearly fictional" it would have avoided that uncanny valley. Basing it on the iPhone was not a good choice for me. A friend of mine was doing the computer graphics thing and initially all of his "models" were real actresses (he used stills from films to figure out the models) and it was hurting his portfolio because the 'goodness' of his modelling skills was being subverted by the 'wrongness' of the model (people recognized the actress and then saw things "wrong" in the models of them). I suspect that is the case here is well.
We should be thankful for people who venture into uncanny valleys or any gap between safe-and-works the next generation technology. The work that finally crosses over the valley and is widely accepted is built on the work that didn't. We need those attempts and should encourage them.
I think you missed the point (but correct me if I'm wrong) the 'uncanny valley' is an artifact. It can be a positive (Escher's case) or a negative (any number of nearly perfect CGI scenes in films). In this designer's case it distracted me from his goal of presenting his skills as a designer. Had he done the same thing with a clearly non-actual product, my response would have focused on his skill at rendering a good looking device and compelling narrative, rather than thinking "wait, that isn't even possible, this is crazy" which I don't think was his intent given that this was a portfolio project. But I cannot speak for him, only to my reaction to it.
Thanks! Great response. Too many people arguing about nothing. I wish I had those skills. I'm a software engineer and am in no way a designer. I've mucked with so many design tools throughout my career and it just never really clicked. I can't draw so that might be a contributing factor.
Anyway, dude has some skills.
It's a hodge podge of loose notions, and is pretty well techno babble, especially considering the materials hyperbole.
The screen however is very reminiscent of Atmel's XSense touch sensor, which I'm keen to play with[1].
The wolf in sheeps clothes special pleading I'll leave alone.
It's so silly, though. Does this guy work/speak for Apple?
Is he an electrical engineer who can say for certain that the retina display can actually be manufactured in this edgy way?
No, he's just a guy with Adobe Illustrator.
So... why should I care what he thinks?
Retina display huh? Retina is just another marketing word. Apple's retina display was surpassed by consumer technology more than a year ago. GS4 has a 441ppi screen while the Iphone 5 "Retina" display is just 326ppi.
.... okay?
I'm not sure why you thought that I didn't understand that Retina is a marketing term, or why it's relevant to the point I was making.
Perhaps because he has provided something to consider... - Edge touch with a new suite of gestures and gesture recognizers? - Side touch without obscuring the UI? - Sideways image projection via total internal reflection?
I used to be in school for ID (switched to the web), and stuff like this annoyed me. You enter contests, really think through what can be done with current tech and what compromises can be made while still preserving the beauty of the design, and some asshole enters with something that is physically impossible.
If this is an advertisement, then all it advertises is that he is incompetent at industrial design.
Yeah, well he is not an industrial designer, doesn’t advertise himself as one and doesn’t sell his industrial design skills. Which he doesn’t have. Doesn’t even claim to have. Not even a little bit.
He is a fucking graphic designer and that’s exactly how you should judge this.
If he's not an industrial designer, then why is this an industrial design?
It's like you hand me an album of somebody scratching at a violin for 80 minutes and tell me that the point was the album art, he's "not a musician" and "not advertising himself as one", gosh.
Excuse us silly engineers that got distracted by the actual content of the damn link. Guess we didn't see the trees for the forest.
If the point is to have a portfolio piece as a visual designer, Make a brochure for something that already exists, or that is unique and doesn't exist. This is an uncanny valley of being unimaginative yet impossible and that distracts me (and many readers here) from everything else.
Sometimes I hate stupid engineers. They are such assholes sometimes that just do not get it at all.
This fucking thing is some stupid fun. Nothing more. I’m not sure what this cynicism burning with the power of a million suns shit is all about. Why do people behave this way?
He's a graphic designer? Than where's some original graphics? The entire thing looks like he made a tweak to an iPhone model, but didn't produce anything nearing original, and slightly modified the iPhone website.
None of the assets look original, and there doesn't actually seem to be any graphic design involved. The entire thing looks to be a showcase of non-existent industrial design skills.
Hows that for judging it based on graphic design?
I thought the app icons were pretty good.
I honestly couldn't see a difference from the ones used in iOS 7...
If he is a fucking graphic designer, then he should stop talking about technical details like graphene, as if he knew how it worked.
Perhaps he should stick to graphic design then, and stay away from industrial design.
I can understand the need to re-design something in attempts to get exposure, I think someone attempted a Facebook redesign relatively recently on Behance and they got a ton of exposure from that, but this iPhone concept is completely impractical, starting with that screen curving over the borders (fragile, slippery, higher costs etc). I pretty much agree, if he was so committed to the idea of a 'better' iPhone, a little more research into industrial design wouldn't have hurt.
I dunno, my negative reaction to it isn't that the designer is breaking the limits of feasible materials and mechanical engineering...it's that, given no such limits, the designer proceeds to create something not terribly original or interesting.
But to be honest, what really annoyed me was a designer who proposes a Retina2 type screen yet in his showcase work here, uses low resolution fonts. It's just hard to give any serious thought to a designer who overlooks one of the most critical -- yet trivially easy to do right -- aspects of a prototype design.
> I dunno, my negative reaction to it isn't that the designer is breaking the limits of feasible materials and mechanical engineering...it's that, given no such limits, the designer proceeds to create something not terribly original or interesting.
I agree with this wholeheartedly.
My secondary negative reaction to this, though, is that I think there's a certain conceit in putting this design together and calling it the "iPhone 6". Whatever merits these drawings might have, they could be showcased just as well by making up an arbitrary new name for it and calling it an evolution in smartphone design in general — rather than hijack Apple's branding just to draw attention.
>the designer proceeds to create something not terribly original or interesting.
Yes, god forbit he also being somewhat pragmatic...
Yeah, as usual HN is taking itself a touch too seriously. This is the design equivalent of re-creating $nineties-video-game or whatever else in $modern-language. It's an exercise used to stretch a designer creative and technical legs.
I would highly recommend the majority of you here to stay away from fashion shows and car conventions if this is your reaction to this concept.
I think it's safe to assume that's pretty much the case for the majority of us to begin with.
Which is really a shame. They're typically great fun, and potentially inspirational.
Someone said on Twitter the other day, I wonder what UI designers could come up with if they weren't hamstrung by the fact that it needs to be built by a developer? I can't help but think of exactly that whenever I see one of these hardware mockups. This is what designers can do when they aren't hamstrung by the need to actually have it built by hardware engineers.
An interesting intellectual exercise and a beautiful design, but that only applies if you think it could be real, or else it's the hardware equivalent of a Minority Report interface. I just don't see this in my hand within the next 20 years. That makes it easy to be pessimistic.
In reference to the top comment, that's why good Sci Fi tends to focus on how the technology affects the future society and interpersonal relationships, not simply marvelling at the technology itself. Calling this the "iPhone 6" mockup and not simply a future phone or even iPhone puts a certain expectation on it, as does the mention of specs that would only be impressive for a year or two.
You can't have it both ways. Either it's an entirely theoretical mockup that can't be criticized and it's simply design work or I'm supposed to imagine it as the iPhone that's on the market two years from now with the specs listed on that page.
I am an interface designer, and the constraints imposed by those mean ol' developers are because they are forced to think through logical flows to implement them.
The perfect ui would be a device that you wear in a small ring that reads your mind to find out exactly what you want, and using superhuman ai, strategizes the perfect way to get it for you.
There. I did it.
For the record that's kind of my point. You need to have a balance and "it's just a portfolio demo" rings hollow to me.
I don't understand the point of these mockups unless they have an actual prototype. It's easy to hand-wave about how great a product will be that can't be built. The borderless glass is probably a non-starter because of chipping. And why would you make an aluminum/carbon fiber composite? Aluminum and carbon fiber both serve the same purpose in a composite structure. You'd use something like a metal-matrix aluminum composite instead, set in resin.
It's really difficult for me to look at something like this as someone with even the barest of comprehensions as to how complicated some of this would be to even do, much less well enough that it would make sense to put in a consumer product this year.
Oh, you're going to make the screen out of graphene? My mockups are exactly the same as yours, but instead of aluminum my case is made of diamond. I've solved the chipping problem!
To be clear, I think that these are really attractive visual mockups with some interesting concepts, but I have seen literally every one of them before elsewhere.
I shake my head every time I see these because as someone that works as a product designer I know what isn't even feasible to do. These artists create work that has no basis in the real world, and add positively ignorant statements about the construction and capabilities of these devices.
I see comments like, "Carbon fiber alone is perfectly rigid and doesn't bend." and can only shake my head about how stupid this statement is. This particular mockup is one of the worst I have ever seen for being unrealistic. Feel free to create industrial design concepts, but at the very least don't comment on features that are unrealistic.
I pity the engineers every time the designers come and say "build me THIS (or you're fired, lol)"...
Uh, yeah, fortunately that isn't how it typically works. In most of my experience the engineers do the innovating & ask the designer to pretty it up, or work in conjunction with the designers to make sure the final product looks & performs well.
Anyone telling engineers to build it or get fired will soon be or is already talking to an empty room, or somehow have engineers hostage
The point of imagination is that it is not limited by constraints. How can you envision the future if you are limited by the constraints of today?
Steve Jobs is quoted in the 80's as saying that they aspire to make a computer that is essentially today's macbook or ipad.[1] It most certainly was impossible at the time.
I sure like mine though.
You know what you get when you limit yourself to the constraints of right now? The IBM PC Jr.
[1] "Apple's strategy is really simple. What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes. That's what we want to do and we want to do it this decade." http://lifelibertytech.com/2012/10/02/the-lost-steve-jobs-sp...
> The point of imagination is that it is not limited by constraints.
But there's no real imagination here either. It's just a thinner, lighter iPhone, made thinner and lighter using materials that don't exist. Genius!
As an aside, this is how Jony Ive works: http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/01....
If you're not limited by constraints, why design an iPhone? Why not design a superhuman AI that communicates with the user's brain via phased-array MRI? I would say that these kinds of concepts tend to use an undocumented and improbable set of constraints. The problem with improbable but possible futures is that there are so many of them that choosing a specific one has no predictive value.
But Steve's comment has quantifiable goals.
Make it the size of a book. Make it battery-powered. Make the UI good (they failed on that one, but moving on)...
OP's link is just "Take an iphone and remove the edges and make it lighter by using a material that doesn't exist."
That's not innovation. It's actually incredibly formulaic, and completely different from the Steve Jobs quote you gave.
You're right. My imagination says I get an iPhone for free. No, wait! Not for free, Apple pays me $500 to take it! No wait, $500 million! $500 trillion! Wow, I'm the richest person in the world! Imagination is great!The point of imagination is that it is not limited by constraints.In the next day or two, the LeapMotion input device ships[1] allowing all sorts of handwavy detection with a tiny box.
Apple have patented gesture recognition detected by the cameras for, e.g. page scrolling.
What does this "unlimited imagination" future iPhone have for an input improvement? Nokia feature-phone soft-buttons from 2002.
Why do designers pull numbers out of their ass to make a concept sound more appealing? "Dual quad core processor!" yeah, well my concept has dual octocore processors and my concept will be liquid cooled! I mean phase change cooled!
Plasma ultra cooling! Probably still need to tack "gamer" on so you can double the price and use cheaper materials, as long as it is black and red.
I don't understand why so many designers attempt to push the limits of material science while clearly being almost entirely ignorant of it. For example, carbon fiber composites do bend. You can make springs out of them. Also, if you could figure out how to manufacture graphene at a scale large enough to use them on iphone screens you'd probably win the Nobel.
You can't push the boundary of what's possible without already understanding the physics and engineering of the existing boundary. Otherwise you're just another kid with a pretend jetpack made out of 2 liter soda bottles. It's fun, and perhaps praiseworthy for a kid... but as an adult you look a bit silly claiming the design is something real.
I don't understand why so many Science Fiction authors attempt push the limits of material science while clearly being almost entirely ignorant of it. For example, carbon fiber composites do bend. You can make springs out of them. Also, if you could figure out how to manufacture anti-gravity thrusters at a scale large enough to use them on a space ship you'd probably win the Nobel.
Product Design != Science Fiction
This is Product Design Fiction.
That Magsafe Lightning concept would never work. Not only is there not enough space to fit powerful enough magnets, not only is the Lightning connector 8-pin, but one of the only reasons MagSafe even works is that laptops are strong enough to still be in the same place if tugged slightly. Your phone will now not only be tugged along with the cord, but will then disconnect more easily and fly across the room.
I disagree. Just build a strong magnet in there (as was suggested, maybe via the speaker). The advantage of the connector would not be the disconnect-on-trip feature, but rather convenience for plugging and unplugging. Namely, it's a lot easier to just have the cord snap it place magnetically than to futz around with the small metal tip[0].
You're assuming it'd either be too weak or too strong. They would calibrate it until it was "just right", as they do (or try to do) with pretty much all of their ergonomics decisions.
[0] Anecdotally, I own both a MagSafe 2 device and an iPhone 5.
Or just use wireless charging and sync.
Regardless, I still don't want a big magnet in my pocket
Yep, right next to all your cards. Brilliant idea if ever I'd seen one.
Are any of your cards still magnetic? In my wallet all bank cards use chips, other cards (subway tickets, etc) tend to be wireless/NFC, the remainder (IDs, licences) are either nonfunctional plastic, or chips as well.
OK, in travels some countries probably still try to read the creditcard magstripe, that may be a problem for a part of population. Otherwise it's just like worrying about the macbook demagnetizing your floppy disks..
My railcard is magnetic only, as well as my student discount card and several store cards.
My university ID uses a magnetic strip and RFID. However the university disabled RFID usage on all of the printers, doors, etc. on day zero after people found out you could easily spoof them.
Granted, at least my important cards use chips/NFC now.
Why not put the magnet on the cable?
Saying that this could "never work" is silly.
I don't know about you, but a Lightning connector is one of the easiest I've used. There's no "futzing around".
I use a thick case (OtterBox defender series iirc), and I'm sure that's what causing me the extra frustration. It's by no means a painful experience, though. I guess I wasn't properly separating my daily experience from the product's design :)
The entire discussion about MagSafe Lightning is pointless. A truly innovative iPhone 6 would use wireless charging.
This objection doesn't make any sense. The status quo is that if you tug on a Lightning cable, your phone will be tugged along with it, and will likely fall off the surface it is on. If you make it a MagSafe connector with appropriately weak holding force, and do the same thing, your phone will be tugged less hard, and will thus have less of a chance to fall off the surface it is on. It can't help but be an improvement, even if it's not a perfect solution.
The objection that actually does make sense is to point out that Lightning is a) reversible and b) has 8 separate data contacts on each side. It's not just a power connector. Can't really duplicate this with MagSafe or anything similar.
However, if you tug on it, there is a chance that it will not disconnect with a Lightning cable. There's still a good amount of force needed to actually pull and disconnect the cable. This means that if you, say, trip and fall, there's still a chance the cable will still be connected and limits the amount of distance the phone will travel.
With a Magsafe-like cable, it'll disconnect after the tugging happens, and if the pull from the tug is strong enough, it'll cause it to potentially go a greater distance, since there's no cable connected.
The magnets do need to be strong enough to ensure a good electrical connection.
Actually the HP Veer had this design, with magnets and pogo-like pins. As noted, however, the Veer's USB cable is a bit bulky and has fewer pins.
http://www.webosnation.com/hands-on-hp-veer-s-ridiculous-hea...
It could work... if they gave the connector a really big magnetic "ring" that held to the entirety of the bottom of the frame, not just the bit in the center. Maybe if they figured out a way to make the speakers also magnets... ;)
But the other issues will still plague it. It either won't disconnect, or will disconnect to easily.
Not only is there not enough space to fit powerful enough magnets
Make it an electromagnet powered by the USB host/power supply, and use the iPhone accelerometer (or more than one) to detect being yanked by the attached cord and disable the magnet to disconnect easily.
(or do what everyone else is and have an inductive charging matt with no connector).
In order to save space, you suggest... Electromagnets? That would require even more space.
I love the idea of wrapping the display around the side of the phone and having touch sensors to detect when you're holding your phone. I have this problem where I'm holding the phone with one hand and trying to press something with my thumb. It doesn't register as a touch because part of my hand is contacting the front of the screen, causing my action to be interpreted as some sort of two-finger gesture. With accurate information about where my hand is, this would be easy to fix.
One question: why not a 1920x1080 screen? The Galaxy S4 already has that resolution.
Seriously, why do you need 1920x1080? 1280x720 on a 5 inch display is great, even 960x540 on a 4.7 inch display (Optimus L9) still looks great, I just don't see the point unless you want to deplete your battery as fast as possible...
Yes, Enough with the PPI race. On a 4" or 5" display give me 720p and more battery life over 1080p.
If the manufacturer does not opt for the top of the line GPU, games suffer too, since by doubling the resolution, you need to quadruple the pixels rendered. Apple made this mistake with the iPad 3 and iPhone 4, both which performed worse than their predecessors.
This PPI race reminds me of the megapixel race in cameras. Where dumb consumers think a "higher spec" is better when it actually gives them a fuzzier screen (pentile OLED over non-pentile, not in LCD), worse battery life, and worse performance in games.
please continue the PPI race so I can get an even more awesome Oculus Rift!
I believe the ipad mini already has touch rejection of this sort.
Slightly off topic but if interested in learning more about DPI/fonts check out http://billhillsblog.blogspot.com/ and http://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/2-0-5-typo
iOS 7 solves this to some degree by letting you swipe from the edge in place of tapping the navigation buttons in the titlebar.
The icons in those home screen mockups look a heck of a lot better than the real ones:
The home screen icons were the highlight for me. The hardware mockup is full of hyperbole, but the icon set seems very humble in contrast. It is much closer to Apple's established branding than the real (beta) iOS 7. This is the kind of icon set that could be introduced without making all existing icons seem out of place.
And it looks gorgeous on a black iPhone (mockup) because it's not as light.
I think it's what will most likely happen over time - elements and affordances from the old design will bleed into the stark minimalism of the new one (along with new ideas). The iOS 7 design is minimal in order to be a blank slate.
Here's an idea. Make a phone with a case that is strong enough to withstand the drops that inevitably happen! Putting so much effort into cool looking things that have to be covered by dorky cases is an illustration of the irrational at the heart of tech fetishes.
I've dropped my iPhone 4 from a meter high onto surfaces such as wood, tile and asphalt more times than I'm willing to admit, and I've experienced no cracks. I don't know if I'm just astoundingly lucky, or if my particular device is just very well built, but I am satisfied with the state of phone durability at least from my limited experience.
Yes! That's exactly why I would love a slightly more rugged Galaxy S4 Active - what's the point of an edge-to-edge display if you're going to crack it on the first drop (which happens even if you're super careful and have ninja reflexes)...
I'm reminded of the Samsung prototype on the left here: http://www.mobilephones.com/news/samsung-reveal-flexible-pho...
where the screen comes round the edge of the surface. Pretty, and a lot more likely to be in production this decade.
It is obvious that this is not an attempt at trying to design a plausible iPhone. It is an attempt to show case his design chops. Unfortunately, I can't give him full marks on his design, I was put off by his "Accidental Gesture Recognition" paragraph. It is a short paragraph of 7 lines, 3 of which are hyphenated.
Pedantry aside, I think the mockups look great.
The design looks amazing, even though most people will probably have the device covered up with a phone cover. Also retina 2 sounds like i would need 3 versions of every image in my app which is getting to be a bit much.
On a related note, I feel like this issue (non-retina, retina, iphone 5 version, ipad version, older iOS support, etc) and the over-saturated app store have really stifled the indie development world. It takes a lot more effort to make a nicely packaged app today than in 2008-2009, and then you launch on the store and you're just one in 800,000 or w/e.
To me, it's kind of like how the first people on Youtube now have millions of views, but good luck starting a new YT account today...
Marco Arment seems to think that this fall will be as close as we can get back to 08/09 for a while: http://www.marco.org/2013/06/11/fertile-ground
> 3 versions of every image
In Android you have to use 4 different density versions of your images to support the majority. And in BB10 you think about to differnt formats which have different artistic rules to them (you can't use the rule of thirds in a square, it doesn't work well).
So you should better expect screen size/density/aspect ratio differences in future or you will probably regret it.
> Also retina 2 sounds like i would need 3 versions of every image in my app which is getting to be a bit much.
I don't see why; for the edges, I think it'd look fine to just stretch the border-edge pixel out to infinity. All taps/gestures on the "sides" could be reported as occurring at the edge pixels. You'd need to modify your view-controller logic (to do something with all these edge-taps), but not your view.
It's already at three versions of many images if you're still supporting the iPhone 3G in addition to the Retina 3.5 and 4 inch screens.
Where possible I've moved my artwork flow from using PNGs for everything to translating PSD files into stretchable image slices and custom UIViews crafted in IB/Objective C via Core Image & Core Graphics. It's more time consuming at first but pays off in the end.
> The only way to create a true edge-to-edge display is to remove the edge all together.
And moisture is the essence of wetness.
If you remove the edge, you get a cylindrical display.
But wetness is the essence of beauty.
Quotes aside, I've imagined this kind of edgeless design to be where things are headed, and it certainly looks beautiful.
It's more likely that the next iPhone or Galaxy S will have the home button removed (finally), the speaker squeezed as far to the top edge as possible and the screen will fit all that new empty space, with 1-2mm borders.
That's doable in the next 1-2 years, this design isn't.
This is awesome! Very well made, I hope someone from Apple HR is watching...
Not gonna lie, I would buy that in a heartbeat.
Would the aluminum + carbon fiber be a weave of aluminum mixed in with the carbon weave (similar to Pagani's carbotanium for the Huayra's body panels), or an aluminum galvanization process on the surface of the carbon fiber (similar to the galvanized carbon fiber in the Porsche 918 Spyder)?
I did my master's thesis on aluminum/carbon fiber composites and typically they mean infiltrating liquid aluminum through weaves of carbon fiber.
But these materials are hard as hell to make. Carbon and aluminum do not get along for a variety of reasons, and aluminum/carbon composites remain a pie-in-the-sky concept. One of the ways they make Al/C composites now is through a process called squeeze casting, whereby they just force molten aluminum (>660C) to infiltrate a fiber preform at super high pressures. And even then IIRC their properties usually fall well short of theoretical. These are not things nature wants us to put together (at least not yet).
How much additional effort is that on top of the current process of making gorilla glass, though? I believe it already requires some mighty temperatures+pressures.
High temperatures are true of glass work in general. I'm not 100% about the gorilla glass process, but I did not think it high pressure one.
And high pressure is not a deal breaker -- it's just the best way to make some things right now. But even after you've forced carbon and aluminum together, you have a variety of other issues then to deal with: large potential for galvanic corrosion and huge difference in coefficient of thermal expansion are two of the primary ones. The fact that they have horrible wetting behavior is another one, and is the reason they have to do squeeze casting in the first place, but likely also negatively affects the quality of the interface formed between the carbon and the aluminum (thus leading to poor properties even after you've spent all the effort of making it)
Well, then in this iPhone they should use carbon fiber titanium instead!
they would likely run in to similar problems. metal matrix composites in general are hard to make and underperform. i just know the most about al/c composites.
also, aluminum and titanium are already really strong and light. the author wanted to include carbon fiber because "it's perfectly rigid and doesn't bend" and that "scratches are a thing of the past". i appreciate that he wants a bit of far-out flourish for his new design, but both of those statements are way off the mark technically, and would be poor and wrong reasons to pursue difficult to make metal-matrix composites.
and let's not even get started on the graphene...
The icons! Those icons look great, for the most part. Still 'flat' while keeping the iOS personality.
I fail to comprehend this kind of fetish
Very impressive - I'd love to have something that looked that damn cool. The wrap around screen kept making me think of infinity pools.
The iPhone, as boring as it is, at least has a distinct look. This is a rectangle with beveled corners.
1) Not very original
2) Not going to happen
And then you put a cover / bumper ...
With that design of touch sensors on the edge, it would open it up to support being used as a chording keyboard in the style of the classic DataEgg - http://xaphoon.com/dataegg/DataEggNewShape.jpg
Everything about this design, from the edge to edge glass, to the Lightening + Magsafe connector is super appealing, but it's too much of a jump for Apple. Their design style is much slower and more iterative than this.
Arguably the biggest hardware leap so far was the 3gs -> 4, and that was limited to an aesthetic re-envisioning, a camera improvement, screen resolution upgrade, and processor bump.
This design showcases improvements that Apple would likely spread out over 3 generations: everything listed for their biggest leap above, plus new input mechanisms, new connector, significantly less heft, and waterproofing (!!).
Don't get me wrong -- I'd buy this in an instant, but it looks more like iPhone 8, than 6.
I think a bigger design leap is from the existing Mac Pro range to the new Mac Pro. From this: http://bit.ly/13VYioH [1] to this: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
[1] Apple store is currently down, this is a link to an image.
A neat design here, but I'd rather see designs that are more creative. What about an iShirt whose color could change via bluetooth from your phone, depending on how many unread emails you have?
And the quote about graphene was distracting to me because I know for certain that Apple would not have a layer of graphene that would be as thick as Saran Wrap. That's crazy talk- too expensive. I know he wasn't saying it would be that thick, but that was the first thing that came to mind: "no way they would do that".
I think that design looks amazing. I like the concept of MagSafe connector but the world would shit a brick if they changed it again that quickly.
Wow, some of the reactions here are really petty-minded to me.
This guy just made mockups of a future iteration he imagined, of a product he probably uses and likes. Something designers have published to the interwebs for years. It can be fun and a nice way to improve on your skills.
It don't get what justifies the hate some people here show up with. If you don't like it, just skip it and enjoy something else.
Is this a joke? Lol, how are you supposed to use this with one hand. The design (from a presentation perspective) is beautiful, the idea from a practicality standpoint is 100% useless. I couldn't tell if this was serious until I was like 75% of the way through.
It does look great, but Im not sure my hands and fingers would fare well if the edges got chipped. A chipped edge would not be enough to pay lots to get it fixed, where as a shattered screen is. As a result, I see minor injury being a bit of a problem.
I think the Calculation for Screen Size were off. ( Unless I am Wrong ) Assuming no changes in Resolution Scale to iPhone 5, a Display that is 5.86cm Width would be 4.7" Diagonal.
Which incidentally fits in with the latest rumours on 4.7" display. Um....
Here's where the guy loses me: the sample movie on the phone is Lone Ranger.
This would be the coolest god damn phone. If Apple made the smaller form factor again with a slightly bigger screen, I'd be on that. I hate the wonky rectangle of the 5.
Thanks, Johnny. This stuff is fun to think about.
I like pure design concept, without regarding to technical limitation.
I like pure technology design concept without regarding to economical consideration.
This design is just plain form design plus some wanna-be technical terms.
This is not even a good portfolio piece. The typography is really bad.
Some nice ideas in there, but I have a few objections: On a practical level, this would be more better described as a prototype for the iPhone 8 + iOS X ... or something a bit further out than next year. Is that too nit-picky? Probably. As far as the aesthetics go - it looks almost exactly like the HTC One, albeit without a bezel. For a product designer with imaginative ideas about nearly everything else, I would have hoped for a more interesting enclosure design.
How long until apple's lawyers shut this down for using their trademarks all over the place without permission?
Ок. It's cool! Do same OS cool concept and I am ready to buy.
Yet his site doesn't allow pinchzoom on mobile devices
Won't happen.
96GB drive? Seems fishy to me.
It seems fishy to you to do a 50% storage improvement, when we just saw a 100% storage improvement to 128GB on the iPad?
Not fishy at all. Quite plausible. If anything, it's reasonably likely that there will be MORE of an improvement than the concept predicts, in this case.
That's a particularly odd configuration of flash chips, though. That's why you don't see 96GB SSDs very often. Generally, they're found in powers of two.
Its a marketing/pricing game. Manufacture all of them with 128G of storage. Every single one of them. Then the consumer gets to pay a varying amount to be permitted to use what they paid for.
This is a VERY old idea in the computing world.
Physical 128GB with 96GB user-accessible sounds plausible enough.
Honestly, that's the most realistic aspect of the whole concept.
Dishonest linkbait headline.