Calm yourselves, this isn’t real, but imagine if it was. Imagine a phone that had something more tactile on it apart from 2-3 buttons. Meet the iPhone 18 from NFT Designer, a phone that looks weirdly familiar. If you’ve seen the CMF Phone from last year, you’ll remember that a highlight of that device was a tactile threaded knob on the bottom corner of the device, designed to help fix third-party accessories and modules, or even swap out your phone’s fascia for unique new color combinations.
Here, the iPhone 18 gets a suspiciously similar knob, but it isn’t for accessories – it’s presumably for rotary input. What do I mean? Well, we just saw phones at MWC debut the ability to attach (and control) camera lenses directly on the phone – so what if you ditched the lenses but retained the control? Placed perfectly at finger’s reach while holding the phone in landscape mode, this rotary dial could potentially help with focusing and clicking photos more naturally. Look closely and you’ll see that the Camera Control ‘button’ on the iPhone 18 is missing, so this rotary knob suddenly makes a LOT of sense.
Designer: NFT Designer
We all know fully well that Apple’s ditching their iconic camera square for a new ‘island format’ with the upcoming 17 series. The leaks have pretty much confirmed it, although it’s uncharacteristic of Apple to bulk their phones up instead of slimming them down. Either way, we’re yet to see what this new ‘chonky’ camera island means for the iPhone’s photographic capabilities. However… I believe the Camera Control button on the side was a precursor for what’s yet to come. Apple’s hell bent on building the best camera a smartphone can have, and the Camera Control was a stepping stone towards that eventuality – but that’s all it is – a stepping stone.
Although highly unrealistic, actual physical hardware sounds like a MUCH better idea for camera interfacing than a haptic button. My first thought was that this was a volume knob, but then again, the iPhone 18 concept still has volume buttons on the side. It only makes sense that this new tactile input is made to power the most important part of the iPhone – the camera. Scrolling between lenses, scrolling to zoom, scrolling to focus, potentially even pressing to click – it all makes sense. The knob is located perfectly within reach of your index finger while you hold the phone in landscape, not so much while in portrait mode, but then again, the Camera Control button is partial to landscape photography too.
We’re expected to get more information on the ‘actual’ iPhone 18 towards the end of this year, once the iPhone 17 materializes fully. A few things we’re fairly certain of is that Apple’s also working on an iPhone Air, which is a slimmer version of its flagship phone, as well as potentially a folding iPhone to be launched around 2026-27.
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