I think that Jony Ive’s end-game with a ridgid iphone is to get to a slab of featureless glass on the front.
I think the current design of the X is near the end game for this, with just a few year on year iterations:
So like many others on this thread, I expect Apple to first shrink the Face ID component so the notch is shallower and then to move it all under the display (if that’s even possible).
Then I expect the side buttons to be fully haptic - for greater reliability and even better waterproofing. And the lightening port made fully waterproof.
(Next year, I suspect that Apple’s promo videos will feature lots of people snorkelling whilst taking videos with their phones).
I wouldn’t be surprised if in near-future (high end) phones, the lightening port is removed entirely.
The QI charging will have to be made faster (10w) for that to happen and some sort of independent (of the main system) secure way to connect to the phone wirelessly.
I suspect that this might even be a next year thing. Apple is relentlessly pushing wireless headphones for a reason, I think.
Under the hood, I think we’ll see even more efficient low power cores as Apple really improves battery life, with YoY performance gains slowing down as Apple focus on battery efficiency. Oh and GPU gains (for AVR).
And of course the usual camera gains.
So no, I don’t think we’ll see a huge redesign. Just meaningful feature improvements.
And then of course there’s a foldable iPhone, which no doubt Apple is working on... And I’m not even going to hazard a guess as to what that’ll be like, except SE users will likely be able to rejoice!
EDIT: oh and 5g...