What the iPhone 8 Could Look Like Without a Home Button

Each year, the industry spends most of the year buzzing about what the next iPhone will look like and what features Apple will bring to the table. This year is no different, although things have been amped up even more thanks to the fact that this year’s iPhone will be the tenth anniversary iPhone.

Rumors are pointing to a ground-up redesign of the iPhone that may even ditch some of the most iconic features of the device. There are all sorts of rumors about what the iPhone 8 will be, but the removal of the Home button is one of the most interesting. Most Android phones ditched the Home button long ago, but Apple’s possible move to a button-less phone could be for an assortment of different reasons.

So why remove the Home button? Well—the concept video above from ConceptsiPhone provides some pretty interesting reasons. We may have already been given a sneak peak at this with the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro, which replaced the row of function keys for a touchscreen.

The possible benefits are twofold and the first is the most obvious: screen real estate. The symmetry Apple favors with its design language have made the 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus an absolutely massive phone, especially compared to its Android competitors. Removing the Home button would allow Apple to significantly increase the size of the display and decrease the size of the bezels.

The second is more interesting: contextual buttons. Like the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, imagine the bottom of the display giving you all sorts of different options and buttons, depending on what app you’re in.

In the concept video above, there is still an indent on the phone to be used for Touch ID, but like the OnePlus devices, it isn’t an actual button that you press. Apple has been headed in this direction with Touch ID anyways, so don’t be surprised if the Home “button” on the next iPhone doesn’t press down at all.