Apple’s most ambitious iPhone redesign in years may not be dead. It may simply have collided with the realities of building hundreds of millions of phones.

Apple is still developing a glass-centric overhaul of the iPhone for 2027, according to new reporting from Bloomberg, contradicting an analyst report that suggested the project had been canceled. The planned Pro models reportedly feature glass that curves from the front and back toward the sides, separated by a metal band.

That distinction matters. According to Bloomberg, Apple scrapped an earlier, more radical glass-heavy concept, but its broader anniversary redesign remains in development. The gap between those two concepts offers a revealing look at the challenge facing Apple as it tries to make the iPhone feel genuinely new again.

Apple’s ‘all-glass’ iPhone may have been too ambitious to manufacture

The confusion stems from two different versions of Apple’s reported plans.

Jefferies analyst Edison Lee recently downgraded Apple and argued that the company had canceled an anticipated all-glass anniversary iPhone because of poor manufacturing yields. Barron’s reported that Lee viewed the cancellation as a setback for Apple’s efforts to introduce more expensive iPhones as component costs rise.

Bloomberg’s reporting paints a more nuanced picture.

Apple reportedly explored a more extreme design that would have replaced even more of the phone’s metal structure with glass. But that version ran into problems connecting the glass panels and reportedly could not meet the requirements of large-scale production.

The 2027 iPhones still in development, reportedly known internally as V73 and V74, are less radical. Glass is expected to cover the front and back and curve toward the sides, while a metal band remains in the middle.

In other words, Apple reportedly abandoned the more futuristic prototype. The broader design direction appears to have survived.

Why Apple’s 2027 iPhone could feel different

For Apple, 2027 carries symbolism that an ordinary iPhone cycle does not.

The original iPhone debuted in 2007. Ten years later, Apple introduced the iPhone X, eliminating the Home button, introducing Face ID and pushing the screen much closer to the edges of the device.

Apple explicitly positioned that redesign as the start of something bigger. In Apple’s original iPhone X announcement, then-design chief Jony Ive described the device as the realization of Apple’s decade-long ambition to create an iPhone that was “all display.” Phil Schiller separately called the iPhone X the beginning of the next 10 years for the iPhone.

Twenty years after the original iPhone, Apple faces a similar challenge: finding a visual and functional idea big enough to define another era.

Incremental improvements to cameras, chips and battery life can give existing customers reasons to upgrade, but they do less to change how consumers perceive the device itself. A dramatically different physical design could give Apple something increasingly difficult to create in a mature smartphone market: obvious novelty.

There is also a financial dimension. Apple reported a March-quarter record for iPhone revenue earlier this year. Apple’s fiscal second-quarter results show that the franchise remains enormously valuable even without a radical redesign. But that scale makes successful experimentation more difficult, not less.

A design that works beautifully in a prototype has to survive drops, heat, repairs, cases, wireless charging and years of everyday use. More importantly, Apple must be able to manufacture it reliably at extraordinary volume.

That may explain why the surviving design is more interesting than the reportedly scrapped one. Apple appears to be searching for a balance between the visual simplicity of an almost uninterrupted glass device and a design its supply chain can reliably produce at iPhone scale.

What the glass redesign could mean for users

Previous reports have suggested Apple wants the 2027 model to appear almost borderless, with a display that curves around all four edges. Reports have also pointed to thinner OLED technology and techniques intended to minimize the visibility of the bezels.

If those reports prove accurate, Apple could achieve the visual effect of an uninterrupted slab of glass without literally constructing the phone that way. It would be a familiar Apple maneuver: make complicated engineering disappear behind a simpler physical experience.

And that may ultimately matter more than whether analysts can accurately describe the device as “all glass.”

The iPhone X was transformative not because its chassis contained a particular percentage of glass, but because its display, Face ID and gesture-based interface worked together to make the old Home-button design suddenly look dated.

Apple will need a similarly convincing trick in 2027.

The smartphone market is far more mature than it was a decade ago, and annual upgrades increasingly revolve around refinement rather than reinvention. Better cameras, faster chips and longer battery life remain valuable, but they rarely change how people think about what a smartphone can be.

That is why the fate of Apple’s more ambitious glass prototype matters beyond one reportedly abandoned design. If Apple scaled back the concept because it could not manufacture it reliably, the decision highlights the tension at the center of modern consumer technology: breakthrough designs still have to survive the unforgiving economics of mass production.

Apple does not need to ship the most futuristic iPhone its designers can imagine. It needs to build one that looks futuristic while remaining durable and manufacturable at iPhone scale.

For a company preparing to mark 20 years of its most important product, that distinction could determine whether the anniversary iPhone feels like another upgrade or the beginning of Apple’s next smartphone era.

Related reading: Thinking about upgrading before 2027? See how much your current iPhone, Mac, or iPad could be worth with Apple’s latest trade-in values.

Lovable has raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, more than doubling its value in eight months as investors place another large bet on software built through natural-language prompts.

The Stockholm-based company is nearing a $600 million annual revenue run rate and plans to expand its workforce by 50% to about 450 employees this year. Its customer list now includes Nvidia, Adidas, Hearst, and Zendesk, giving Lovable a larger foothold inside companies where AI-built applications can move quickly from experiments to everyday business tools.

Lovable’s $13.3B valuation backs a broader software bet

The new $400 million funding round was co-led by Menlo Ventures and Scaleup Europe Fund, an EU-backed investment vehicle overseen by EQT. Balderton Capital, World Innovation Lab, and Tencent also participated.

It follows Lovable’s $330 million Series B in December, when the company was valued at $6.6 billion. Lovable’s valuation has therefore more than doubled while its revenue run rate has nearly tripled from the level reported at the end of last year.

Lovable is part of the broader vibe-coding market, which lets people create applications by describing what they want rather than writing the code themselves. Its platform can generate front ends, back ends, databases, authentication, and integrations, with generated code available for review or export to GitHub.

That model is increasingly moving into established companies. Nvidia, for example, uses Lovable to create customized software that helps team leaders track projects and delivery. Lovable also markets the platform for internal tools and production applications built by product managers, designers, marketers, and other employees alongside engineering teams.

Investor interest extends beyond Lovable. Replit was valued at $9 billion in March, while SpaceX agreed to acquire Cursor parent Anysphere for $60 billion in June.

More builders mean more software for IT to govern

Giving employees outside engineering the ability to create working applications can remove development bottlenecks, but it also expands the amount of software an organization has to track.

Lovable’s enterprise offering reflects that shift. The company provides SSO and SAML authentication, role-based access controls, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, GitHub integration, and controls for managing applications across shared workspaces.

Its Workspace Insights tool gives enterprise administrators an inventory of projects and externally published apps, along with information about owners, personally identifiable information, security findings, publishing status, authentication providers, database tables, and row-level security settings.

Lovable says enterprise workspaces can grow to thousands of projects. At that scale, an AI app builder becomes another part of the organization’s software estate rather than an isolated productivity tool.

IT teams adopting platforms such as Lovable therefore need policies for who can build and publish applications, which company data those apps can access, how generated code enters existing development workflows, and who remains responsible for maintaining an application after it is deployed.

Lovable’s $13.3 billion valuation is ultimately a bet that far more employees will build software themselves. If that bet pays off, IT departments will be managing not only AI coding tools, but a rapidly growing inventory of software those tools create.

Also read: A high-severity Cursor Git vulnerability demonstrated how flaws in AI coding environments can reach the development systems around them.

Well over half a million Grubhub drivers and customers are set to receive a share of $23.8 million following allegations that the food delivery company misled workers about their potential earnings and engaged in other deceptive practices.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Wednesday that it’s distributing the money to 640,038 consumers, with most recipients receiving a check in the mail. Some will receive their payments through PayPal.

The payouts stem from a lawsuit the FTC and Illinois Attorney General filed against Grubhub in December 2024. The complaint accused the company of a range of unlawful practices, including making misleading claims about how much drivers could earn, restricting customers’ access to their accounts and money, and listing restaurants on its platform without their permission.

Another allegation involved Grubhub’s restaurant listings. According to the complaint, the company had as many as 325,000 restaurants on its platform that were not affiliated with Grubhub. The FTC alleged that Grubhub used those listings to make its platform appear larger.

The complaint also alleged that Grubhub sometimes refused to remove restaurants after they asked to be taken off the platform. Instead, the company allegedly tried to convince some of those businesses to enter into paid partnerships.

The settlement required Grubhub to change how it operates in several areas. For instance, the company must be more accurate when advertising potential driver earnings, give customers a way to challenge account restrictions that leave them unable to access their accounts or funds, and obtain a restaurant’s consent before listing it on the platform.

Today’s announcement puts renewed attention on Grubhub’s treatment of its drivers and diners and the company’s broader business practices. Notably, it comes just one month after a federal judge granted final approval of another settlement worth nearly $25 million and involving approximately 60,000 Grubhub delivery drivers in California.

Grubhub also isn’t the only delivery company to face scrutiny. In the past, DoorDash has faced criticism and legal challenges over driver compensation, while Uber Eats has dealt with allegations involving customer charges and its relationships with restaurants.