Adam Kos He already has a patent for it, so why couldn't he? Jony Ive talked about it long before he left the company. Such a device was nicknamed "a single slab of glass". The patent application reveals that we could expect not only an all-glass iPhone, but also an Apple Watch or a Mac Pro.
Past
It was 2009 and Sony Ericsson introduced the first mobile phone with a transparent display. Xperia Pureness was a classic push-button phone that didn't have any extreme features. It practically brought only a technological fad in that transparent display - as the first and also the last. This phone model had the misfortune that at this time the iPhone was already king and there was no one who had a reason to follow it. It went on sale, but of course success could not come. All they wanted was "touches".
Then in 2013 we could see a prototype of the Hollywood dream of what a fully transparent phone could really look like. Yes, its equipment is quite limited, but it can make calls and, surprisingly, it also offers an SD card slot. Minority Report, Iron Man and other blockbusters have been competing to deliver a wild vision of future technology. So far, it appears to be completely transparent, although at the expense of functions - that is, taking into account the real possibilities, because Tony Stark proves that even transparent devices can really do a lot.
The Taiwanese company Polytron Technologies offered a transparent touch screen in the aforementioned year, which it tried to offer to retailers. The key to its success was supposed to be Switchable Glass technology, i.e. conductive OLED, which used liquid crystal molecules to display an image. When the phone is off, these molecules form a white, cloudy composition, but when activated by electricity, they realign to form text, icons or other images. Of course, we now know whether it was a successful concept or not (B is correct).
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Vratislav Holub Future
The patents are written in the most general terms possible, making it sound like Apple invented a glass box with a display. And for any use. Even according to the drawings, the glass iPhone actually looks a lot like a Samsung device with a curved display. But of course this is not transparent. Apple's patent actually shows that the display could be practically everywhere on the device, on every surface.
The idea looks damn good, but that's about it. It's impractical for several reasons - you simply can't make some components opaque. In the end, it would be a glass body with a mess of wiring that could simply not be avoided, and that wouldn't actually be so nice anymore. And yes, if there was a camera, of course it wouldn't be transparent either, which puts the overall design on the back burner.
Another question is about privacy and whether the manufacturer would be able to ensure that the information displayed on the front side cannot be read from the back of the phone. It all looks nice, but that's about it. Few people would want to use such a device.
