Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max look set to keep today’s 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch displays, but everything that sits above those panels is about to change. A new post from reliable Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station says the company has locked in two major display upgrades that will debut on the 2026 Pro line: under-display Face ID and a single pinhole selfie camera.
Sticking with the same dimensions would mark three straight generations, 16 Pro, 17 Pro, and now 18 Pro, with identical screen real estate. That conservatism frees Apple’s engineers to tackle the bigger design problem: hiding sensors without sacrificing image quality or Face ID reliability. The leak echoes earlier predictions by DSCC’s Ross Young and investigative reporting from The Information that pegged 2026 as the year Apple finally ditches the Dynamic Island’s visible hardware.
Under-display Face ID is the headline feature. The infrared projector and dot-matrix sensor array will sit beneath active OLED pixels, lighting up only when authentication is required. In day-to-day use, the glass above those components should look indistinguishable from the rest of the screen. If Apple keeps the Dynamic Island animation, it will be purely cosmetic, a software flourish rather than a hardware necessity.
The second shift is a move to hole-in-active-area (HIAA) technology for the front camera. Instead of the current pill-shaped cut-out, users would see a lone pinhole, potentially nudged to the top-left corner, mirroring many Android rivals. That asymmetrical placement could maximise status-bar real estate while clearing the optical path for the camera.
Together, the two tweaks promise Apple’s tidiest face-up design since the iPhone X scrapped the Home button in 2017. Thinner bezels become feasible because the earpiece and other components can creep closer to the edge, and Apple lays the groundwork for an eventual full-screen slab once under-panel camera tech matures. The caveat: integrating Face ID under organic LEDs without degrading accuracy is notoriously tricky, and Apple prototypes several designs before finalising anything. Plans can shift if yields or image quality fall short.
Goodbye, Island. Hello, Glass?
If the leak holds, the iPhone 18 Pro will leapfrog most Android phones in display cleanliness while keeping Apple’s biometric crown intact. That would leave only one visible blemish on the horizon: the selfie shooter itself. And if under-panel cameras reach Apple’s demanding standards by 2028, even that pinhole could vanish, ushering in the first truly unbroken iPhone screen.
For now, expect the talk around next year’s iPhone 17 Pro to feel almost conservative. The big fireworks are reportedly queued for autumn 2026, when Face ID hides in plain sight and Dynamic Island retires from hardware duty, proving that sometimes less screen furniture really is more.