Kuo: Apple's 2020 iPhone will include a smaller TrueDepth camera, reducing the size of the notch, and a rear-facing camera with a seven-piece lens system
Apple is expected to significantly decrease the size of iPhone's TrueDepth “notch” in 2020, modifying or potentially removing …
Context & Ripple Effects
This July 2019 note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is the opening move in a multi-year notch-shrink saga that his own later research kept revising. He forecast that the 2020 iPhone would carry a smaller TrueDepth module and a seven-piece rear lens system — but when the iPhone 12 arrived with only a narrower notch, the full shrink had already slipped a cycle.
The pattern then repeated: Kuo's March 2021 notes again flagged a smaller notch on the iPhone 13, and by April 2021 he had pushed the endgame — Face ID hidden entirely under the display — out to 2023 iPhones. The 2019 report matters as the baseline against which two years of slipped timelines can be measured.
First-order effects
- Apple's 2020 iPhone design brief calls for a physically smaller TrueDepth sensor array, directly shrinking the notch, while the rear camera moves to a seven-piece lens stack — raising optical complexity for the camera module chain feeding the iPhone line.
Second-order effects
- Because the shrink did not land on schedule — the iPhone 12 shipped with merely a narrower notch and none of the models got a 120Hz display — expectations for display and Face ID upgrades rolled forward into the iPhone 13 cycle, where Kuo tied the smaller notch to larger batteries and Pro-only 120Hz panels.
Third-order effects
- If Kuo's trajectory holds, the notch's disappearance becomes a staged engineering program rather than a single redesign: incremental TrueDepth miniaturization through the iPhone 12 and 13 generations, culminating in under-display Face ID around 2023 — after which the front-of-screen constraint disappears as a differentiator between Pro and standard models.
The trend: Apple is shrinking the iPhone's Face ID notch incrementally across successive generations, with full elimination deferred to an under-display TrueDepth system rather than achieved in any one cycle.