Apple’s entry-level iPhone 17e might dump notch in favor of Dynamic Island

Apple’s morphing ‘Dynamic Island’ featured on iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 14 Pro Max, and later
Apple’s budget iPhone could see a major design refresh in 2026, with the iPhone 17e reportedly swapping the notch for the Dynamic Island, per a recent leak. This change would bring the modern Dynamic Island feature, first introduced on the iPhone 14 Pro, to entry-level iPhone users.
David snow for Cult of Mac:
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With every new iPhone lineup, Apple must decide which features to add to which models — and which to withhold. Typically, high-end features trickle down to entry-level models in subsequent years.
That seems to be the case with the iPhone 17e, which will feature a “Smart Island” design, according to Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station, which has a relatively solid track record for Apple predictions. The “Smart Island” is seemingly a reference to Apple’s Dynamic Island, which replaced the traditional notch on higher-end models in 2022 and came to the rest of the iPhone 15 lineup the following year.
This would make iPhone 17e the final iPhone model to transition from the notch to the Dynamic Island.

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MacDailyNews Take: Die, inelegant kludge, die! You horrid thing should never have seen the light of day!
The “Dynamic Island” takes a negative (we can’t figure out how / don’t want to hide the TrueDepth Camera and sensors under the display or put them into a thin top bezel) and turns it into a positive – look, it’s a coolly animated morphing thingamabob that just happens to look like a black pill while it’s poised to morph into its next iteration!
Apple’s “Dynamic Island” is deviously smart. We like it much more than the inelegant kludge (notch) we’ve been stuck with since 2017 with iPhone X.
(We contend that Steve Jobs would have been presented the notch, arched an eyebrow, and told whoever pitched it to go back to the drawing board. They would have worked at it until they arrived at the “Dynamic Island.” Without Steve Jobs, Apple shipped the notch for 5 years. That’s the Steve Jobs difference in a nutshell.) – MacDailyNews, September 8, 2022

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