Unified iPhone 5 bypasses thicker white iPhone 4, odd Verizon iPhone 4

The iPhone 5 will need to restore balance back to the force after the splintered mess Apple has created during the iPhone 4 era, which now has four spatially different iPhone 4 hardware models on the market. First the company released a Verizon version of the iPhone 4 whose buttons are in slightly different places. And now it's been confirmed by various users that the Verizon and AT&T iterations of the new white iPhone 4 are a hair thicker than their black iPhone 4 counterparts, doubling the number of disparate iPhone hardware models on the market. Does any of this matter to you as a user? Yes and no. But it further underscores the need for a unified iPhone 5 when the time comes, in order to bypass the the downsides to the current discrepancies.

Why does the iPhone 5 need to leave this inconsistency behind? First, there's the obvious: if you have an AT&T iPhone 4 and you decide to move to Verizon or vice versa, it's one thing to have to break your contract and pay your early termination fee. But it's another to have to buy a new iPhone 4 to replace your existing iPhone 4, simply to get your hands on one which has a compatible antenna technology. And it's a whole other thing when you realize that, thanks to the differing placement of the controls, even your existing iPhone 4 case might have to be replaced because it might not fit the other iPhone 4. And now, thanks to the slightly thicker nature of the white iPhone 4, it's possible that merely switching from the black iPhone 4 to the white one on the same carrier might keep the most tightly form-fitting of cases from fitting – and in this case all you thought you were doing was changing colors.

The iPhone 4 era has been an evolving one all along: there were supposed to be two colors and one carrier, then it was one and one, and then it became two carriers with one color between them. Now it's two carriers, two colors, four physically differently shaped iPhone 4 models out there. It's enough to make one breathe a sigh of relief that the 16 GB and 32 GB variations of the iPhone 4 are somehow magically the same size and shape. So what does the iPhone 5 need to do in order to leave this all behind? Simple: come in one unified hybrid model which works with AT&T, Verizon, and any other carriers the iPhone 5 might be offered on. And whether the iPhone 5 ultimately comes in a choice of black and white or moves to some other color or material motif, they all need to be the same thickness. This late in the iPhone 4 era, it's almost bizarre that we're still having these conversations about the aging-yet-evolving current iPhone. Here's hoping they'll be a thing of the past once the iPhone 5 arrives later this year and corrals the entire hardware lineup into a physically identical form factor. Here's more on the iPhone5.