RANKED: The best-looking iPhone designs, from the original iPhone to the iPhone X (AAPL)

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Apple has made a lot of gorgeous smartphones over the years.

While the iPhone has evolved plenty over the years, particularly with regards to functionality, we thought it'd be fun to just focus on how the exterior of the phone has changed over the years, and rank our favorite looks.

We've written extensively about how terrible the very first iPhone was from a technical standpoint when it was launched in 2007.

From a design perspective, though, it was a good-looking phone that was intuitive to use, with buttons and the mute toggle on the side, and the power button on top. With its silver trim and matte back, it looked like a more premium version of the iPod Touch. More beautiful iPhone models came along, but this was the model the launched the smartphone wave that defined the last decade. 

The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus were very similar to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The phones were slightly thicker, slightly heavier, and made of a stronger aluminum that made it tougher to bend. It also had a finish that made it slightly less slippery to hold.

Other than that, Apple kept all the design choices from the iPhone 6, for better or worse. The display was still the star of the show, but details on the back of the phone — like the awkward antenna lines and the rear camera bump — left much to be desired.

Apple ditched the glass portions from the iPhone 5S and went whole-hog on aluminum with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The all-aluminum design made those phones much thinner and much lighter than previous iPhone designs, which had an unintended consequence where people tested the phone's flexibility by bending it, leading to the much-publicized #BendGate.

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus featured a new rounded look, compared to the flat edges of the iPhone 5 and 5S, making them look more like iPod designs from way back when. But the biggest improvement in the iPhone 6 line was the display: Apple upgraded from the 4-inch screens of the iPhone 5 era to a larger 4.7-inch screen for the iPhone 6, and a much larger 5.5-inch screen for the iPhone 6 Plus.

The iPhone 6 phones were the first inkling that Apple wanted to create a phone that was mostly display. Still, those antenna lines on the back were not very appealing, and this was the first iPhone to introduce the rear camera bump: The lens is raised slightly off the back of the device, which meant the phone couldn't lie perfectly flat on a table.

The iPhone X represents the future of Apple's smartphone efforts, and the phone itself is an incredible testament to Apple's industrial design. When the phone is off, it looks like a seamless slab of glass, like the iPhone 7 and 8. It's a different story when the phone is on, however, as the eyes are naturally drawn to the "notch" at the top of the phone that houses Apple's TrueDepth camera system.

The iPhone X is very close to Apple's ideal all-screen smartphone, especially with its gorgeous edge-to-edge OLED display. Still, between the notch on the front and the bulbous camera bump on the back of the phone, there are some obvious areas for improvement. In the same way the iPhone 6 design looked much better by the time Apple released the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8, the iPhone X is likely to undergo a similar evolution in the coming years.

The iPhone 3G and 3GS — released in 2008 and 2009, respectively — had identical designs, save for the model number listed on the back of the phones.

The iPhone 3G and 3GS also looked pretty similar to the original iPhone, at least from the front (save for slightly thicker bezels, or black borders, on the later iPhones).

The backs of the iPhone 3G and 3GS, however, looked much more attractive than the original iPhone. Whereas the 2007 iPhone had an aluminum backside, the iPhone 3G and 3GS had all-white or all-black backs that were made of plastic.

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