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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes Apple’s material choices are questionable. Their iPod touches have this really slick, polished metal back. It looks really great – for a few weeks. Then it’s quickly getting scratches.

I don’t know whether they picked that material for sentimental reasons (all iPods back to the first one – except the smaller ones – had that back) and whether you are just supposed to accept that back that’s slowly getting more and more scratches. (I won’t use cases. Never. I have to be able to put your gadget in my empty jeans pocket. If I can’t there’s something wrong with your product.)

Apple knows and used better materials. My trusty six year old brushed aluminum iPod mini pretty much looks like new and has been treated far worse than my iPod touch.

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> Their iPod touches have this really slick, polished metal back. It looks really great – for a few weeks. Then it’s quickly getting scratches.

Likewise for the chrome bezel. Within an hour of ditching my iPhone's case, I nicked the damn thing with a very slight bump. It was a huge relief to see Apple lose the chrome for the iPhone 4. But after one of Engadget's phones got a nice big scratch on the back, I can no longer assume they're using gorilla glass on both sides.

I'm forced to believe they make questionable material choices merely to increase the "shiny", which is one of my main gripes with Apple. It's undoubtedly why they use glossy displays by default on MacBooks, iMacs, and iPads, even though matte is far more usable.

To be fair, the introduction of glossy displays was done after most other laptop manufacturers had switched. I'm sure they did it because it looks better at the store, i.e. you have to know that a matte display is more usable in daylight to prefer that over the glossy display.

They do consider how it will look past the store—not in the least because Apple products are sold online as well as through the retail stores.

The likely explanation, to me, is that professional graphics people (Apple's high-end core market) will set up the environment of the device to be perfect for it (i.e. "studio lighting"—basically the same as the Apple stores) rather than expecting the device to conform to the environment. Glossy is better under perfect conditions.

I don't buy that explanation, as glossy displays are ubiquitous on Apple products aside from the Cinema Displays and matte options for MacBook Pros. They surely aren't assuming that iPads and regular Macbooks are being used in perfect lighting conditions, which is an unreasonable assumption to make for any portable device.

I would actually argue that glossy displays are not ideal in any lit environment, for the simple reason that blacks just turn the display into a mirror. This is also a problem if you've turned down the brightness in order to save power.

Matte really needs to be the default for any display, with glossy as an option.

One sunny day I went outside and tested glossy and matte lcd side-by-side. I had the same results as described here: http://netwalker.nl/2007/07/28/glossy-vs-matte/

Glossy was better. (lcd panels were from different manufacturers, so my results may not apply to every case)

edit: unlike in the linked blog-post, backlight intensity of both lcd-s I tested was roughly the same.

That blog post is comparing a glossy LED to a matte non-LED display. Big difference, and one I know about first hand because I own MacBook Pros with both types of display, only my LED is matte.

Personally, it's incredibly rare for me to be using a laptop outside on a sunny day, so even if glossy were better in sunlight, I'd never base my decision on that fact. But I can tell you that I did get to compare a matte and glossy MBP of the exact same model in an Apple store, side by side, and saw no significant difference in brigntness.

I've read an interview with Jobs that said it's meant to scratch - it gives it personality. Jobs thinks it should, the rest of the universe would prefer it doesn't.

If this was the case, it would come pre-scratched as an option. Can you still buy those iPods that are scratched with U2's signature?

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