Apple responds to iPhone 5 scuffs, says scratches and chips are ‘normal’ | Hacker News Reader

Apple responds to iPhone 5 scuffs, says scratches and chips are ‘normal’

extremetech.com

36 pointsukdm77 comments

So first, they have metal backs which get scratched and everybody complains (first iPhone). Then they move to plastic (3G) and everybody is happy until they actually use the phone at which point everybody complains about the cheap "plasticy" feeling.

So they go ahead and announce the iPhone 4 with a glass back. Everybody is happy after the announcement that the cheap plastic days are finally over, but once the phone comes out, everybody complains about scratches, or worse, breakage (even though, personally, I love the touch-and-feel of the iPhone 4(S) and so far, neither the front nor the back broke).

So finally, they release the iPhone 5, again with a metal back. "Finally! No more breaking risk" everybody says after the keynote. Then the phone comes out and everybody starts complaining about scratches again.

So what's left? What material would you suggest they could use?

I realize it's not always the same people rejoicing that are then complaining, but I do see kind of a pattern here.

> so far, neither the front nor the back broke

careful there, coworker told me exactly the same thing and the next day his glass cracked :)

The casing of the Nexus One has none of those problems AFAIK.

The macbook pros are quite durable to scratches and scuffs, so perhaps they could have used the same material/processes. Not sure about the iPhone 5 since I haven't handled one in person yet.

Anecdotal counterargument ho.

I've owned a unibody MBP for only a year or so and it has several visible scratches, especially on the underside. It doesn't bother me, at least not as much as a case would, but based on my own experience I definitely wouldn't say "quite durable." I also wouldn't prefer any other material.

> "The macbook pros are quite durable to scratches and scuffs, so perhaps they could have used the same material/processes."

They do. On the white/silver iphone5. And it, by all accounts, handles wear just like the unibody macbooks. The issue only relates to the black/graphite iPhone5, due the coating used to make it appear black/graphite.

The iPhone had a metal back that exposed a black sub-surface with wear - and people complained. The iPhone 3G/3GS had a plastic back that scratched, chipped, cracked and was known to develop discolored stress marks - and people complained. The iPhone 4/4S had a glass back that chipped, scratched and shattered - and people complained.

I'm not sure about the Nexus One, having never seen one. But I am fairly certain that no matter what Apple makes a phone with, they can not ship anything that's literally perfect. And they will ship millions, with the initial sales tilted toward obsessives and perfectionists. These people have always found things to complain about and they will always find things to complain about.

Further, the press knows Apple articles are an eyeball gold mine, particularly Apple articles about a controversy, so they will always make as big a deal out of anything that they can.

See also: the 'yellow' screen glue issues; 'antennagate'; the possibility that repeated application and removal of cases to an iPhone4/4S might cause cracks; the stress cracks on the 3G; wear on the silver face band around the 3G/3GS; wear on the original iPhone back; dead pixels on the 4; etc.

Nexus One owner here. My device has a lot of scratches and scuffs, it has been magically lifting itself out of my pocket on a few occasions including riding a bike at full speed. Needless to say, when it hit the ground it not only totally disassembled itself, it also received a few more scratches here and there. My MacBook Pro is different by the way, no scratches after lots and lots of usage.

The verdict: I couldn't care less. It's a phone and after putting the battery back in and the cover on, it never ceased to work, it didn't even change my user experience in any way (broken glass, buttons etc.)

I would not buy a phone that requires me to put in in an ugly case, but I would also not care much about a few scratches here and there as long as the phone doesn't break.

So if you buy a phone partially for it's supposedly amazing design and then hide it inside those ugly rubber casings or whine about small scratches, well, than you lost me along the way.

"What material would you suggest they could use?"

There are plenty of plastics out there that don't break or scratch easily. And when they do scratch, it's a solid color so the scratch isn't readily visible. Most other phone companies use one of those.

Yes. They tried that with the iPhone 3G. People didn't like the cheap "plasticy" feeling.

Because it was a cheap, plasticy plastic :) The premium kind in the Lumia series beats any iPhone up to 4S. Haven't tried the 5 yet, though I think metal is a particularly poor choice.

Did you read the article? Extremetech seems to believe that it's a flaw in the adonizing process:

"Schiller must be referring to the fact that anodization simply isn’t strong enough to withstand everyday use. We know this isn’t the case, though, as anodized aluminium is very well understood and used in a massive gamut of applications — including military, where the anodized coating certainly doesn’t just scratch off."

Also, from another extremetech article it links to: "Usually another protective layer of sealant or lacquer is added to make the it more wear-resistant — but sadly it seems like the iPhone 5 lacks that extra protection."

The iPhone 5's adonization seems to be more fragile than other adonized devices. <strikethrough>They've been coloring the iPods for years and nobody has complained this much.</strikethrough>

The second generation anodized iPod nano scratched if you looked at it funny.

You are correct: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10149328-37.html

From personal experience, I have had an anodized aluminum computer case for over ten years, and in all my accessing and bumping into that case I have yet to scratch the coating.

"So what's left? What material would you suggest they could use?"

Type III Hard Anodized Aluminum, not the thinner, weaker Type II they apparently used. Also, a little more texture on the back would have disguised scratches better.

I carried this HA III flashlight on my keychain for years with surprising little wear, given that it's constantly scraping against keys, key rings, and other metal tools. http://www.arcflashlight.com/arc-aaa.shtml

Actually Apple are pretty bad at picking phone materials period.

Glass is probably the poorest material possible for the obvious reason. The fact that yours didn't yet break is irrelevant.

Aluminum is yet another bad choice. It is cold to the touch during winter, it's slippery and if you're wearing a ring it will scratch the back. Nokia made the same mistake with the N8 and the E7.

The answer is high quality plastic, like on the N9 or Lumia 800/900/920. This feels excellent in the hand and is also very tough. Another option might be rubberized plastic as seen on some Android models.

But making it out of plastic would lose some of the thinness/strength benefits from a unibody aluminum enclosure.

Apple uses a single block of aluminum: http://thetechblock.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/iphone5_t...

Could be. The Nokias I mentioned use one block of plastic (or polycarbonate as they call it), but they are indeed thicker.

As an anecdote my laptop (MBA) and phone (N8) have a full aluminum body. I prefer the high quality plastic of the Thinkpad & N9 though, it's "friendlier" to the touch than the cold slippery metal.

> Actually Apple are pretty bad at picking phone materials period.

Which is funny, because they filed a patent[1] over two years ago for a process to make scratch-resistant stainless steel.

[1] http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/apple-to-patent-process-f...

Stainless steel is a pretty interesting material, but probably not a good choice for this design. A new variant of stainless probably makes it an even poorer choice (because full characterization is a prerequisite):

- Some variants of stainless steel are ferromagnetic, which would mess with the compass.

- Steel has very poor RF transparency, which would impact performance even with glass windows.

- Steel is heavy.

- Steel is far more difficult to machine: with Al you can easily (quickly, with little resistance) mill the curves and cavities that Apple likes for unibody design. Meanwhile steel chips, heats, and provides much resistance to a mill. It requires more finishing and incurs more tool wear.

I agree there are drawbacks to stainless and that it would be difficult to design a cellphone or other RF device entirely or predominantly from it. However, the patent does show that they have gone so far as to research and patent a process for improving a material for use in their portable devices. This makes the apparent lack of care in choosing the anodized aluminum for the iPhone 5 surprising and disappointing.

Nitpick: There are tons of high-durability glasses that you'd have to try pretty hard to chip or break.

> Glass is probably the poorest material possible for the obvious reason.

Yet the iPhone 4 that I own since about release day has fallen an impossible number of times from unsuspected heights, and both front and back panels survived the abuse. I'd buy another such "poor material" phone anytime.

The only shattered iPhone 4 panel I encountered was my boss's, and it fell from the kinetic equivalent of second floor onto concrete. He's still using it because only a corner is affected, and a replacement front panel costs too much (I bet he'll get an iP5)

Ok, but what does that prove really? The bottom line is that while virtually all phones can crack their screen, i4(s) is the only phone that can just as easily crack its back.

The most important property of glass is transparency, while the big disadvantage is that it breaks catastrophically. You get no benefits and all of the downsides when using it for the opaque back plate. It does look nice, but there are other nice looking materials available.

And George Burns smoked several cigars every day for 70 years and never got lung or mouth cancer. Many, many, many other people were not so lucky.

Anecdote: My 4s fell from pocket height onto concrete. Screen was shattered, but the phone was still usable.

And, for "just" $200, Apple replaced it with a new one.

A small-ish point:

While the glass Apple chose does have issues with very hard impacts (the stuff that lead to catastrophic failure), it has really impressive resilience to minor wear and tear. It's difficult to scratch with metals and doesn't chip or dent. Yes, sand/silicates will scratch it, but not softer materials.

Further, ceramics and glass have excellent RF transparency, especially relative to metals. As you can imagine, this is incredibly important in smartphones. This has been a pretty big design challenge for Apple in the past: the Titanium Powerbooks has horrendous wireless performance, and generations of iPads and iPod touches have had to have glass or plastic windows in their backs. The iPhone 5 has two glass windows in the back for this reason. Note that stainless steel has poorer transparency than Al, and some types are ferromagnetic.

I definitely like the polycarb that Nokia is using in the Lumia line. That said, the feel that Apple has created by its material choices in the iPhone line is very nice, and that this complaint over scuffing is minor. Wear and tear happens, whether to plastic or steel.

This seem pretty subjective ... I love the various aluminum ipod-mini/nano models, for instance. In my experience, they're almost perfect.

Apple's mistake with the earlier metal ipod seems to have been not that it's made of metal, but that it's made of highly polished metal (which will of course be subject to scratching, fingerprints, is more slippery, etc).

"High-quality plastic" can easily suffer from the same issues if it's glossy; I own phone made from very glossy plastic, and while it's beautiful and extremely well made, it's also very slippery and very prone to picking up fingerprints.

So using a metal back with a less finicky finish, as they did with the iphone 5, seems a pretty reasonable move.

> What material would you suggest they could use?

Bamboo would drive Greenpeace mad.

Actually, I think bamboo is supposed to be much more renewable than traditional wood, since it grows so darn fast.

Laminated wood like you find in high-end automobiles. Possibly with an inner plastic or aluminum reinforcement to give it strength. It would be both beautiful and in keeping with Apple's high-end appeal.

Plus the Apple logo could be etched, burned or inlaid in.

http://www.samuraijapan.co.jp/forauction/Alim/ebay/smartphon...

Wood would be very beautiful and nice to touch, but it seems difficult to make it thin enough without having horrible durability problems.

And here I thought Apple's main selling point (at least to justify the price) was this hard-to-quantify "build quality" meme.

Granted, the iPhone 4's could be broken and shattered left or right if dropped, but if you avoiding actually stressing the device in any realistic way and avoided making calls without "holding it right", it should at least present an appearance which shoved off this "build quality".

Now "build quality" is reduced to mean even less, almost little more than "looks nice on photos"?

From the way I'm seeing things, Apple is lossing its cool completely.

I'll admit I'm not an Apple fan, but even I expected the iPhone 4 to feel a lot better in hand the first time I used one. I was very disappointed with how it felt, compared to my aluminum HTC Legend. It definitely felt like glass in hand, and in a bad way - like I was afraid that if I dropped it it would shatter in multiple pieces. And I guess I wasn't that far from the truth, considering how easily they cracked.

As for iPhone 5, Apple is being very misleading. Yes, it's "normal" for the scuffs to happen - if you're making a painted aluminum phone from 2005, like those LG or Nokia ones from years ago that lost their paint after 3 months of usage.

But I would've expected a lot better from Apple. It's obvious Apple is inexperienced with colored aluminum, and they weren't even aware of this issue, because HTC can already make dark aluminum handsets, and they don't scuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPZ7y1EDKvk

They shouldn't really be inexperienced with coloured aluminium after the last few years of coloured iPod Nanos and Shuffles

The YouTube comments seem to disagree about the scratch/scuff-ability of the surface of the HTC One S.

and: http://www.androidauthority.com/four-times-the-strength-of-r...

In spite of the bold claims made by HTC about the micro-arc oxidation (MAO) process used on the One S making the phone almost immune to dents and scratches, reality (as it, too often, tends to do) begs to disagree.

They actually changed the coating of the phone for the US launch- mine is a much lighter grey, and has a smoother texture. Also has no scratches, but that's just anecdotal evidence.

I got my MacBook Air replaced for free, literally because it shipped with a scratch on the cover one dot in size. Reading this response makes me put that experience into question.

Then again, they seemed unapologetic when the original iPod Nano got dinged like crazy. But still, that some people receive phones that ship with scratches is ridiculous.

My HTC One S is scuffed all over

To be fair, scratches and scuffs on the outside of brand new iPhones have little to do with build quality, just shoddy quality control at Foxconn. I assume Apple will take responsibility for iPhones that are damaged out of the box.

Wear and tear on the outside of the phone after using it is normal, if you really want to keep the thing in pristine condition, either put it in a case, or don't use it at all. There really is no difference with other phones here.

> And here I thought Apple's main selling point (at least to justify the price) was this hard-to-quantify "build quality" meme.

You don't honestly want to say that you see no difference between the build quality of iPhones compared to most cheaper phones, right? IMO there isn't much 'hard to quantify' about the build quality of iPhones.

The only people I see with cracked screens are iPhone owners. No Android-phone owners I have ever seen has been using a broken phone.

So no, I don't buy that Apple has some sort of magical build quality-property which can't be had in better (and cheaper) phones made by significantly less evil vendors.

All Apple has left is full platform lock-in and a church.

The only people I see with cracked screens are iPhone owners. No Android-phone owners I have ever seen has been using a broken phone.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Four people I know specifically have broken android screens. Only one person I know has a broken iPhone screen. Android phones are 4x more likely to have broken screens...

The majority of Android phones are also made of plastic. It should come as no surprise that a Casio sports watch has a higher survivability than, say, a metal and glass Swiss timepiece.

Build quality is not isomorphic with survivability.

I've seen a Galaxy Nexus with a cracked screen. Everything breaks.

http://imgur.com/tL47Z -- This was after about 1.5 years and 100+ 4ft drops, though. I had a habit of letting it vibrate itself off my dresser many mornings when using it as an alarm.

It has nothing to do with the quality control. It's the whole idea of putting a coating over the aluminum that's wrong.

>To be fair, scratches and scuffs on the outside of brand new iPhones have little to do with build quality, just shoddy quality control at Foxconn.

Quality control would seem to be a subset of build quality to me. How do you mean to separate it?

> Quality control would seem to be a subset of build quality to me. How do you mean to separate it?

I think it's pretty easy to separate the two things. Shoddy build quality means every single instance of the item is built badly, uses low quality materials and breaks easily. Shoddy quality control simply means the ratio of good items vs. lemons is too high. As long as the manufacturer takes responsibility for sold units that are defective or damaged, shoddy quality control does not necessarily mean a bad product.

I worked at an electronics store when the iPhone and iPod touches were initially released. We would take our keys directly to the screens and say to the customer, see its a solid product, even with keys in your pocket it will be safe. Selling Apple products back then was a joy because they were one step ahead of the curve with everything. Now it seems rather than continue to innovate and blow away competitors they are concerned with how their competitors caught up and if they can legally knock them down a wrung or two. Apple stinks of greed nowadays.

Apple stinks of greed nowadays.

I'm sure their shareholders appreciate that.

You know thats right. Whats such a shame is that the rest of the world embraces Steve Jobs and what he stood for and what he made Apple stand for. I feel a little crazy to say this, but doesn't it seem like Apple is falling farther and farther from their initial tree?

Schiller ignores that in his response, which could well mean that Apple doesn’t plan to replace or recall damaged iPhone 5s

They have already been replacing them. In some cases they are letting people switch from black to white models if they are very concerned about scratching. I've yet to see any evidence that normal wear & tear causes scratches or chips to appear. It's probably metal on metal damage you have to worry the most about. So no keys/change in your pocket with your phone which is kind of common sense. I've had my iPhone 5 since Friday and I don't treat it with any special care. It gets throw into my bag, floats on my car seat when I drive, no case, etc. Haven't had any problems with scratching or chipping. I think if it was going to be a problem I would have seen it by now.

> Furthermore, it would seem that Apple is fully aware that the iPhone 5 is easy to scuff — and yet it knowingly proceeded to manufacture (and sell) record breaking numbers of the new device.

How dare they!

Seriously. Everyone knows that a phone with a scratched back can no longer make calls, download movies, or receive a GPS signal for navigation.

Being familiar with aluminum and it's uses in windows, doors, and railings ......

There is such a thing as maintenance free aluminum. It can be anodized, stained, painted, and more and look exactly the same.

Our Macbook Airs don't scuff easily (but they still do, due to the nature of aluminum) for the reason that using a suitable type of aluminum was paid attention to.

I'm pretty amazed that the iPhone, being the most mobile, out of laptops, desktops, etc, didn't go a step further to use even more space age aluminum.

But it's great that they use 28MP cameras in the making of the phone.

This reminds me of a segment in the movie Objectified where they interview Bill Moggridge, the guy who designed the GRiD Compass (the first laptop). He talks about his choice to use magnesium for the enclosure and how he liked the fact that the laptop would gain character as it accumulated little nicks and scratches, exposing the magnesium. I have to agree with him. In a way, it actually makes a product feel more durable because you can see it's withstood some wear and tear. In fact, it's the same reason why people like vintage furniture.

You can see the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHEA-jbo1aI

That sentiment was popularly applied directly to iPhones not too long ago.

http://www.davidhughes.org/aged-to-perfection/

It's also a major theme in the Steve Jobs biography that Steve was obsessed with this kind of aging in objects (evident, e.g., in his preference for faded blue jeans), and wanted the products he built to acquire character by scuffing, etc. (Not, of course, by actually degrading performance such as broken screens or cracks in the casing).

You may disagree with this philosophy, but the lazy refrain of "this wouldn't have happened if Steve still was around" is particularly clueless for this issue.

You just need to put it in water and re-anodize it.

I can just imagine a recall after months of complaining.

Be sure to watch the video at the end, fascinating http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZhVOy-ytJY#!

> You just need to put it in water and re-anodize it.

Right now I have an image in my head of Steve Jobs saying that, very much like "you're holding it wrong".

You can't be serious.

"You're anodizing it yourself wrong"

antaneagate - get a case, glassgate - get a case, scuffgate on a phone - get a case.

People will complain that the iPhone 6 is not grease proof, calling it now.

No people have ever had these problems on any other phone than an iPhone.

I think that's telling a lot.

Give me a break. People haven't cared enough about other phones to even notice these types of issues. Mountains out of mole hills.

I think you may be projecting a bit

Perhaps that's just it. First world problems - phones are a tool, and the fact that people are fetishising the iPhone 4 to this degree is the actual problem here.

I think you both hit the nail on the head with this one.

> No people have ever had these problems on any other phone than an iPhone.

Not sure if trolling or delusional...

Compare media response to this and media response to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4574853

That should tell you a lot.

The marketing material pushes the black version, but I suspect the white to black ratio will be higher than Apple had initially expected because of this issue.

Is this a serious article?

I hope that calling this "Scuffgate" is just a poor joke...

but what about this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M5q5TRuAsY

I'd rather have a slightly scuffed phone than one made entirely of glass.

Seriously though who doesn't buy a case for their thousand dollar smartphone?

A case completely deletes the aesthetics of the device. Why protect the appearance of something you'll never see?

steve jobs has left the company - and with the head of the company gone, there goes the company

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