Apple made a big deal out of the new aluminum unibody design of the iPhone 17 Pro, shifting it away from a titanium build and putting a glass layer on the back panel. But it seems two of the new color options are running into an ugly scratch problem that is causing the paint to chip away, leaving the silvery metal underneath exposed.
What’s happening?
French site Consomac shared a handful of images showing scratched-up iPhone 17 Pro demo units in a store. The scuff marks appear on the glass as well as the aluminum portion of the phone’s rear face, and look pretty conspicuous on the Deep Blue color variant.
It seems the Cosmic Orange variant isn’t impervious to the scrapes either, and once again, the wear marks are easy to spot. Some on social media are calling it “scratchgate” and “scuffgate.” The iPhone Air, particularly the black shade, isn’t doing any better, it seems.
“The deep blue variants of the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max exhibited scuffs after just a few hours of being on display, Bloomberg News found from visits to Apple stores in New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai and London,” reports Bloomberg.
The outlook
This won’t be the first such incident of its kind for Apple. Over a decade ago, reports also highlighted the iPhone 5’s anodized aluminum casing getting scratched and scuffed pretty easily. “Any aluminum product may scratch or chip with use, exposing its natural silver color. That is normal,” Apple’s marketing boss, Phil Schiller, said back then.
In the wake of the incident, Apple tightened quality checks at the cost of slower assembly. “Stricter benchmarks have hampered production of the iPhone 5’s anodized aluminum housings, forcing Foxconn’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. to idle factories,” Bloomberg reported back then.
But it seems the iPhone is not the only aluminum-made Apple product with a scuffing problem. I’ve noticed that the MacBook Air’s shell also gets scratched very easily, and I’ve personally seen it persist across the M3 and M4 generations. An Apple Store executive confirmed to me that they are aware of the complaints last year.
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