Why Does Apple Use Glass for the IPhone Screen?

The IPhone is unquestionably one of the most beautifully designed products of all time. With its sleek, elegant profile it has gained almost universal acclaim. Unfortunately, in the real world, you almost never see the phone as it appears in the out of box state featured so beautifully in their advertisements. No, normally, that beauty is usually locked up tighter than the Mona Lisa under some sort of bulky casing that barely can be contained in a normal pocket or purse smaller than a grocery bag. Yes, the iPhone has a weakness – it’s surprisingly fragile.

Anecdotally, Steve Jobs rejected a heartier plastic screen based upon the number of scratches on the screen after a week of carrying a prototype around in his pocket. Apparently in Apple’s purview, the scratches, which render the phone slightly less visually pleasing, are more than worth the price of the screen fragility, which renders the phone useless. In my opinion, it’s pennywise and pound foolish, even if it does result in greater phone sales, since a number of consumers (fanboys/fangirls) consider Apple products irreplaceable.

This is a long standing design issue, as well. Apple has more than one chance to fix it as there has been little, if any improvement in the strength of the glass since the original IPhone debuted. Rather, IPhones with glass more shattered than have become something of the norm. Personally, after breaking the IPhone 3G and 3Gs, I was forced to give up and abandon the product for an HTC manufactured phone mostly due to contractual issues since you can only replace your phone once every eighteen months, which I found was far short of the product life of my IPhone screen.

Considering that Apple just became the most valuable company on the planet, this doesn’t appear to be a particularly pressing issue for the company. However, it is a severe product design flaw in a product largely lacking in them. Is it enough to scare away consumers? At this point, the answer appears to be a resounding “no”, although with the increasing competition from Android and the new Windows phones may cause Apple to shift its opinion.