Apple’s new vice president of hardware engineering, Tom Marieb, says the company designed its latest iPhone glass to make screen protectors unnecessary and that he would rather customers go without them.
Marieb, who took over Apple’s hardware division when John Ternus moved up to CEO earlier this month, said at an Apple briefing in London that the accessory undercuts years of work on the phone’s display.
“Personally, when I see someone put a screen protector on their iPhone, it makes my skin crawl, because we work so hard to make beautiful front screens,” he told TechRadar.
The frustration is perhaps what drove the engineering of the Ceramic Shield 2, the glass-ceramic coating Apple introduced on the iPhone 17 and carried into this month’s iPhone 18 Pro line. The tech giant claims that the proprietary material offers three times the scratch resistance of the glass on the iPhone 16 Pro.
Marieb explained that the design required a deliberate trade-off between resisting scratches and resisting long-term wear, with the goal of creating glass that holds up against both. The coating was put through accelerated testing meant to represent roughly five years of real-world customer use.
Apple released the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max earlier in September during its annual launch event. Both models carry the A20 Pro chip, a 48-megapixel main camera with variable aperture, and a vapor chamber for thermal management. The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 and the Pro Max at $1,299. The handsets debuted alongside Apple’s first foldable iPhone at the company’s Sept. 9 showcase.
Sources: Apple Newsroom, TechRadar, NDTV