Glass is glass

MKBHD explains how smartphone makers exploit the scratch/shatter resistance trade-off to manufacture endless improvement headlines.

• Scratch resistance and shatter resistance are inversely related — improving one degrades the other, making simultaneous dramatic gains impossible.
• Gorilla Glass generations have been alternating between shatter and scratch improvements since Gen 1 (iPhone 2007) through Gen 9.
• Ceramic Shield on iPhone 12 led with 4x shatter resistance; Ceramic Shield 2 on iPhone 17 led with 3x scratch resistance — the pattern holds.
• Companies are never required to define what ‘3x more shatter resistant’ actually means in absolute terms.
• Drop test gains on iPhone 12 were partly due to returning to flat/square sides, not glass alone — but Apple attributed it all to Ceramic Shield.
• Sand and quartz in pockets are harder than glass, so scratching remains unavoidable regardless of generation.
• Underreported glass improvements include oleophobic coatings and anti-reflective coatings, which get no keynote time.

2026-04-24 · Watch on YouTube