Apple avoided a Bendgate scandal with the iPhone Air, but it seems like another device may not have escaped the torture test unscathed. This year, Apple unveiled that they were ditching Titanium for forged Aluminum with the latest Pro series. The reason, because the forged aluminum allowed the phone to integrate a new vapor chamber for overall better heat dissipation. However, that tradeoff might have accidentally revealed why Titanium was always a great idea – strength.
As the strongest metal known to humankind, Titanium is a hot favorite in the EDC circles for a reason. It’s ridiculously strong, resisting bending and even scratching no matter how much you try to damage it. Sure, Apple’s previous Pro iPhones weren’t entirely made from titanium, just the outer frame… but that was enough to give the iPhone Pro line-up some solid street cred. Reverting back to an aluminum shell (and skipping past the stainless steel that was used on even earlier Pro models) has led to some consternation and frustration from iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max users as the phone they expected to be rock solid, is turning out to be incredibly damage-prone.
Multiple users online (like this one on Threads) is complaining about the iPhone 17 Pro denting extremely easily when dropped. Even JerryRigEverything’s iPhone Pro stress test video revealed that the aluminum scratches effortlessly, revealing the true Aluminum color underneath. The reason, Zack from JerryRigEverything mentions, is that it isn’t just the fact that aluminum is soft and fragile (no matter how strong Apple claims their alloy is), it’s also that Apple didn’t apply a sufficiently thick anodization coating on the phone.
For the most part, the phone remains fairly decent at holding its color (although holding its shape is an entirely separate debate), the one area that will definitely show signs of wear and tear is the sharp lip of the camera plateau, which quite literally doesn’t have a fillet or a chamfer (a rounded or beveled edge). That area experiences wear and tear first, whether it’s interacting with items in your pocket or even being scuffed on a tabletop surface. The image below from the JerryRigEverything video shows exactly what users are expected to face if they ‘raw-dog’ their iPhone 17 Pros.
And it’s my sincere recommendation that you don’t ever raw-dog your Aluminum iPhone 17 Pro (the Titanium iPhone Air can easily be used sans-case). Over the past 10 days, we’ve covered an entire bunch of iPhone 17 Pro cases for you to check out. TORRAS has one that’s built for content creators and packs literal airbags into its design. Supcase’s iPhone 17 Pro case might be the most rugged we’ve seen, with 20-foot drop protection. And for people looking for something classy yet practically bulletproof, Benks made an incredibly stylish iPhone 17 Pro case using actual Kevlar®.
The post ‘Scratchgate’: Apple iPhone 17 Pro’s Aluminum body scratches and dents very easily first appeared on Yanko Design.