the glass you never use

Hey folks, Pratham here.

Welcome back to Paradox Weekly, a Masters' Union newsletter, where we break down the ideas, trends, and contradictions shaping business today.

Every September Apple walks on stage and tells you this year's iPhone has the most durable glass it has ever made.

The iPhone 12 came with Ceramic Shield and 4x better drop performance.
The iPhone 17 this year shipped Ceramic Shield 2 and 3x better scratch resistance.

*Remember this, because we’ll get back to this white lie later. 

Then you walk out of the store, hand the phone to a kid at a kiosk, and pay him ₹200 to cover that glass with a sheet of cheaper, softer glass.

Just think how absurd this behavior of ours is.

Apple spends years and a fortune making Ceramic Shield, then markets it as the reason you don't need to worry.

And the first thing almost everyone does is worry, and stick a ₹200 tempered film on top.

This habit has made the global screen protector market worth around $55 billion a year, and over 90% of it is tempered glass, the cheaper, softer sheet that sits on top of the expensive hard one.

Then most of us go one step further and wrap the whole thing in a case, so the titanium and the colour and the thinness Apple spent a year perfecting also disappear into a ₹500 silicone sleeve.

So that durability that Apple has engineered doesn’t really matter.

We’re paying a premium for materials (the titanium and glass) which cheap phones don’t have to cover it up within minutes of buying the phone.

Remember, I said “white lie” above?

This is because the marketing is true every year because the goalposts move every year.

Scratch resistance and shatter resistance pull against each other, because the same hardness that stops a scratch is what makes glass brittle enough to crack.

So a phone company can only really push one at a time, and the trick is to push a different one each year and compare only that.

You just never hold a four-year-old phone and a new one in the same hand to notice that the glass spent most of the decade trading one strength for the other.

This is not only an Apple game.

Corning's Gorilla Glass did the same dance for years, alternating a drop generation and a scratch generation, and the year it finally pushed both at once it gave it a brand new name, Victus, precisely because doing both at once was the rare hard part.

The number resets on exactly the cycle you upgrade on, which is why you never really catch on to it or bother about it.

If you’re still curious about this, just see the MKBHD video where I found this info:

For those who don’t care about the video, it’s important to remember that some of the magic numbers were never even the glass.

Take that famous "4x" on the iPhone 12.

A good chunk of the extra drop survival came from Apple going back to flat, squared metal edges instead of the rounded ones on the iPhone 11, which changed how the phone hits the floor.

In real drop tests the lighter iPhone 12 often survived better than the heavier, stiffer 12 Pro right beside it, which tells you the frame was doing work the glass got the credit for.

So part of "the toughest glass ever" was a number earned by the metal around it.

The proof is that your screen still scratches at the same place it always did.

The glass got a new name almost every year but what it protects against barely moved until very recently.

So here is where I land.

You are sold the toughest glass ever made, you immediately bury it under the cheapest glass in the shop, and you keep a ₹2,500 deductible on standby for the day both of them fail anyway.

The glass was never really the product.

Your fear of a cracked screen is, and that fear sells the phone, the film, and the insurance, three times over, every year, for a sheet of glass that scratches in roughly the same place it did in 2020.

The most durable thing Apple makes is the worry of replacing the strong glass, or should I say the cost to do it if you don’t buy their insurance.

I read every email.

Until next week,
Pratham