By John Gruber

Following up on my post yesterday about modern iPhones and scratch resistance, and my personal habits of (a) almost never using an iPhone case, and (b) never setting the iPhone face down except on soft (cloth) surfaces.

I should have anticipated this, because I’ve had this conversation with real-world normies repeatedly in recent years, but I got a bunch of questions from people who say they’re wary of every putting their iPhone down on its back because they’re worried about scratching the camera lenses. That’s not a silly thing to worry about. It looks like those lenses are glass; glass scratches; and it sure seems like a scratched camera lens might forever ruin all the photos and videos you take with the camera.

There are a couple misconceptions here though. First, the flat round circles exposed on the back of your phone aren’t the camera lenses. Those are covers over the lenses, which are smaller, round, and recessed. You can look through the covers and see the actual spherical lenses inside. The exposed lens covers are made of sapphire, not glass, and are thus incredibly scratch resistant. They’re by far the most scratch-resistant parts of the phone. I’ve never once found even a tiny scratch on any of my iPhone camera lens covers, and I’ve never taken any particular care to avoid scratching them. I mean, I don’t drag the lenses face-down on surfaces. I’m not trying to scratch them. But I set my phones down on hard surfaces lenses-down all the time and they never seem to pick up even fine scratches.

Zack “JerryRigEverything” Nelson is the guy on YouTube who makes videos where he scratches the hell out of products to see how durable they are. (And he bends them, burns them, and abuses them in other creative ways.) In his iPhone 17 Pro video, starting around the 4:10 mark, he tries scratching the sapphire lens covers with a sharp razor blade. No effect. Sapphire is far more likely to shatter than scratch, because it’s so hard. (You may recall that a decade ago Apple pursued using sapphire for the displays of iPhone but it didn’t work out.) Don’t try scratching your lenses with a diamond hardness pick and you’ll be fine.

Also, believe it or not, a fine scratch on the lens cover will almost certainly not affect image quality at all. Trying sticking a piece of hair (which is probably much thicker than a typical scratch) to the surface of your iPhone 1× main camera lens. Take a picture. Clean the hair off the lens. Retake the same picture. You almost certainly won’t see any difference at all. Here’s a great video from DPReview back in 2020 showing just how much dust or scratching you need to put on the outside of a lens to degrade image quality. It’s counterintuitive but the surface of the lens is not where light is focused — the sensor, inside the camera, is.