Customers question Apple’s excuse for iPhone 17 Pro and Air scratches

It is common for a launch of iPhone to be accompanied by complaints according to which the new handsets are defective in one way or another. Some years, these complaints will make a snowball in a major scandal, such as antenat in 2010 or Bendgate in 2014. Other times, they are not really going.

What category is the so-called scratchgate situation subject? It is difficult to say it at this stage, but Apple does its best to push public opinion in the latter direction.

Scratchgate is, inevitably, the name which has been given to generalized relationships according to which some new handsets show more scratches than expected. According to Bloomberg, The Deep Blue 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max and the black iPhone “exhibited scratches after only a few hours of their exhibition,” according to Bloomberg. It was also noticed that Magsafe Loaders sometimes left a circular brand at the back of the iPhone 17 Pro.

Apple answered these reports last week, blaming the problem of the equipment used to display the handsets in retail stores. The company told 9TO5MAC: “It has determined that these imperfections are caused by worn magsafe stands used in certain stores. He also specifies that marks are not scratches, but rather the transfer of material from the stand to the phone which is removable with cleaning. ”

But not everyone is convinced. As Joe Foley currently points out, some of the reports do not come from retail navigators, but from people who bought the phones themselves, and unless these people also bring the Magsafe worn at home with them, this explanation is not added to them. These buyers “seem convinced that what they see are real tokens and stripes,” adds Foley.

In the latest edition of his power on Newsletter, Bloomberg’s journalist Mark Gurman addresses the controversy and adds his catch. And he does not completely buy the excuse either.

“The reality is that the iPhone 17 Pro has no really problem with the” doors “of the previous iPhone, such as the iPhone 4 antenna problems in 2010 and the flexion problem of the iPhone 6 in 2014”, writes Gurman. “But it is also true that the purely aluminum part surrounding the area of ​​the iPhone 17 pro camera can be quite scratched. And that has nothing to do with the Magsafe leaving marks on the glass area of ​​the devices. “

Whether or not you are convinced by Apple’s explanation, the easiest way to protect your new iPhone (unless you leave it in the box) is to use one of the best cases of the iPhone 17 that we have gathered and examined.

Scratchgate is the most capricious and most high level problem to strike iphones from the end of 2025, but it is not the only one. Apple himself has recognized that a reported photographic problem is indeed “something that can happen in very rare cases when a LED light screen is extremely shiny and shines directly in the camera”. There have also been Wi-Fi bug reports, but it would have been corrected by iOS 26.1.