Apple reportedly scraps the iPhone 17 Pro’s anti-glare, anti-scratch display

This September’s iPhone launches just got a tiny bit less interesting, with reports that the previously rumored anti-reflective, anti-scratch screen is no longer likely to appear on the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max.

Last spring, a Weibo account named Instant Digital claimed that Apple had bought equipment for making the outer glass of the iPhone out of a new “super-hard” anti-reflective material, suggesting that Ceramic Shield would be replaced by something better in the fall of 2025. But it looks like this development hasn’t worked out.

MacRumors, citing an anonymous “source with reliable information,” says this project may now have been cancelled, and won’t appear on the 17-series iPhones.

“Apple planned to use the anti-reflective coating for the higher-end ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ and the ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ Max models, which would have made them the first iPhones with an anti-reflective display,” the site explains. “Apple ran into problems scaling up the display coating process, and it is currently no longer a planned feature for the ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ models.”

The issue appears to be a question of volume. Apple’s suppliers can make the displays, but not at a sufficient scale to cover even just the number of Pro handsets the company expects to sell. It isn’t clear at this point if Apple intends to persist with the project for future handsets.

In the Mac and iPad ranges, Apple offers a nano-texture display finish that reduces reflections and delivers improved screen performance outside or in bright lighting. This hasn’t yet appeared on the iPhone, but an option could appear as a replacement for the cancelled/postponed project.

Longtime Apple watchers will be familiar with the process by which upcoming products are billed as groundbreaking when they’re just a distant rumor, and then steadily become more and more mundane as they approach release. But there are still more than a few interesting announcements that will make it to launch—for all the latest news and rumors, bookmark our regularly updated iPhone 17 superguide.

Author: David Price, Editor, Macworld