Scratches and Scuffs

I’m currently walking through Rome, listening to the scratch, scratch noises of my coat’s zipper rubbing against the Leica Q attached to my hip. I look down at my camera, covered in dust from a couple of week’s worth of traveling, and see edges of silver metal shining through the device’s black finish, exposing wear from only a few month’s time.

I glance at my phone and see a long, deep cut right in the middle of the screen, an imperfection picked up somewhere along my journey, essentially unnoticeable when the screen is turned on but obviously apparent when it’s off.

My watch has suffered similarly, with the bottom right edge of the gray aluminum showing a small dent, and the bottom of the screen covered in small scratches similar to my phone’s.

This is — and I mean it — totally fine.

I do not use a case for my iPhone, and I often get asked why that is. Yet I just as much want to ask why I should use a case in the first place. It’s strange to me, how we baby our technology, using cases and screen protectors and everything else in an attempt to keep that which we use every day as pristine as possible.

This was most exposed recently by the brouhaha over the jet black iPhone, and the controversy surrounding the back’s highly scratch-prone surfaced. Many weighed in on how the phone’s finish was essentially unusable due to the eventual imperfections, weeks before it was even released — and this mentality seems like an impediment to actually using our devices.

It makes me think of a tweet I saw from Craig Mod recently (another Leica Q owner that doesn’t seem to mind banging his camera up a bit), where he pondered the following:

Confused by the obsession with keeping things scratch free, pristine, seemingly unused. A most unnatural way to think about products. Are we optimizing everything for maximum resell value? Consider ourselves humble stewards, not owners?

Responding to someone pushing back on the importance of reselling, he added a new question: “How much is the cognitive overhead of pampering a phone worth?”

To me, that overhead is never worth it — and not only that, but perhaps the protective devices that we add are never worth the amount of time and money we put into them. I’ve often mused that the amount of money that goes into cases (perhaps $30 to $50 a year) would just as easily be spent replacing the single cracked screen you might gain in the course of three or four years of use.

Some people might be more accident prone (and I’m aware that the beginning of this very article makes me sound a bit clumsy, which I don’t think is the case), and perhaps in certain situations cases and protectors are warranted. Yet the people I hear talking about issues of pristine devices most are the ones most unlikely to scratch them up in the first place.

Craig Mod added one more comment to his conversation on Twitter of note, saying that “Many things get better with use: books, watch straps, jeans, dyneema bags, wooden shingles, hiking boots, speakers, haircuts, axes.”

It is better to think of our technology in a similar way. If nothing else, it makes for a less worried mind.