[postalrat]

I wear glasses and every lens I've ever owned has been some type of plastic. Yes small scratches add up over a year but it isn't that bad. The coatings they have do a pretty good job to reduce scratching.

Apple is using thin glass covered with a soft plastic. Why possible advantage could that ever have over solid plastic with an anti-scratch coating?

[saurik]

You have to actually then coat it with anti-scratch coating, you have to make sure people carefully clean the device in ways that don't destroy this coating, and the result--as you admit--still gets scratched, and routinely it is these scratches that cause me to eventually get new glasses. I don't think "treat this device with the implicit care that you treat your primary pair of glasses" is fair, as even if I carry around a second pair of glasses they tend to get scratched as they don't have any of the automatic protections my primary ones do (due to being on my head or only put down for limited periods of time).

[throwway120385]

It feels cool to the touch and therefore feels more "high quality" than a plastic would.