Gold iPhone 12 Pro buyers get a special fingerprint-resistant coating

iPhone 12 Pro Finishes (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

Some early unboxings and reviews of iPhone 12 Pro have been shared today.
One of those, from TechCrunch, suggests that the Gold iPhone 12 Pro has a different coating to the rest.
That coating should make it more durable and less prone to fingerprints.

Today saw a number of unboxing and review videos and articles appear online, giving iPhone 12 Pro its first public unveiling since the announcement last week. It also comes a few days before the product goes on sale and we're still learning tidbits about it. For example, the news that the Gold iPhone 12 Pro uses a different coating around the edges than the other colors.

That tidbit came from within TechCrunch's coverage and was spotted by the eagle-eyed Joe Rossignol at MacRumors.

Most of the iPhone 12 Pro finishes still use a physical vapor deposition process for edge coating. But the new gold (which I do not have in person but looks great) uses a special high-power, impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) process that lays down the coating in a super dense pattern, allowing it to be tough and super bright with a molecular structure that mimics the stainless steel underneath — making it more durable than "standard" PVD. One side effect is that it's easier to wipe clean and takes on less fingerprints, something that my blue model was, uh, definitely prone to.

The review goes on to say that the new coating is more durable than that used on the other models, suggesting the Gold iPhon 12 Pro is set to be the most durable of all.

Whether that would be enough to make you choose that color over the rest, I don't know, but I'd still wager that Pacific Blue will be the most popular model around.

Regardless, the overwhelming majority of iPhones will end up inside a case anyway.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.