The iPhone does not need any screen protector. Who said that? The story goes like this:
The Apple's Engineers working on the first iPhone proto-type brought to the Big Boss(Steve Jobs, who else?) the first iPhone. Steve said, good, put on the desk, I check it out later. He put the iPhone on his packet with a bunch of keys, a week later he came to the Engineers with the iPhone basically with scratches all over the screen. Steve said, this is unacceptable, you MUST correct this intermediately. Some Engineers flew right away to China, arrived at 2AM, woke up an entire factory's workers that usually sleep at the factory, and start working right away on that problem. The result? An iPhone with unscratchable screen.
Sure, they will tell you all kind of stories including Apple itself, just to make money!
What the iPhone needs is a good case to protect it in case is dropped on a hard floor, and be recharged every night. Other than that, the iPhone is a beautiful peace of alien technology.
Note: Time Magazine, if I remember correctly the source, published an article some years back talking about this story. Apple should know better.
In the 1960s, Corning Glass had developed a very durable type of glass they called "gorilla glass", because it was so tough. They had stopped making it, but in 2005 the CEO of Corning (Wendell Weeks) explained the material to Jobs, who immediately wanted to use gorilla glass for the first iPhone.
"[Jobs] said he wanted as much gorilla glass as Corning could make within six months.'We don't have the capacity,' Weeks replied. 'None of our plants make the glass now.'
'Don't be afraid,' Jobs replied. This stunned Weeks, who was good-humored and confident but not used to Jobs' reality distortion field. He tried to explain that a false sense of confidence would not overcome engineering challenges, but that was a premise that Jobs had repeatedly shown he didn't accept. He stared at Weeks unblinking. 'Yes, you can do it,' he said. 'Get your mind around it. You can do it."
As Weeks retold this story, he shook his head in astonishment. 'We did it in under six months,' he said. 'We produced a glass that had never been made.' Corning's facility in Harrisburg, Kentucky, which had been making LCD displays, was converted almost overnight to make gorilla glass full-time. 'We put our best scientists and engineers on it, and we just made it work.' In his airy office, Weeks has just one framed memento on display. It's a message Jobs sent the day the iPhone came out: 'We couldn't have done it without you.'"
Weeks is a brilliant businessman who knows how to make glass, but his initial inclination was "it can't be done". It was only by confronting Jobs' challenge (and I mean
really confronting it) that he and his company were able to make it happen (to his own surprise). Of course, we can't just ignore real physical constraints, but most of the time constraints are self-imposed and say more about us than they say about actual limitations on our actions.
Another wrinkle of that story was that Steve complained about only getting the secretary during the call when he had asked for the president.
Weeks called him back and asked for Steve Jobs and only got the secretary. Touché