Can human fingernails scratch the screen of an iPhone 14 Pro Max?

Unless your fingernails have been reinforced with adamantine or have diamonds on them, no, they won't scratch your iPhone screen.

A fingernail has a hardness of 2.5 (Mohs scale). Glass is 5.5. It's harder.

ETA: lobsterghost1 may be correct. I know that have fingernails long enough to touch the screen on my phone at least some of the time and I've never had a problem with the coating. However, I would agree that if this is something that's going to weigh on your mind, get a screen protector.

Nails likely cannot scratch the glass itself, but they could potentially scratch the Oleophobic coating on the display, which would appear as minor scratches. If this is a concern, I wouldn't test it and I would most definitely invest a few dollars in a decent quality screen protector to ensure no hard comes to the screen on the phone directly.

As stated, your fingernails ain't strong enough to overcome the screen. BUT, where do you keep your fingernails? If they get contaminated by something hard that gets embedded, that can cause scratches, even if micro-sized. That's how the "diamond" knife sharpeners work: a soft metal backing that readily permits the diamond powder grains to penetrate and embed themselves, and away they go removing metal to do the sharpening. As long as the metal in the knife is harder than the backing of the sharpener, the diamond powder remains put and keeps on sharpening (i.e., scratching away the dull knife metal).

If paranoid, better get the screen protector.

Dogcow-Moof wrote:

More importantly, independent tests have shown that iPhone screens since at least the iPhone 7 are a Mohs 6.

Thanks! I didn't look that far. I just googled the value for fingernails and glass was there, too.

More importantly, independent tests have shown that iPhone screens since at least the iPhone 7 are a Mohs 6.