Popular tech influencer Marques Brownlee shared a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday from his visit to Apple labs that do durability testing like iPhone water testing. You’ve probably never seen iPhones this wet. And you’ve probably never subjected yours to such punishment.
Along the way, he fit in an interesting video chat with Apple hardware honcho John Ternus about product reliability versus repairability, below.
Tech influencer Marques Brownlee shows how Apple tests product reliability
Marques Brownlee recently visited Apple product durability testing labs that try to make sure products like iPhone can resist water ingress and take a few bumps and shakes, among other mild tortures. Although some of the testing is actually pretty harsh, as his videos, below, show.
This is why some iPhone come out of lakes after a couple of weeks and still work, to their owners’ amazement, as John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering (and possible Tim Cook successor as CEO), mentioned in one video.
iPhone water testing, shakes and drops, and repairability chat with John Ternus
The tweets below show some elaborate iPhone soaking and shaking in action. The second video features a water cannon we hope your iPhone never meets.
Further down the thread, you can listen in on Brownlee and Ternus debating which is best: easy repairability or supreme reliability/durability. The two can be at odds because making a device almost impervious to harm also makes it harder to work on and fix.
But Apple is striving to make customer repairs easier on iPhone 15 and other products. For one thing, as Ternus points out below, users can incorporate approved used parts in their repairs that will retrieve critical data from the cloud like new parts will.
Watch the videos:
I recently got to visit some Apple labs where they durability test new iPhones before they come out, and learned a few things (THREAD)
#1: Have you actually seen how they water test phones for IP ratings? (video) pic.twitter.com/Qh3hfmlmdn
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) May 29, 2024
#3: Apparently Apple has also bought and programmed and industrial robot to be their own drop test machine – to simulate hundreds of different drop angles onto different materials
Then they hit it with some ultra bright lights and a high speed camera to watch them back in… pic.twitter.com/EsNJbVQrbO
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) May 29, 2024
$5 – Talked to John Ternus – Head of Hardware Engineering at Apple, and it was interesting hearing straight from the top why the iPhone is harder to repair. Take a listen pic.twitter.com/O9QsQOx4SP
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) May 29, 2024
#7: Connecting the durability test machines the real world: They may test 10,000+ pre-release phones while testing before the phone comes out pic.twitter.com/8JbhMXEPdY
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) May 29, 2024
