♪ Ah, ah, ah, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪ – So a couple days ago I
dropped a Twitter thread, yes, I still call it Twitter, and I severely underestimated how many of you guys
would be interested in it. But then a lot of the conversation that it drove was really interesting, and a lot of discussions that
happened afterward were fun to participate in, so I figured I would drop
even more of the footage here. So I'm back with more of my footage and clips from my visit to Apple's secret iPhone
durability testing labs. So if you ever wondered how an iPhone gets
water resistance tested, or drop tested, or shaken like crazy before it gets announced on stage, these are the labs where
all of that happens.
And then they have to connect the dots between their test results and how they actually build
phones, which is fascinating. So the first thing that I saw was the water resistance testing. So I think a lot of us kind of take for granted at this point
most high-end smartphones, most flagships have IP68 ratings. But a lot of people don't
actually think about it, that that is a code, where IP stands for ingress protection, and then the first number is for solids, and then the second number is for liquids. And so each of these numbers
gets higher and higher as it's more protected against ingress. So some, like, earbuds or
headphones, for example, you might see they are IPX4 rated. That just means they're
not protected from dust, but from water, they can
withstand some light splashes from any direction. So sweat. Great. So the first iPhones all the way up to the iPhone 6s were not
water resistant at all, at least not rated to be, but then the first water-resistant iPhone, iPhone 7, was IP67 water resistant.
And then now we see everything being IP68, meaning it can literally be underwater for an extended period of time. And so this is what it looks like to actually test that stuff. There's literally specialty equipment just to torture phones with water
and make sure they can survive. So lots of companies have these things, but it was cool to see it in person. So the lowest level of this
test is basically a drip ceiling to simulate rain and splashing. So there's no real water pressure here. But a pass is good for IPX4 on this test. But then to simulate some water pressure, they have these jets that
rotate around the device and spray it with water from all angles. Into the speakers, into the earpiece, into the ports, everything. And if it's able to pass this test, that's good for IPX5. It seems so simple, but it's
also pretty cool to see. I've never actually watched this happen. To turn it up to 11, they
just put the phone on one end and stick basically a literal
fire hose on the other end and just blast the phone
with high-pressure water.
Kind of looks insane, but if we want our modern smartphones to be able to get splashed
from any angle many times over its lifetime and survive, then it has to survive this. And then it earns its IPX6 rating. But then, finally, for IPX7 and IPX8, that's full submersion. So they have some lockable sealed tanks. But some of you may already know that IPX8 is supposed to be under
deep water for long time. So they actually have
this pressurized tank where they can turn up the pressure inside to simulate different water depths and leave phones in there
as long as they want. So now, ideally, today, if you drop your phone in the
toilet, or spill water on it, or drop it in a lake, whatever, for as long as it's down
there, it should survive. Which, again, we kind
of take it for granted, but that's all the seals and the gaskets and all the adhesives and
things that go into getting it to pass those tests are what get it to pass the real-world tests.
Now, there is an entire
separate type of testing that you might have
already seen on YouTube. That is, drop testing. And it turns out Apple has been doing their own internal drop
testing for years now. So it turns out, in the same building, Apple's set up this full on
industrial robot by Epson that they've programmed
to be a drop test robot. And then they've set it up in front of these ultrabright lights and super-high-speed
Phantom cameras pointed at the exact spot on the ground
where the phone will land. So the idea here is they
can program the robot to pick up the phone and
drop it onto any surface. (robot whirring) And then they can have it
repeat that exact motion and that exact same drop
on the exact same angle over and over again, but
with different surfaces, and they can A/B test them and take a look at exactly what happened.
And then those of you
who are camera nerds, you already know these Phantom
cameras are pretty serious. I don't remember the exact frame rate they told me they were shooting at, but it's pretty incredible. You can actually see the titanium on this iPhone 15 Pro wobble on its first impact with the ground. And its second impact too. So yeah, they had all kinds
of different materials to do drop tests, from
granite countertops to marble, to corkboard and wood, et cetera. They even had this massive block of asphalt just sitting there, just waiting to see how the
iPhone reacts to being dropped in the streets, you know? But this is a fascinating setup. Now, of course, the fact is, most phones still just break immediately when you drop them on the ground.
So I kind of wonder how much of this data is actually getting translated into real changes of phone design. But it's still cool that I
got to see all this stuff. And then the hardest one to capture, for me, anyway, is the shaking tests. Yeah, that's exactly what it
sounds like. Shaking tests. Apple has rooms full of machines that are literally trays of
devices strapped to a surface that's being shaken thousands of times at a specific frequency. It's actually kind of hard to record, because if my shutter speed
is at the right number, it doesn't even really look
like anything's moving. Kind of like how car wheels
don't look like they're spinning if you have the right camera settings. But I did get a few clips
where like I put my hand on it, and you can see it's moving a lot. They're using this machine to
try to simulate years of wear and tear out in the real world.
Apparently, they can
program in the frequency of a certain motorcycle
engine, or a car engine, or subway car, or whatever
constant vibration that they just want to check up on, to make sure everything
holds up to exposure to it over a very long time. But I really think the
most fascinating thing about all this testing is they are trying, before the phone even comes out, they're trying to simulate
years of wear and tear in the real world, with real customers, in a small room under the
basement of Apple Park, with, like, the machines
that they've designed.
It's a fascinating connection
they've gotta make. And I spoke to John Ternus, who's the head of hardware
engineering at Apple, about this process, and
he mentioned, apparently, they go through sometimes 10,000 iPhones, prototypes, before they
actually ship a final phone, with all this durability testing. Which sounds crazy. I don't know what number I
thought it was in my head, but it seems insane that they'll
make 10,000 phones to break before they ship one. And actually, while I had John there, I felt like this was a
unique opportunity to ask, 'cause I've never really heard people from Apple actually speak
out about the durability, but also the repairability of the iPhone. Like, we all know Apple's
reputation for repairability: not great. Like, the iPhone's notoriously
very difficult to repair. But also, now it's a little clearer because the more I've thought about it, the more it feels like, I mean, Apple's just shown me a
ton of durability labs, and durability feels like it's directly at odds with repairability. Like, it actually feels like
it's basically a sliding scale, with durability on one side
and repairability on the other.
And the more durable you
want to make your thing, the less repairable
you're making your thing. And all these decisions
that go into making and designing a product
are kind of pushing it back and forth along this scale. So take a listen to this. – But sometimes, for me, I find it helpful to kind
of think about the bookends. Like, if you imagine a product
that never fails, right, that just doesn't fail. And on the other end, a product that maybe isn't very reliable, but is super easy to repair. – Right. – A product that never fails is obviously better for the customer. It's better for the environment. – Okay, it's interesting
you put it that way, 'cause on one end you have
the product that never fails. On the other hand, you have the product that can be replaced infinitely,
but it's not as reliable. – Yep. – That downside of being
not as reliable comes from being infinitely repairable. But I think someone would argue that the downside of being
really hard to repair comes from being almost infinitely durable.
– Sure, but they're not
always mutually exclusive. Like, those are kind of the bookends. So let me give you, like,
a couple of examples. I think a battery on an iPhone as being an important one. On an iPhone, on any phone,
a battery is something, if you want to extend
the life of the product, that's something that's gonna
need to be replaced, right? Batteries wear out. As we've been making
iPhones for a long time, in the early days, one
of the most common types of failures was water ingress, right? Where you drop it in a pool, or you, you know, spill your drink on it, and the unit fails.
And so we've been making
strides over all those years to get better and better and better in terms of minimizing those failures. And I don't know how
many years it's been now, but we got to a point of IP68, which is kind of a
rating for water ingress, which is really impressive. And I think you get to
see some of these tests, right?
– Yeah. – And it's great because we
get these stories of people, you know, literally, I
dropped my phone in the lake. I couldn't get it for two weeks. I fished it out, it still
works. They're super excited. That said, to get the product there, you've gotta design a
lot of seals, adhesives, other things to make it perform that way, which makes it a little harder
to do that battery repair. You still need to do the battery repair, so we need to make sure we have a solution for customers to do that, which we do. But it's objectively
better for the customer to have that reliability. And it's ultimately better for the planet, because the failure rates since we got to that
point have just dropped.
It's plummeted, right? The number of repairs that need to happen. And every time you're doing a repair, you're bringing in new materials, you know, to replace whatever broke. So you can actually do the math and figure out there's a threshold at which if I can make it this durable, then it's better to have it a
little bit harder to repair, 'cause it's gonna net out ahead. – So yeah, that checks out. I found that kind of interesting that we've never really heard anyone from Apple speak directly about this. Now, of course, in a dream world, if Apple's goal is to
make the ultimate phone that never ever breaks, then they probably shouldn't
be making it from glass. 'Cause in the words of
JerryRigEverything, glass is glass. Glass breaks. But still, they're trying to push as far towards that end as possible. And it is interesting to hear a little bit of the behind the scenes
on the philosophy there.
But yeah, that's been it. That's my behind-the-scenes look at Apple's durability testing labs that we've never seen before. Make sure you subscribe to see more stuff, very cool, like this coming up soon, and let me know what you
think about this sliding scale of durability versus repair. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace. (relaxing upbeat music).
