iPhone plunges 13,500 ft from skydiver's pocket - and lives A Minnesota skydiver's iPhone 4 slipped out of his pocket at 13,500 feet, landed on a factory rooftop, and lived to tell the tale. Jerrod McKinney told CNN that he was "just absolutely shocked" when his high-flying iPhone still worked after the fall – especially considering that its glass had cracked when his toddler had …
Surely the skydiver should be fined now? What if the phone had fallen and hit someone on the head?
The rest sounds more like advertising for the Incipio cases.
Also didn't see the antenna being discussed in CNN's original story. I'd appreciate if El Reg would provide references to such claims, thanks.
Could have been a one in a million circumstance. I purpose that we verify this by dropping a thousand Iphone users with their phones glued to their ears from 13,000 feet and testing their phones after they land
Good chance with the fanbois should get a few ipads and ipods in the mix too
Yes, it must be verified, but in a different way. The question is whether a fanboi will survive a drop from 13,000 ft if he is covered in jesusPhones. So, take a couple of, let's say at least 100, fanbois, who more or less volunteer for this experiment. Randomly put them into two equally sized groups, take the members of one group and glue iPhones to every bit of their skins. Then bring both groups up to 13,000 ft and drop all of them out of a plane. Count those who survive with iPhones and those without.
If not conclusive, i.e. no significant difference between the two groups, adjust your hypothesis and repeat the experiment accordingly, e.g. with less iPhones per fanboi or higher altitude.
Repeat until you either reach at a plausible conclusion or no fanbois are left.
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I can confirm, the laws of physics do not apply to iphones. Those law showed, empirically, that you can drop an ol'n'ugly Nokia phone several times onto concrete floor, whatever, and it won't take any damage. (Even if you wanted to deliberately destroy it, to have it replaced by a shiny new iPhone...)
With the iPhone, well, you cannot.
Aside from my wife's ol'n'ugly Nokia - you can drop that from a mere couple of feet onto the finest and softest of shag, and it still explodes and dispels the battery cover, and ejects the battery and SIM card as far away from itself as possible. I swear the battery thinks it's an ejector seat.
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1/ Fail1: The terminal velocity is not a function of the weight --- a 200gr ball bearing will gladly smash through an unfortunate bystander's skull, while a 200gr air mattress will flutter to the ground.
2/ Correct1: The Galileo experiment is relevant: everything with the same shape will fall at the same rate. Fail2: That experiment (and the parachuting) has nothing to do with vacuum and/or feathers.
3/ Correct2: Vacuum has nothing to do with it; but that doesn't mean the original remark was right.
Terminal velocity will indeed quickly be reached, so 500ft or 13K ft don't really matter. The iphone being a rather rigid & solid (high relative density) object, you'd expect it to reach a good terminal velocity and to be severely broken.
The roof would be my prime concern --- you can easily do a few hundred of pounds of damage to it, if no more.
Correct1 above: "everything with the same shape will fall at the same rate" is incorrect
The air resistance will be the same, but the gravitational force (weight) will not be. Two 10cm spheres, one massing twice the other will not fall at the same rate though a viscous fluid. The more massive sphere will fall quicker, due to the air resistance being less significant as it is acting on a greater mass of object.
I agree that its density would probably mean an iPhone's terminal velocity would be relatively fast. However, the potential energy of a falling Jesus Phone is still 1/2(m)(v^2), so mass does factor into the energy release into said phone upon impact with factory roof -- though quite a bit less than velocity does.
@atippey
The formula you give (half mass times the square of the velocity) is that for kinetic energy. The formula for potential energy in this case is m x g x h where m is the mass, g the acceleration due to gravity and h the height above the reference level you are measuring the potential energy (ie where this blessed phone would land).
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I'm the AC from 12:48, and I stand by my statement.
I wasn't referring to the Galileo experiment, I was referring to the AC at 11:57 who brought up the vacuum experiment, which isn't relevant here because the iPhone was not dropped in a vacuum. I'm not throwing out the theories behind it, just the relevance.
The reason I mentioned reading up on terminal velocity is because, outside of a vacuum, it is relevant - at some point the iPhone will experience enough drag (mg, in fact) through air to prevent any further acceleration, which was the OPs original point.
If you substitute "weight" for "mass" in the OPs message, do you feel happier? I tend to assume people say weight and mean mass, and I don't feel any worse off for it, in the same way that most people use kg instead of kgf (or N).
"I'm the AC from 12:48, and I stand by my statement."
OK, I apologise for the tone and have retracted my comments. My apologies to the OP as well. I accept that terminal velocity is directly proportional to the mass of the falling object - I went through the equations in the bathtub and figured it out - and I should have digested that before posting.
Beer because I obviously need more of it. Thanks for your patience!
The one time I decide to wear a posh jacket and jump a few fences - well, that's when my iPhone 4, too decides it knows a shorter route down. That day I managed to crack the back on three separate occasions. I was about to mail his Holiness, about how it's his personal fault that iphones and top pockets don't work well together. But I decided to chug that up to good old user-error.
How long until someone has their head stoved in by one of these wayward Jobsian flying machines? Maybe that would be news, but this article certainly isn't.
As for the "ultradurable" glass - don't make me laugh, I've seen iPhone 4's smash their glass after being dropped just a few feet. Apple should be sued under trade description laws for claiming their product is ultradurable when clearly it's anything but and always comes off second best in a straight fight with concrete.
If you want ultradurable - and not some made up nonsense from Cuppertino - get a Nokia, they use real Gorilla Glass on all their high end devices (inc. N9, N950).
I was under the impression that Corning's "Gorilla Glass" and Apple's aluminosilicate screens where made in very similar ways, it's just that one has marketed it as a product to other manufacturers who want a tough screen and the other has their own which they use exclusively themselves in their own products.
Gorilla Glass can survive a drop on to a hard surface, Apple's "aluminosilicate screens" cannot, therefore they are not in any way, shape or form, the same (or even similar, except that they're both glass of course).
If Apple had to substantiate their claims of how tough their glass actually is, they'd surely fail as there is plenty of evidence around the web that confirms it is as fragile as regular glass and is certainly not anything special, and is nothing like Gorilla Glass.
to permit anything other than fine sand or pure water to leave an aircraft in flight - and a parachute is considered an aircraft. This guy will no doubt be having words with the relevant authorities.
The story should rather have been 'factory workers in near miss'. What's the terminal velocity of an iphone?
But you have to have the appropriate certification for the plane.
To be honest, I never fly (paraglider) without a phone - but it's in a fitted and velcroed pocked on my flight suit. Come to think of it, the one time I did pile in - wing collapse at 70 feet, bounced six feet into the air - it came out of it a damn sight better than I did. Though it was of course a Nokia.
I guess it would've broken into a thousand pieces on its way down, infringed a few fundamental patents, had some malware remotely installed onto it, accidentally sniffed a few Wi-Fi networks, blatantly copied Apple, and ultimately disappeared into dust (just after sending your personal information to a server in China).
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