iPhone X Survives Fall From Over 11,000 Feet
An iPhone X has survived a fall from over 11,000 feet in the air, according to a pilot on the Diamond Aviators forums.
The pilot was flying his Diamond DA40 plane from Colorado Springs to Atlanta when he wanted to take a photo of a billowing cloud formation to his right using his iPhone X.
The aircraft had a large plexiglass canopy with small side windows that could be opened in flight. Traveling at around 175mph at 11,500 feet, a small pocket of turbulence moved his hand too close to the passenger window and the iPhone was sucked out into the airplane's slipstream.
After landing in Atlanta, the pilot used a spare iPhone 6S to track the iPhone X using the Find My app, which somehow had survived the fall to transmit a location in Blythe, Arkansas from a nearby cell tower. He then attempted to trace the device in crops of soybeans, and after a long search through the thick crops, discovered the iPhone X, still in its Otterbox case.
The device was in perfect condition despite a little dust from the fall. When connected to power and charged back up, the iPhone X worked as expected and continued to do so in the following days. The discovery came as a surprise to the pilot and fellow forum users, given that the iPhone X has a glass front and rear, and is believed to have reached a terminal velocity of around 200mph before hitting the ground.
Apple has bolstered the iPhone's durability even further since 2017's iPhone X, most recently adding a more durable squared-off design and Ceramic Shield glass to the iPhone 12 for improved shatter resistance.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....