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Comment by aninteger | Hacker News Reader

Their devices are still fragile though.

Please explain. Apple devices last longer than any Android device, or for that matter 95% of all electronics sold

They build glass phones with glass on both sides. Glass. You know that super durable material that is broken by kids with baseballs and breaks easy when dropped?

iPhones get more updates sure. More durable? No. I'm pretty sure a Samsung Active can withstand more abuse. I'm pretty confident that my plastic backed with only a glass screen average Android phone could too.

I’m not a person who is gentle with their tech - it’s a tool, not a fetish - and in 14 years of owning an iPhone, I have only broken the glass once. This is tough stuff - it’s not like it’s the single pane my dad installed in the garage door that I promptly broke by looking sideways at it.

Yes, it could be sturdier. But that would require other trade offs. Just because you don’t value those decisions doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. It just means your values were not the primary use case. Diversity is good because people value different sets of trade offs!

You must not have kids that demand to play with games on your phone then. I have witnessed many iPhones get smashed when said kids drop the phone (almost always by accident). One person I know went through 3 iPhones in a year due to this :(

Do people have some weird objection to phone cases? I've got a $5 case on my 12 Pro and I've dropped it many, many times in the past year without a single issue.

Take public transportation sometime. Notice all the devices with cracked screens. Totally "anti-fragile" :). Android devices are no better, but the article is talking about Apple.

I would consider that anti-fragile, actually. Cracked front or back glass is limited to a visual defect most of the time, hence why so many people continue to use it.

In comparison, something like an old iPod with a spinning HDD could have a storage failure from a fall.

That modern phones, not just iPhones, are these completely solid devices, packed to the brim, with no more moving pieces makes them surprisingly resilient.

They're even water and dust resistant now just as a standard. Dropping your phone in water was a death sentence a decade ago - it's whatever now.

That is robustness. A robust thing can endure many stressors, but the stressors either leave it as is or make it worse.

Antifragile systems can get better from being stressed, at least to a limit. Muscles are antifragile, as one example. You stress them moderately, and you grow stronger. Stress them too much and you'll break, but within limits your muscles don't just endure the stress, they improve from it.

No physical phone is antifragile.

That's hard to believe from my personal experience. Every, and I mean every, Apple product I have ever owned has had major issues, including basically becoming bricks, all on their own. If I include my family's failures, it gets worse. It's enough that it is giving me pause on potentially buying a new iPad. Why do I need a new iPad? Failures are why. The large iPad Pro has begun to bend, a common issue with them (not due to a drop, I can see a stress point in the aluminum chassis since it's poorly designed with holes in the thin chassis right in the middle on all sides). My iPad Air I paid Apple to "repair" (i.e., replace) after it suddenly bricked itself by not being able to charge. It was replaced with a new iPad Air with literally the exact same issue out of the box and was then replaced again by Apple. Now, just a few months later, the touchscreen seems to be failing and is becoming errant and unusable at times.

Out of all my Microsoft Surface computers and Android phones, only one phone ever had a major issue, but it was replaced under LG's two year warranty.

> Every, and I mean every, Apple product I have ever owned has had major issues, including basically becoming bricks, all on their own.

You should buy a lottery ticket with some of that hyperbolic bad luck.

I don't think it's bad luck. I think it's Apple not caring about how long their products last or how robust they are. Many of these issues are well known and reported but rarely unchanged between models.

I simply gave my own personal experience, stated as such, and am heavily downvoted, so it's hard to believe Apple cult followers about anything regarding their products.

Apple is devilishly brilliant at marketing.

As a counter argument none, not one of their devices failed on me in 15 years, and I bought a lot

>> including basically becoming bricks, all on their own.

> I don't think it's bad luck

I’ve owned around 30 iPhones, 20 iPads, 10 iPod Touches, 8 Apple Watches, 15 MBPs, 4 Mac Pros, 2 iMacs, 5 AirPods, etc etc putting them through hell in many cases (including testing unproven baseband, iBoot, and other firmware exploits), yet have never had an Apple device “basically become a brick, _all on their own_”. So either I have the worlds best luck, or my point stands about yours. I’m not calling you a liar, but at minimum your comment was hyperbolic.

30 iPhones? What you doing with them? Eating them?

The number is actually a bit higher than that actually, but there’s at least 30 that I know where they are. The 7 generations after the first one (aka 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 5C) had multiple different baseband variations and for several reasons (one of which I previously mentioned) required me having one of each. After I was done using them and had restored them to stock (always kept at least one of each generation jailbreaked though), I’d rent them out to friends who lived in SF/NYC who needed to test their apps on older versions of phones or with specific OS versions (as back then, I could install almost any OS version on demand). I made enough doing that to continue my trend of buying multiple of every generation up to the iPhone 8. Around that time factors changed and beginning with the iPhone X, I started buying just one from each generation. So long story short, that’s one way that someone ends up with lots of iPhones.

The newer Corning glass used on the front of the current iPhone is certainly much more durable than prior versions.

>With the screen still holding strong, we decided to go even higher, using a step ladder to reach nine feet. Again this is not a realistic drop unless you happen to slide your phone off a second floor balcony, but we wanted to see how far we could take it.

We repeated this drop two more times... The frame had a few more bumps and bruises, but the screen still looked like new after three back-to-back drops from nine feet.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/iphone-12-scratch-drop-test...

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