With each passing year, Apple tries to make its costly smartphones more and more resistant to physical damage. In many respects this mission has been a success: certainly today’s iPhones are far more water-resistant than was the case a decade ago. And the Ceramic Shield feature introduced with the iPhone 12 in 2020 means the glass of the screen is harder to break, too.
One of the trumpeted upgrades for the newest 16-series iPhones is the inclusion of a new version of Ceramic Shield, which Apple claims is “two times tougher than any smartphone glass.” That may be accurate, but don’t think it means you can toss your iPhone 16 Pro on the floor and walk away scot-free.
The insurance firm Allstate Protection Plans regularly tests the drop- (and dunk-) resistance of various devices, and yesterday revealed how the iPhone 16 got on in the latest round of simulated spills. The news isn’t entirely positive.
The company uses what it refers to as a “DropBot” to simulate falls from six feet (which is perhaps on the high side if we’re imagining the phone being dropped from a pocket or hand unless you’re a giant) to gives a general (and consistent) sense of how well each device stands up to this kind of impact. And the answer is that even the latest iPhones don’t stand up to it very well.
“When dropped face down on a sidewalk from six feet, the 16 Pro Max shattered, and the display failed completely, rendering the device unusable,” Allstate reports. Dropping it on the back panel was less catastrophic, but still inadvisable: while remaining fully functional, the phone shattered and suffered significant damage to the camera housing.
“So while the iPhone 16 may be the smartest smartphone to date, one thing hasn’t changed,” the company concludes. “It’s still made of glass.”
This may sound bad… and certainly isn’t reassuring to hear. But as MacRumors points out in its coverage of the story, this is just a really hard test. The iPhone 16 Pro Max has glass on both front and back, and no glass-based smartphone has ever survived Allstate’s DropBot test.
