Jarrod McKinney was “just absolutely shocked” when he found out his Apple iPhone 4 survived a fall from his pocket while he was skydiving from 13,500 feet.
CNN reports, “He found the gadget, its glass surfaces shattered, on top of a building about a half-mile away from where he landed with his parachute.”
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“Joe Johnson, a skydiving instructor, said he and a few friends watched from the ground below the two-story building as McKinney raised the phone above his head in triumph after he located it using a GPS tracking app,” CNN reports. “Just to be funny, Johnson decided to call the busted phone.
“He didn’t expect the call to go through. But it did,” CNN reports. “McKinney felt the phone vibrate and started laughing. ‘They were all like, ‘It works! It works!” he said of his friends watching his rooftop search from the bottom of the building.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ringtone? Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’, right?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]
This will get reported elsewhere as “More dropped calls on iPhone”
Lol!
The phone could have easily killed someone…
No, GRAVITY would have been at fault. The iPhone itself is merely a victim of natural law.
Gravity is a myth. There is no such thing. The Earth just sucks.
And flat!
Phones don’t kill people.
Gravity does.
Well, well, well!
An equally amazing fact I have learned with my experience with Apple is that if the phone is less than a year old, they will replace it under warranty for free. Also, if it’s beyond a year, and you haven’t yet purchased Apple Care, they will probably let you get it anyways, and then replace the phone ar no additional cost. Apple isn’t only about the incredible products, but also incredible service. Eat that would-be rivals!!
I used to be skeptical of stories like these until last week when my iP4 slipped out a car window onto a road where it was run over. Thanks to “find my iPhone” we located it in a puddle in the middle of a road. The front glass was shattered, the “protective cas” smashed to pieces but the phone still worked fine. Also thanks to the Tacoma Apple Store who happily replaced my phone despite being out of warranty and with apple clearly not at fault. Amazing craftsmanship and amazing customer service, that’s why they are beating the bejeebies out of everyone.
To be fair, there is nothing much else to be broken from a fall in a phone other than case (glass).
For something else to be broken, very hard conditions should be met.
Hard conditions? Like being run over by cars or dropping 13,500 feet?
Nah, 13,500 is nothin’. Now, 13,600, that is “hard conditions”.
No, very much possibly much harder than that.
Seriously, what could happen to the board and components if these are packed with a small steel frame and multi-layered glass?
The glass will shatter, but for damage to chips and other components the force has to be absolutely ridiculous. Flying from big height might very well not to be the case of giving ridiculous force since everything reaches it’s terminal velocity.
Wasnt this reported a few months back?
Man I’m living in a slow news day today… Someone sent out a news story on the NYT last night that James Doohan died…. Except he died in 2005… Quickly redacted but… Screwed up day.
My old 3GS shattered like noneI have ever seen after being dropped from waist height on a parking lot month or so ago. Maybe it was because of the huge temp difference between an air conditioned car and a 100 day..
Anyhow, the drop was no worse than many it had survived. It proved tone quite tough. Just not that day.
Milspec ???
AppleSpec, bro — even better.
Guess he should have downloaded that parachute app . . .
Or maybe bought Parachute’s album . . . .
guess I bought a lemon, dropped it while walking up stairs one week after buying (3G) and the screen was non responsive , no cracks on the screen, just a scuffed corner!
Just give the darn thing to my daughter. She is on her 4th iPhone…..
I havent had a phone go for a long fall but i did have a panasonic toughbook fall 4 stories and land on a cement floor.
I saw the handle go flying off the thing and it bounced twice.
As i walked up to it i heard the new mail tone sound off and was shocked to find that beyond a big dent in the corner of the case and the broken handle it was still running.
2 weeks later the HD started failing im sure the hard jolt helped start that process lol
Anyone else catch this retardedness?
“Mike Gikas, a tech editor at Consumer Reports, the nonprofit group that tests phones and other gadgets for their reliability, jokingly said that McKinney finally found a way to fix the phone’s reception woes, by dropping it from a plane.”
Wtf?
Thanks to Apple’s patented multi-smash technology.
The CNN story really repeats the Antennagate crapola again (CR has lost all credibility, IMHO), and gratuitously portrays the Android as more durable. Even with such evidence staring them in the face. Lamestream media indeed.
Yeah, the title suggests a pro-iphone article but it does more antennagate FUD and propping up Android than anything. Like all Android hardware could have the same durability…….its the OS people….it has ZERO to do with the durability of the hardware. They’re forgetting that the only company that integrates the OS AND the hardware for a phone is Apple. Where’s the testing results for every Android phone taking a fall? Don’t hold your breath…..
Read this this morning. The article pretty much slammed the iPhone and pushed Android.
If the iPhone fell UP when the skydiver dropped it, now THAT would be somethin’.
Just sayin’.
Unrelated; but I had my samsung phone run over by a Ford heavy duty truck and it still works. That was 18 months ago and I still use it. (can’t afford an iPhone). 🙁
My Samsung phone quit the day I got my first iPhone, the 3G. I turned it off and never used it again.
anyone see the pictures of the iPhone yet?
Holy crap…
but yeah, bash iPhone praise Android…. lol. CNN does not like Apple..
Wow what kind of case was he using? Maybe it was the Griffin survivor case or otterbox…
Someone needs to make a rugged case that integrates with an app that monitors the iPhones altitude. A sudden sustained drop automatically triggers a parachute deployment, and airbags inflate to cushion impact when it hits the ground.