It‘s been a couple of days since Frederik Riedel’s friend dropped his iPhone 12 Pro into a canal in Kreuzberg in Berlin. How the two men rescued the smartphone using MagSafe has been detailed in a new blog post and video.
On May 29th, 2021 at 21:18, a friend of mine sent me this message. Apparently, his iPhone 12 Pro slipped out of his sweat pants‘ pocket and fell into the canal. He was still able to see the blue phone shining through the water which motivated him to jump into the disgusting canal water. However, by jumping in, a lot of mud was stirred up and the phone slid away further into the mud. After some minutes of wading through the 3ft deep sewer water, he happily discovered a blank screen surface with his bare foot and decided to dive down to recover his iPhone. Turns out, he just found a Nintendo Switch instead that someone else must have lost to the canal. The iPhone was lost and couldn‘t be found at this point.
Shortly after drying up, he called me and I suggested to attach some strong magnets I had lying around to a string and try to catch the phone with those. We quickly built a prototype (in the process the magnets broke apart unfortunately) and tried to figure out how strong they would attach to our remaining phones (no MagSafe devices). The result was sobering: Not strong enought to lift them up. After that, our faith was in the new MagSafe-capabilities of the 12 Pro.
After 1.5 hours of pulling junk out of the canal, something happened that nobody of us would have imagined: A rectangular object attached to the magnets and we pulled it towards the surface of the water. By now it was clear: this was the missing iPhone… At this point, we really have to give props to the iPhone Hardware Engineering team: We were able to recover the device in perfect mint condition and without water damage. The new Ceramic Shield Glass really held up to the strong forces of the magnet and junk in the canal, and the IP68 water resistance is mind-blowing.
MacDailyNews Take: Nice catch!
“Dude, I put that thing on my face!” – Raj Koothrappali, The Big Bang Theory.