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Comment by brainfire | Hacker News Reader

The same way they use durable glass and don't cover broken glass under the warranty.

They're not saying the glass is unbreakable, they say it's strong. Water resistant sounds entirely different from 'should survive small splashes' and doesn't add anything if it's not actually watertight. I already use my android phone in the rain, covering it as well as I can, and take the risk. Or hope it survives when splashing water over it. That works, so the next step is actually being watertight.

Water resistant sounds like break resistant. It doesn't make any promises.

Fwiw, the main Dutch tech news site just headlined with "waterdichte iphone", literally "water tight". Yeah, legally they make no promises but they definitely know what impression it gives.

For better or worse, companies aren't directly responsible for what news agencies write about them.

But glass has some base-level strength you can rely on. Imagine if there was a chance of the glass shattering while you hold the phone gently in one hand, and the warranty excluded the glass.

But in the field, anything can mess that up, e.g. pressure applied to a small point.

If I drop my phone on the ground screen first, I have an idea that it might not break, but it might break. If it doesn't, I'm happy it survived, and if it does I don't go out and sue Apple.

Same if my phone gets hit in a rain storm by a bunch of drops of water.

The point is: If you don't abuse your phone by dropping it on the ground, you know the warranty protects you. If you gently splash your phone, it's very possible it could break because it was defectively sealed, but the warranty won't help. Lots of products that are supposedly water resistant to X degree have not lived up to their labels. They should not be claiming any level of water resistance if they're going to categorically exclude water damage. It's one thing to say it is more likely to survive a splash than previous phones. But they're making a very specific claim that a certain amount of water is safe. That claim should have teeth.

Double standard. They shouldn't claim any amount of breakage resistance if they are going to categorically exclude trauma damage from their warranty. There is plenty of precedence for best effort claims backed by laboratory testing but that don't actually have teeth in warranties (car crash testing).

But the warranty does cover the screen just exploding out of nowhere. The key difference is with a screen there has to be trauma to exclude it from warranty. With water, even laying it super-gently under one inch for thirty seconds is not covered, when it's supposed to be safe for thirty minutes at five feet.

Car crash standards are okay, because the car always crumples, and they don't make promises like "you can crash a car at up to X pressure and the crash will not penetrate and cause damage". If a company was parading third-party lab results showing an immunity to 10mph collisions vs. walls, their warranty has no place excluding 5mph collisions vs. walls.

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