In my experience the vacuum holds the bottom half immovably in place, and I have to pry it out. It looks nice in that gif but in practice I think they need to test a little more. Perhaps it’s a humidity thing?
It’s no longer the case, but for a long time my iPhones were pretty bad about reconnecting to the cell network when emerging from the NYC subway, which always struck me as a little bit of evidence of its California roots–given the polish of the device overall, it surely would never have been so janky in that situation if a majority of their employees experienced it each day on their way to work!
Unrelated to your overall to point, but maybe this helps a fellow reader.
Most stations have cell signal now, you just need to toggle airplane mode once you are fully out of the tunnel.
I wouldn’t even be surprised if they did something like using the accelerometer as an input to the baseband for triggering a quick network scan after a rapid deceleration when on a train without signal.
Or maybe newer networks are just more predictable for phones to reconnect to quickly without draining the battery?
I don’t know, but I imagine there is some effort into balancing staying-closed and falling-open within the constraints of the machinery used to produce and assemble these things. Seems like it’s something likely to be somewhat variable.