It's a solid piece of silicon encased in epoxy, so there's nothing really to get crushed. Contrast this to something like a cellphone that's made of hundreds of separate parts and has void space that will get crushed.
It was also in casing already prepared for that type of environment
I figure I could probably put together a resilient fuze using off-the-shelf parts that's at least as good as a WW2 era one for <$100 (potted solid state parts are really frickin resilient to G forces). With some optimisations for mass production I think <$30 is doable. So I'm going to say an order of magnitude easier.
Of course factoring in today's markup on military parts and the failings of military procurement, that fuze will actually cost the tax payer $3000-$30000 + R&D.
* https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/75940/what-has-h...
Would note that air isn't the only substance in a phone that compresses under 38 MPa. (Batteries come to mind.)
Note that I would expect water to seep into a battery at this pressure and that will cause all kinds of issues - including chemical fires underwater. Just not crushed batteries.
> Why isn't a cellphone filled with epoxy?
Anyway, I wasn't disagreeing, just reasoning a bit further.
Typically the limiting factor on your phone is the screen breaking, your battery life getting too short, wear and tear on components like buttons or the charging port, and factory defects. Epoxy isn't going to help with any of those. The only thing it would help with is exposure to water, but if other parts of your phone like your screen aren't water proof, what's the point?
Epoxy adds weight and manufacturing cost. It introduces design challenges as you need to balance the thermal expansion of the various parts. It's an extra step that can go wrong, and makes repair of other defects far more difficult. What benefit is there for the typical consumer that outweighs these costs?
Phones these days are often more expensive than the chair and can be pretty inconvenient to replace, especially if you have nonrecent backups.
Filling the entire cell phone with epoxy wouldn’t help. The parts that break on drops are external like the screen.
This SD card was enclosed in a sealed metal container so it wasn’t exposed to water.
People hydromod digital quartz wristwatches by filling them with oil. This gives them truly absurd water resistances and even improves the readability of the screen somehow.
“I dropped my phone and all the oil leaked out making a mess”
Yeah that’s not going to happen my dude.