Researcher Sam Kohl from AppleTrack has published the first crash tests of the iPhone 15 Pro on YouTube. According to his video, the titanium frame’s new rounded edges don’t hold up to drop tests as well as the iPhone 14 Pro’s surprisingly sturdy design.
In the drop test, the iPhone 14 Pro remained in almost perfect condition until the end, while the glass of the 15 Pro gave up about halfway through the test and spider cracks initially appeared in the corners. Consecutive falls resulted in increased damage to the 15 Pro’s glass on both the back and front. In the end, the bottom half of the iPhone 15 Pro’s display was completely broken (only the white pixels were lit) and the rear camera module was completely separated from the housing.
While the flat stainless steel frame strip on the iPhone 14 Pro absorbed most of the impact, on the iPhone 15 Pro the impact seemed to spread through the rounded titanium sides to the front and back glass, causing spider cracks to form. The hardness of titanium is higher than that of stainless steel, but this also has the opposite effect as the less hard stainless steel frame has better shock absorbing properties. And the elastic and light titanium frame transfers much more kinetic energy from the impact to the glass.
Testers found that while the iPhone 15 Pro isn’t as drop-proof as the 14 Pro, it still held up well, with the glass only cracking after a few drops on concrete.
It must be added that various device crash tests are obviously neither academic nor scientific and their repeatability is a big question.
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