Post Content The iPhone 4 that survived a three-floor fall with barely a scratch. (AI Image using Gemini)
Every Apple user has a story that explains why they stayed. Mine goes back to the iPhone 4 — the first iPhone my wife and I owned, bought just around the time our son was born. We had picked up older models because the latest edition was a stretch for our mid-level journalist budgets, but the 4 felt like a proper upgrade, and we were attached to it.
Our son was just a year old then and, like most toddlers, had no interest in his actual toys. The smartphone was a different matter — the bright screen fascinated him even though we kept him away from content and games on it. He was comfortable around gadgets anyway; there was always a review device or two lying around the house.
Toddlers also go through a phase of wanting to test the world for themselves. My son’s preferred experiment was throwing things off our third-floor balcony onto the concrete walkway below.
Then one weekend, his curiosity and his ease with gadgets made for a terrible combination. We remember seeing him peering through the bamboo panels on the balcony, looking pleased with himself. Something was clearly wrong. That’s when my wife realised her iPhone was gone.
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I ran downstairs expecting the worst. Three floors onto bare concrete – there was no version of this that ended well, and it wasn’t damage we could absorb. But the iPhone had survived. It had bounced off the concrete and come to rest in a flowerbed nearby. The only evidence of what it had been through was a small dent on the aluminium frame and a few faint scratches on the glass.
That was almost 12 years ago. I recently remembered this story when I came across the old iPhone 4 box while clearing out a storeroom. Last I checked, the phone itself was still in working condition — though it too must be buried somewhere in the hundreds of objects and memories we’ve accumulated over the years.
For years after, that accidental drop test became one of my favourite stories to bring up with smartphone executives. It’s also, honestly, part of why I’ve stayed with the iPhone – having cycled through Nokia, BlackBerry and Sony before that point.
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Another reason was my 2015 MacBook Air, which my son and I put through years of manhandling. By the time he was using it for lockdown online classes, it had started to look like a well-thumbed paperback — dented corners, scuffed lid and all — but it kept going.
Apple is a skilled storyteller about its own products. But I suspect what really makes the brand is the millions of stories users carry around without being asked to.
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