Sturdy little bastards!

For a marketing experiment we needed some broken products at work. So we peeled apart an LCD in a macbook to make it appear broken. We destroyed software on a harddisk. And a few other things. We also tried to break the digitizer of an iPhone. And we succeeded eventually…

Since a broken digitizer (the glass front and touch screen) of iPhones is the most popular repair here we decided we needed a broken iPhone. We had some old devices lying around and thought to simply smash the screen in and be done with it. As the most likely cause for it to break was to simply throw it to the ground we tried that. It didn’t really work. We then tried hitting it to the narrow end of a steel pole. All we accomplished was a small budge and a scratch.

A colleague then thought to use a alarm hammer, used to break car windows with minimum force. Basically what this thing does is shoot out a steel pin shattering any glass it touches. Not so for the iPhone. It didn’t even get scratched. When we tried it on the steel pole a big budge was there. So the hammer indeed worked. Just not for the iPhone.

We ended up using a wrench. Simply beating on it would destroy the iPhone too much we thought so we took it apart by removing the actual phone and LCD. So we would just break the glass.

And break it did:

And we used this tool:

It took some effort but the digitizer was thoroughly broken. Too much really. Since the touchscreen stopped working also. Which is part of the glass. But for our experiment we needed it to work. We destroyed 2 digitizers with the wrench and they both broke too much.
Finally we just took a used digitizer and smashed it’s edge to the table’s edge… The table is damaged now, but so is the digitizer. A neat little crack. Just enough to justify the need to repair it.

I wonder how all those people break their phones. Since, if they’re to be believed they dropped from a table or from their pockets… We dropped a fully assembled iPhone from 2 meters high and it didn’t even scratch!