In this week’s Sunday Reboot, an iPhone 17 Pro Max goes underground for a very, very long time.
Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get the next week underway with a good first step.
iPhone 17 Pro Max becomes the oldest tech
The United States of America is having a big celebratory year, because it’s 250 years old. I’m not American, I’m British, so I do look at the celebrations with a bit of amusement.
You’re probably going to expect some pithy comment about the Boston Tea Party or modern-day Fourth of July celebrations. Far from it.
What I want to focus on is a story that came up on Monday about a time capsule. America250 has put the iPhone 17 Pro Max in a box alongside a number of items, intended as a representative snapshot of the United States.
It’s buried at Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia, and will remain underground and untouched for 250 years.
The iPhone was picked because it represents American innovation and advances in handheld computing, photography, and connectivity. To be frank, it does match that role quite well.
The time capsule and the iPhone 17 Pro Max that is inside. Image Credit: Rich Press/NIST
In the year 2276, the capsule will be opened, and historians will be taking a look at all of the items inside the box. You would think that 250 years of innovation would lead to people looking at the iPhone 17 Pro Max like it was a primitive piece of technology.
“Zounds, this item is proper ancient, innit?” one onlooker would say, trying to use street jive from the period and getting it wrong. “Is that one of those flip phone things?”
They would be right, of course. Once Apple absorbed Softbank, Mitsubishi, and PepsiCo in a super merger in 2184, technology surged forward so that people don’t need to use devices to communicate, only thoughts.
They won’t have any concept of touching a screen. Telling an AI what you want would be unheard of for decades, thanks to the newly developed continent of OpenAIctica.
That many servers need to cool down somehow…
No one will have cables that work with USB-C, volume buttons would be a mystery, and people would be shocked that it doesn’t support the latest Bluetooth version 8.
If time travel were actually possible, going to that site would be quite high on the list. Seeing our current life treated as relics of a “simpler and more primitive” time.
Tomb-proof?
There’s also the question of whether the iPhone’s battery will survive that long. Not as in battery life, but as in survivability.
It’s a chemical reaction in waiting, and there’s every chance that there could be an issue. Maybe a seal breaks down after a few decades, resulting in a Galaxy Note reenactment while it’s in that sealed container.
The last thing anyone wants is for the iPhone to set fire to everything else in that time capsule. But the morbid curiosity has me wondering if it could happen.
Apple’s Q&A testing is legendary, with iPhones undergoing insane tests, but not 250-years-underground legendary.
A robotic machine to test repeated insertion and removal of a USB-C cord. Image credit: Jonathan Bell
Aside from drops and impacts, Apple does test for environmental factors, like water and dust. One of the more extreme tests included salt exposure for up to 100 hours.
Outside of Apple’s test facilities, the iPhone has had a hard time in similarly lengthy ways. In 2022, an iPhone that was dropped into a river was rescued 10 months later, and it still worked.
I’m sure that someone at Apple has made a note for a future tester to pay a visit to Philadelphia in 250 years’ time. It could well become the most thorough battery survival test of all time.
Last week’s Sunday Reboot talked about questionable research, Betteridge’s law, and how AI devices just aren’t going away.
Source: www.appleinsider.com
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