This isn’t surprising - there was a wired story about phones surviving from planes back in 2011 (1)
The gist is that it’s a light object and due to that + broad shape, its terminal velocity is not very high. Coupled that with the mass and there’s not a lot of force on landing. Of course the phone itself is fragile so it might not take a lot of force to break. Still, as long as it lands on something soft it might be ok, as we’ve seen!
Where it lands is the biggest factor. A phone will almost never break if it falls on soft grass or mud. And no phone is surviving a high velocity drop onto concrete.
Angle of fall is another big one. From what I've seen phones are generally fine if they fall face up or down, but even a slight bump on the edges is enough to crack the glass.
It landed on grass/dirt. On the photos on Twitter there seems to be some thick vegetation. Seeing the drops on the screen, if it has rained, then it would make the ground even softer.
If it would have landed on the asphalt, concrete, marble it would have looked very different!
Vegetation can also help to break velocity. People fell out of planes and survived by falling into trees and snow underneath. The smaller branches of the trees very much acted like a crumple zone on a car - giving way and breaking, but taking away little chunks of energy everytime.
Because there isn't much difference in the force between a 1m and a 8000m drop due to the above. So it really comes down to case, angle, and material onto which it was dropped with corners being more vulnerable.
There is. Dropping your phone follows a curve, it falling from 16,000ft it does not. There are more forces at play when you fumble your phone. They aren't necessarily stronger forces though...just more of them. Trajectory and spinning add different forces on top of gravity. There is also the catch attempt that invariably forces the phone down harder and changes the trajectory.
Yeah. I’ve dropped my phone though rarely hard. A few months ago I was hiking with the phone in my pocket and some sort of impact (there was a lot of scrambling over rock) caved in the phone from the back through the case and completely destroyed it.
It didn't have time to turn around and stretch in order to slow itself down.
Or maybe that's cats. Cats reputedly have a higher chance to survive a long drop than a short one because the long one gives them time to catch themselves and maybe slow down.
I drop my iPhone 12 mini on the daily onto marble floor, asphalt and concrete .. sometimes it flings out of my hands with an arc to it. Slippery little thing, it is.
I am pretty sure ALL phones that are on sale today have better glass than my Nexus 4 which had a beautiful glass panel on its back. Gorgeous but not strong at all.
> It's not a huge leap of faith to assume they mean the phone as in the thing covered in glass and fragile touchscreen.
Not all phones are fragile. Ones with bodies made out of glass or aluminium are, ones with "nice to glide your finger along" glass screens can be. But those "features" are found in expensive phones.
Cheap phones, with their plastic bodies, flexible touch screens and removable batteries that tend to leave the case on impact are remarkably robust. As in "riding bike at 30km / hour, phone leaps out of pocket smashes into concrete gutter, covers and battery fly this way and that and so you have to dodge traffic to retrieve them" are perfectly fine after the incident, after reassembly. In fact on of my phones survived multiple rounds of that treatment.
Cheap phones being robust and expensive ones being delicate is a bug bear of mine. The one caveat is cheap phones are never water proof.
Cheap or expensive, I've never see the phones electronics damaged by an impact.
Modern phones aren't fragile but they are slippery, and it's still annoying to drop them especially if it can go down a grate or something. So a case prevents that.
> If it wasn't fragile - people would not buy cases and protective glass for their phone.
Well for my money I think they're mostly nonsense.
I never use them and despite living in my pockets for years, my phone aren't scratched up. Cases are annoying and unwieldy, making it more likely I would drop my phone, and screen protectors make the screen look worse - which I think is what they're supposed to prevent?
I often go 5+ years with the same phone, so it's not like I write them off any faster. My S2 and S5 both lasted for ages, and they both still work perfectly fine - the only issue is that software "outgrew" them.
It is strange two phones have been found, but not the door. Most of the Cedar Hills/Beaverton area is houses and shops with sporadic green spaces that aren’t that large in comparison. It is possible the door fell into a green space, but the odds are it did not. I imagine it is in someone’s backyard, but it is January in rainy Oregon. People aren’t doing yard work right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t found until Spring when someone goes out to their backyard and discovers it.
It would be amusing if it fell into the lake on Nike Campus. It is fairly shallow, but if it was in the middle, it might not be noticed for a long time.
Sounds like the thing in the woods mentioned below was not the real deal and just some other bit of garbage or something that was dumped in the brush.
Previous comment:
I live in this neighborhood and saw a post on Nextdoor a little bit ago that indicates the door/panel may have been found. The text of the post is as follows: “My husband and I were walking the trail behind the Renaissance Town-homes near Barnes and Valeira View and we saw a large white oval object with a teal stripe on it in the brambles between the creek and Barnes Road. Two others saw it too and they called non-emergency. WCSO and the NTSB showed up but they could not affirm that that is what is was. As my husband said, nobody will know until they walk over to it. Unfortunately the undergrowth prevented us from doing so. We'll see, or not.”
The description of it having a teal stripe could match up with the missing panel, although we obviously can’t be sure yet if it is actually the missing part. I also saw a post from one of the folks who found a phone, and they had included a photo of where they found it, which I recognized to be fairly close to the place where the door was potentially found.
Sometimes we hear stuff on our roof, but it’s always just pinecones falling or a squirrel running around… makes me grateful we haven’t had a Donnie Darko scene in our yard or on our roof!
Disappointed there is no photo of what it looked like when it was found. As in a photo of the door at the place it was found before anyone moved it anywhere.
Reminds me of the skydiver who dropped his camera and you can watch it spin and eventually land in a pigpond where a pig investigates it. It’s on YouTube.
I was rather surprised at this comment. A quick google later it seems that airplane mode turns off all radio communication (as I suspected), but apparently it is possible to turn Bluetooth or WiFi on while remaining in airplane mode. At least for some phones.
Airplane mode on iOS does _not_ by default turn off wifi and bluetooth, just the cellular radio. At least in Europe; it's possible that this is driven by regional regulations. Though I think pretty much everywhere allows use of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands in the air now.
I do this as soon as I’m home. Now both Android and iOS automatically keep bluetooth and wifi on when turning on airplane mode, provided the user does it the first time.
I do it because cell reception is quite poor at my house so calls are better off staying on wifi - also battery life is improved.
I fly regularly with an iPhone and use United’s WiFi entertainment on a regular basis. Also I often switch on airplane mode when I don’t want an international plan to activate and use WiFi all the time.
The reason being that "airplane mode" is there to save the terrestrial mobile network. It has nothing to do with the airplane, and there's no reason to turn off wifi or bluetooth on an airplane.
I actually wondered about this. My iPhone can be located even when turned off, so long as I haven't deactivated that functionality at shutdown (has to be done each time). Is an iPhone in airplane mode really less trackable than an iPhone that is turned off?
I feel like the BT behavior varies when I activate airplane mode. If I am currently connected to my BT headphones, they stay connected. If I am not, then activating airplane mode appears to turn off BT (pulling out my headphones and trying to connect doesn't work). But I would be surprised if the Find My functionality didn't work in airplane mode, given how Apple set it up to work even when turned off (you must manually set it not to be active, and you must put in your passcode each time).
When I turn on Airplane mode on my iPhone, it switches bluetooth into that "not quite off" mode that you get if you just tap the Bluetooth button in the control center (the icon goes white rather than a cross through it like if you turn it off completely in Settings). The Not Quite Off mode IIRC allows stuff like Apple Watch, Apple Pencil, Handoff, Find My, etc[0] to use Bluetooth but it disconnects all the paired Bluetooth devices you are using (basically it solves that "damn my phone is still connected to the headphones in the other room!" problem that 90% of people turning Bluetooth off are trying to fix)
I have auto lock disabled, because I'm the one to decide when I don't need to look at my screen anymore. But that's different from not requiring faceid/passcode upon unlock.
Same for me - has worked for a few years now. The only hitch is when I allow someone else to use the phone and they just put it down after use expecting the screen to lock automatically, which it won't...
I often find myself leaving my phone unlocked on the table while I do something else, knowing that locking it risks the app I'm using discarding my state so it can show me more Content despite me having more than adequate RAM. I don't have it set to Never, but it is longer than default to accommodate this.
I have to ask, why? I use the default settings without issue. Face ID is near instant, and I have almost never had my phone go to sleep when i don’t want it to.
I never forget to turn off my phone, probably because I'm so used to pushing the off button when I lay it down because I disabled auto lock on my first iOS device (1st gen iPod Touch). Maybe it's better now (by registering attention via face id), but back then I often found myself keeping something open as a reference and then having the screen turn off when I needed it.
edit: I just checked and indeed the settings screen says it watches for attention, so I'm willing to give it a try and enable auto unlock now...
I am technical, and I have no phone security (screen lock). I am sure that professional hackers can more easily steal my credentials remotely (phishing, etc) than from physical possession of my phone.
That said, I understand why most people want to use a phone screen lock.
You're betting on the fact that there will never be an event where a malicious party comes in contact with your phone. Which might very likely be the case, but it's not a non-existent risk.
A phone screen lock is a low friction, low cost solution for mitigating that small but impactful risk.
I think dolmen was saying that if its likely that a phone can be found after being sucked out of an airplane, a scenario like yours is also prone to happen
I honestly feel like technical users would be using the "Never" setting more often than non-technical. When testing an app on the phone, it's really annoying having to re-unlock it because you looked away at a different screen for a while. Checking it on Android, never locking is a developer setting, regular display settings have a maximum of 30 minutes.
It's a feelz > realz world where people vote with their feelz and you made them feel bad because they are doing dumb bad things.
It should always be possible to set a device timeout to never and allow WEP56 auth on your WiFi AP, but there should be a warning about the implications.
Doing a bit of research I found a few sources that say that the terminal velocity for a generic smartphone is ~20-40mph, which isn't that much. Lots of phones survive car crashes with higher speeds than that. Add to that landing on softer soil and maybe even breaking fall with branches and I'm not shocked it survived.
No screen crack is pretty good though. Smartphone screens have gotten crazy good recently
First, hat tip for terminal velocity research. That is a nice addition to this discussion.
I was thinking exactly the same about the landing. If it lands in a soft place, like tall grass, most phones should be fine. Most phones are broken by falling onto hard surfaces.
~25mph assuming a Cd of 2.1 (a smooth brick is the closest I could find) a mass of 0.194Kg and a surface area of 0.01142313m^2 (75.6mm x 150.9mm).
Of course that assumes it’s falling facing its largest surface, and not tumbling or a falling edge first. Obviously that is trickier to calculate, but 20-40mph doesn’t seem that unreasonable.
Edit: it takes ~3 seconds to reach 99% terminal velocity.
putting mildly, still it's lovely to see the mix the input of imperial and metric units.
the 'fluid' density is quite wrong as well. 1.29 kg/m^3 -> almost 777 times lighter than water, it's similar to air. By its dimension iphone 15 should be around twice heavier than water.
The behavior I know is that (both iOS and Android) will open the map in foreground even when locked (for example by being turned off and on again via the power button), but it will never go to stand by and lock by itself as long as navigation is open.
Based on https://www.alaskaair.com/content/travel-info/baggage/checke... it seems like that would be just two checked bags (not two extra bags, two bags!) and is irrelevant of your seat class? Be lucky the poor bloke didn't need a third bag, that's when it gets really expensive.
I guess I just have to chalk this up to yet another case of oddities in American flights I can't relate to.
Well in Europe, you pay about £23 per flight just for a carry-on bag and £30 per flight for a check-in bag so I'm not sure things are any different here.
It completely depends on which airline you take. Like most other things, it's free on the more expensive airlines and more expensive on the cheaper ones.
To be clear: I'm not European nor do I live in Europe.
I just looked up a flight, for example London to Paris. The cheapest BA ticket includes hand luggage for £57 each way, or the next option with checked baggage is £14 more.
I'm sure there probably are cheap-and-shit airlines that include nothing with the ticket price as you mention, but there clearly are also options where you pay a small fraction more (and certainly less than "additional baggage" charges) and have baggage included.
There's basically 2 classes of airline in Europe. "Low cost" airlines like RyanAir and Easyjet are constantly finding new ways to charge extra for service, while "traditional" airlines like BA are playing catchup by offering a slightly better experience.
The latest innovation of low cost airlines, as of a few years ago, is to charge for even the hand luggage in an overhead bin. You can only take a really small bag which fits under the seat in front without paying. BA haven't yet got to that level (although I'm sure they will with time). BA tend to be 30-50% more for the base ticket though - so you pay for it one way or another.
That's their choice - the comment I replied to phrased it as if every airline charges extra for any baggage of any kind, not that cheap airlines charge for 'extras'.
American carriers heavily encourage fliers to get their branded credit cards in tandem with their loyalty programs, which often give perks like free checked bags, among other variously useful perks.
For example, if you have the Alaska credit card you get a free checked bag for each of up to 6 people on your reservation.
It sucks that they gouge infrequent passengers, but if you fly even a couple times a year the perks are worth the card fee for whichever airline you fly most.
Also, international flights often do have free checked bags regardless.
I flew them recently and was amazed at how low quality the English text on all their websites/emails was. It's about as bad as you'd see in Asia 15 years ago.
They did let me prepurchase a pretzel though. (And then never gave it to me on the flight.)
Fuck Lufthansa. I bought a round trip, but bought a different flight out for circumstances not pertinent to the story. Anyways, on the return trip, they wouldn't let me check-in, for a flight leaving in 2 hours, with a valid ticket through them, because I didn't take the departure flight out.
I STILL don't understand the angle there, but I learned you can buy a plane ticket to anywhere in the world (except Australia and NZ), day-of; for about $2500.
I'm just the messenger and I'm not claiming it's fair, but this is standard procedure everywhere in the world: when you buy a round-trip ticket (single PNR), if you are a no-show for any leg then you're forfeiting the whole ticket. If the ticket for example includes a train ride to the airport, and you don't show up for the train ride, you're forfeiting the flight as well.
Some airlines might not enforce that if you're deemed an important enough customer for them, but I just want to bring this up because being a no-show in the outbound flight and keeping the return flight is not a right that customers have in general, basically in any IATA airline. It's not really Lufthansa specific, those are rules that the whole industry applies.
The entire thing fell out of plane (phone + charging cable plugged), then landed in a tree, where the charging cable got tangled in branches and that's when phone broke out of it and fell in grass.
So phone was able to release kinetic energy in 2 big events (+a few branches hit maybe), not a direct splash on the ground.
Wonder if somehow they can analyze the accelerometer data of the phone and figure out if that correlates with that scenario.
In skydiving, it isn't unheard of for someone to have their phone fall out of their pocket and survive impact without the screen shattering. That's from ~13000ft, but once the phone reaches terminal velocity, it's all the same impact force regardless of altitude.
I think dirt/grass is just a lot softer than the things we usually drop our phones over, like concrete or tile.
I'm surprised it didn't break past the strain relief. Everyone with an iPhone has a handful of charging cables that end up like [1]. That's where they tend to fail first.
I’ve never had a cable break like that. Many people just don’t know how to handle cables and treat them like rope without any knowledge of bend radius, internal wire twists, etc. (and don’t care if they crush them).
If I was the passenger I’d want to know it’s found and have the possibility of finding the finder. Best would be to post it online like this—I’d see it that way. If they turn it in to the airline it’s probably going to be stuck in bureaucracy for months. If they turn it in to the NTSB, it’ll be gone for years.
If I wanted to reach out to the owner, one could just open the phone app on the already unlocked phone and call anyone that seems like a close relative. Hoping for the owner to just randomly stumble into an internet post seems very impractical, considering that the phone likely contains a substantial amount of info about the owner.
Besides, why would the NTSB hold onto the phone for years? It's not part of the aircraft, there's no real reason why they'd need to have it at all. Is it just common with US government agencies?
Assuming the owner knows how to use their phone features, they can mark it lost in Find My with contact info. Or you can ask Siri what their address is.
Really? You dont think the NTSB worker in the picture won't be capable of informing the owner/returning it after they collect it from the scene?
If I found the phone like that guy did my last thought would be to post pictures of the persons private emails and full name to the internet - and get a bunch of attention for it.
I have a story about that, from the movie producer Fred Zinneman.
He was working on a movie and cast some paraplegics. One when asked said it was an accident, but didn't want to talk. Fred eventually got the story out of him.
He had been a paratrooper in WW 2. His parachute didn't open. But he landed in a big tree. Shaken, bruised, scratched up, and so on, but basically fine.
Climbing out of the tree he fell, and broke his neck.
Nitpick: The parachute likely opened _partially_ (as is common for such malfunctions) so that impacting a tree wouldn't cause injury or death.
That said, falling out of the tree checks out because that _is_ dangerous. Modern US Airborne training teaches a whole lot of caution when doing so. Best case you wait for someone to extricate you, but worst case (or for a combat jump), you deploy the reserve chute and then slide down it like a rope.
I don't know if they were using reserves in WWII (might have depended), but combat jump altitude is typically too low to have time to deploy your reserve. Better to chance the landing, than a hail storm of lead from the ground.
In WW 2, only US paratroopers had reserve chutes. This was likely a British paratrooper. So no reserve chute.
And yes. Climbing out of a tree while shaking from adrenaline is scary dangerous. But it is the sort of risk that takes experience to appreciate. In WW 2, nobody had experience.
I suspect the vegetation immediately above it also had a cushioning effect. Its owner was probably charging it while using it on the plane, and the force of the decompression was enough to snap the connector off.
In 1972 flight attendant Vesna Vulović survived falling from 33k feet [1] pinned inside the remains of the fuselage after an explosion destroyed her airplane mid-flight killing everyone else.
Thanks for sharing. I thought this was the most interesting paragraph:
“Air safety investigators attributed Vulović's survival to her being trapped by a food trolley in the DC-9's fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground. When the cabin depressurized, the passengers and other flight crew were blown out of the aircraft and fell to their deaths. Investigators believed that the fuselage, with Vulović pinned inside, landed at an angle in a heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact.[1][a] Vulović's physicians concluded that her history of low blood pressure caused her to pass out quickly after the cabin depressurized and kept her heart from bursting on impact.[7] Vulović said that she was aware of her low blood pressure before applying to become a flight attendant and knew that it would result in her failing her medical examination, but she drank an excessive amount of coffee beforehand and was accepted.[3]”
I'm glad we know the cause of the accident now. If the FAA had just explained how severe the consequences would be if someone used a phone on a flight, I think we all would have been more compliant.
I would've preferred that the identifying information of the person had been edited out.
The phone's owner experienced a traumatic incident. Which furthermore is under investigation.
Posting some kind of photo feels OK, however, since finding the phone is arguably newsworthy. And the Twitter poster says that it was open to that email, suggesting that they didn't go snooping through the phone. A little privacy redaction/cropping would've helped.
It's crazy to me that the phone hasn't locked automatically. Do people really walk around with their phones set to never lock and turn the screen off? Mine times out after 5 minutes.
I disable auto-lock. The primary reason for this is that I’m extremely intentional about using my phone. If I have some content open, I don’t want the screen turning off.
This is an atypical choice, but I always lock when I’m done and don’t encounter any issues from this choice.
> I also almost never use apps like dedicated banking apps or social media apps; instead, using Safari.
Nearly every bank I know of recommends using apps over their website, since in general they're safer than using their websites. But I'm in The Netherlands and I don't know whether banking apps in different countries have the same security standards.
That is probably true because phones are less susceptible to keyloggers or evil browser extensions, but "security standards" have approximately nothing to do with it beyond "using HTTPS".
The security model for US banks is that it's illegal to do crimes to people's bank accounts. It doesn't involve "super secure apps", bank account numbers and credit card numbers are super insecure and there is little reason you should care about this insofar as you're not liable for leaking them.
The difference is that with an app, the server can ensure it's running on a safe non-compromised/jailbroken device using remote attestation (Play Integrity, App Attest).
With a web browser, there's no way of doing that by design as the user has full control over their user agent, so you need to trust the end user is following good security practices and hasn't allowed their user agent to become compromised.
However, in the EU, banks are legally liable for financial loss caused by unauthorised transfers, so they are increasingly not willing to trust that the user hasn't just loaded their browser up with malicious extensions and malware.
This might be true for credit cards but for the vast majority of people, even completely irrespective of income, getting your checking account number leaked to a nefarious party can absolutely cause you a hell of a lot of trouble.
Credit cards will give you the benefit of the doubt with a credit while they investigate. Banks (and credit unions) are going to be VERY hesitant to give you a 5-figure advance into a new checking out while they investigate how your account got drained when it initially looks like you did it. Even the most pro-customer policies practicable won't help when now all your automatic payments start failing. It's certainly a recipe for ruining your week and you'll likely spend the next month or two dealing with the fallout, and that's assuming you don't face crippling financial penalties because of it, which the majority of Americans would.
Where I live having the app for 2FA is mandatory for online banking unless you can convince them to give you a hardware TAN generator. So transferring money is actually much less convenient in the browser because everything I do has to be confirmed with my pin in the app, so I might as well just do it in the app directly and only login on one device instead of two.
Of course this is actually "phone factor authentication" and not two-factor authentication, but I kinda need a bank account.
Ugh. Sorry to hear that. I use 1Password for TFA, and I haven't had to use an app.
When I first run an app, and it asks for access to camera, microphone, photos, calendar, contacts, and location, I tend to immediately plonk it; regardless of its purpose.
I have a PMB, and the store has an app that uses the phone to unlock the door, after hours.
There is a keypad, but that hasn't actually worked, in months, and the store has ignored my reports.
I just go there, during business hours, even though it's inconvenient.
I just recently started a job that uses 1Password, which I've used personally for years, but they also recommend the 2FA built into 1Password. It's incredibly convenient, and I "know" it's as secure or more secure than using my phone, but man I just haven't been able to get over that mental hurdle of putting all my auth eggs in that 1Password basket.
With a touch login on the phone and (say) google authenticator IMHO it's considerably less inconvenient to login into something online with the desktop than what Chase does to me. The phone is sitting right there anyway, and 6 digits to type in by hand is not that big a deal. I do it all the time.
I mean the bank's phone app. It is locked to one specific device and is the only possible method of authentication. I either need to use the app itself, or confirm every login and transaction in the app when using a browser.
> I solve that, by not doing banking with my phone.
Even though some scum corps like Chase make it a PITA to manage my account from a desktop through firefox, that's the only way I'm going to interact with them.
"Download the app!"
Hard no!
In fact these are the only apps I think that appear regularly on my phone, but only when I'm traveling: AirBnB, Uber/Lyft, and whatever airline I'm currently flying on next. I think if I'm crossing borders I've installed whatever gov spyware makes TSA/Global Entry easier. They're already groping me hard, why not.
LA Fitness gets to stay because it's dumb and silent. I don't see anything else not security related. On mobile I talk to the outside world with K-9, firefox, signal, whatsapp, sms. I'm happy.
> I then exit my current FF, and switch to it, and back again.
FWIW, you can also run multiple profiles simultaneously. They are independent processes, sharing no resources or permissions.
This is my model for difficult sites. If I'm really concerned, I use FF network config to allow access only to the domains I think are proper.
Although in the case of banking, I prefer to use the official mobile apps. Some are actually pretty good. Others are awful. But I trust the iOS app sandbox and I trust my banks.
I also block traffic at the network level, so if the bank app attempted something egregious (e.g. tracking via the basket of Internet deplorables), it would fail.
The idea of our lives being in/on our phones, is an animating plot mechanism in Accelerando( by Charles Stross: a tech executive loses their <device> and is unable to function, most memory and executive functions having been delegated to it; and a kid who finds it, becomes correspondingly empowered.
If someone grabs your phone, welcome to issues. Or you drop your phone when distracted by something. Both unlikely, yes but not impossible. Similar to wearing a seat belt.
I found someone’s Apple Watch that had no password. I could have done a ton of nefarious things if I’d been inclined. Had a different person picked it up, they might have had all their accounts hijacked.
Lineage OS has this cool feature called "Caffeine" which is a quick settings button. When tapped, it temporarily increases the lock screen timeout. Pressing it again increases it more. Long pressing it will make it infinite. It will reset once the user manually locks.
I find it quite useful in cases like reading
Hmm, I live alone and I don’t leave my phone unattended. I think it’s important to consider your risk profile before changing any security settings. With kids, I would probably adjust my threat model to prevent accidental changes to things, etc.
Precisely. I’ll choose when to lock the screen - what if I’m using it to read a recipe, or looking up documentation, or I have a map on screen? Etc etc.
It seems like you should still have an auto lock to 30 minutes? Events way less drastic than an airplane door blowing off can cause you to not be able to lock your phone, like someone just snatching it out of your hand on the subway (where in theory they could keep it awake indefinitely with a 30 minute timeout but they very probably won't)
The maximum on iOS is only 5 minutes, and I regularly leave my phone untouched for longer periods than that while cooking.
I hear your point, but everything really important on my phone is behind another wall of passwords/pin protection, and I am meticulous about backups. The physical device doesn’t matter much. I’ll put it on stolen mode remotely, force an email sign out, and just assume it’s dead because they won’t be able to turn off Find My.
I also work from home, so I’m more suited to having it in this mode of operation.
I've had phones for close to a decade now (Moto X 2014) that can detect when I'm looking at the device and extend the timeout. So if I glance at the device every few minutes checking on the recipe or a map or whatever it'll keep the screen on indefinitely.
iOS has “Attention Aware” features but these features don’t account for atypical use cases like when I’m running some persistent app that needs foreground use (like a firmware update on an IoT device) that I can’t be bothered to stare at.
I'm in the same boat. I disable auto-lock. However, it would be nice to have a setting for 30 minutes or an hour, but thankfully my battery will die before that's needed.
Quick data point that Samsung Android phones (at least the ones I've used for the last many years) unlock with fingerprint on the side which is as close to a zero-effort unlock as you can get.
I have Face ID enabled etc, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s annoying. If I’m alone at home with the door locked, there is an infinitesimally small chance of any security issue that would render my device compromised. So realistically, I’m accounting for my own sanity + convenience here.
Possibly, given people are (to some level of course) basically fine, having someone walk off with your phone unlocked could have pretty annoying consequences at a time when you'd really rather not deal with them
> That said, from now on I'll probably have auto-lock turned on when flying.
I think you are far far more likely to have a random cardiac arrest or stroke while you are looking at your phone than have it ripped out of your hands in an airplane. The former has happened to several otherwise healthy people I know and the plane thing happened to a few people ever.
Also do you turn it on while you are a passenger in a car or bus?
As a rule, if the security feature creates even the slightest bit of inconvenience when using the device, you can bet your bippy that about half the user population will turn said feature off.
I always put my seatbelt (feel naked without it), but I deactivated the ringing in my car, otherwise it's annoying if you have a bag on the passenger seat.
Or maybe a speed limiter. You can’t go over 25mph until the seatbelt is fastened. That would let people move a car in the driveway or something minor, but force them to buckle to get on most roads.
Unfortunately, not wearing a seat belt isn't a risk borne just by the one in the seat. There have been cases of people flying out of their window and battering someone with their body due to not wearing a seat belt. Of course, everything carries a risk of harm to someone else, its a matter of where to draw the line.
We already legally force it in almost every state on public roads because it's not about you, it's about everybody else minding their own business getting killed by your choices.
Doesn't take much FOD on the highway for your unbuckled body to slam into something and now you have a driverless vehicle. Also every else in your car should be bucked too so you're not bumping noggins.
Are you a teenager, because this line thinking crosses into the territory of "I don't need a seatbelt, I'd just use my arms to stop my ass from getting flung out of the window, while having zero clue how physics works.
Do you think of the 6 million police reported auto crashes in 2022 (in the US if you're not from here) that most if not all the people involved would have rather not been in an accident in the first place?
The fact that it was pulled out of the plane (and didn't stay snug in its owners pocket) suggests it was being used at the time, and thus unlocked. And yeah, I tend to set my phone to never lock at times, probably not while traveling I guess, but it absolutely happens.
Some of us intentionally disable autolock - I know I have it off because I can’t stand the screen automatically turning off on me when I’m using it for reference material.
Can't you set it to only auto-lock when not on your person, near you or at place X, Y or Z? Seems there are so many options for targets to keep it unlocked (smartwatch, a place, movement, WiFi, ...) that disabling it seems unnecessary?
Phone locks are mostly a protection against accidental loss (self inflicted or stolen).
But sometimes that's not worth the hassle. E.g. I disabled locks while my car was running.
The tradeoff is IMHO well worth it as I immediately take the phone from the car should I leave. So the overall risk is minimal. Yet should it ever distract me then that's a big issue.
And not being reachable was also not an option given family circumstances at that time.
It's just a risk vs. benefit tradeoff. And that's a very personal judgment call.
> Do people really walk around with their phones set to never lock and turn the screen off?
I set mine to lock and auto-turn off after a short moment.
Nonetheless, I have found that the phone will sometimes get in a state or screen which prevents autolocking. It does this usually at the same state or screen but it's easy to trigger accidentally without noticing.
...just pull down the top bar. That might happen if you're holding your phone and it gets sucked out of your fingers. Or stolen right out of your hand.
My auto-lock is set to 30 seconds, and I still manually lock it any time I put it down instead of waiting. I often see people put their phone down or in their pocket with the screen still on, and it just sits there for several minutes. It’s a pet peeve of mine. I have to assume these are the same people who complain about battery life all the time.
I agree. I see a lot of comments about “being intentional about using the phone” but in those cases the phone doesn’t lock anyway… using maps or watching something prevents auto lock. It just makes no sense at all to disable it.
It’s not true if you’re looking at sheet music in Safari while playing an instrument for example, or looking at engine assembly diagram while working on an engine with greasy hands.
That's true of video playback, it's not true for other apps I want to keep open without the phone auto-locking. People making those comments aren't like lying or delusional, they're just using different apps.
The name in the email is a generic Vietnamese origin name, so while I agree with you about privacy, the post didn't expose much information about the owner.
As a matter of principle, you should always redact names, at least down to initials; as a matter of practice, I am not sure the name is any more identifying than eg "Mike Johnson". If you had Mike Johnson and the last four digits of a credit card, you might be able to identifying him from a database of leaked PII, although there may be enough of them to get a collision on that.
On the third hand, including the name doesn't really add anything to the story/image.
It looks like they did redact the last 4 digits of the person's credit card number in the email. It seems odd they would have done this and not done the same for the name though.
In prior incidents, I have heard it takes years before belongings left on the plane are returned. Devices sucked out of the aircraft seem like they would be more relevant than other items.
49 CFR § 830.10 appears to be one of the regulations on the subject [1].
While "that would be stupid" doesn't reliably keep government officials (or companies) from doing that thing, not returning the phone promptly would be a really dumb move. They're not going to learn much from the device, and a phone is something that is incredibly annoying to lose for any amount of time.
If they keep it and it becomes known, people who e.g. took videos of incidents would become reluctant to come forward and share them, worried that the government might want to take the phone that recorded the video. They'd lose a lot of useful evidence in future cases, on top of the terrible PR it'd be.
Edit: The agency also relies a lot on the goodwill of the public. Investigations work a lot better when school teacher Bob, finding an aircraft piece in his back yard, contacts the NTSB and tells them to come get it, rather than deciding to quickly bring it inside and turn it into a coffee table later. And public perception can totally make the difference between "this might help them, let me call them immediately" and "screw those guys, it's mine now, will make a really nice coffee table".
I wouldn’t pretend to know what the NTSB considers potentially useful. I would expect them to prioritize anything that could remotely help an investigation over getting an iPhone quickly back to its owner.
Planes get so much attention precisely because they're so safe. If we reported ever car crash, we'd not have time for much else whereas planes hardly ever crash. Every crash is international news with national investigations because they hardly ever happen.
Now try explaining that to someone with a fear of flying.
I think the comparative rarity of plane accidents is part of why they're such a big deal. I've been a number of car crashes and survived relatively unscathed. Neither I, nor anyone I know (and likely a few levels of separation further) has ever been involved in any aircraft accident/incident.
People are terrible at assessing risk. Big, scary things like falling out the sky seem like bigger risks because they grab attention, no matter what the stats say.
Crazy considering multiple iPhones (latest being an iPhone 11) haven't survived a few feet fall for me (no case...I'm extremely particular about using a case now).
I had a spectacular break once. Sat my phone on my recumbent trike seat when I stood up, to take off my jacket. Went to pick up my trike, put it in the back of my truck and the phone spun off. About four feet off the ground.
Hit the cement spinning, which spiderweb cracked one corner. Not content with that, it bounced, now spinning in the opposite direction from the impact, hit on the other corner, spiderweb crack.
Now the bottom third of my phone was shattered glass with shards sticking out. And I had to call my team, learn their eta. One a week-long five hundred mile cycling tour.
It's well established that intermediate fall heights are the most dangerous, since the phone doesn't have enough time to rotate into the optimal landing position and brace for landing. Or was that for cats?
I broke iPhone 4, 5, 5s and 1 st. Gen. SE. All of them are quite small, and all also the 4th are light as well. I use cases, but those light ones, so they don’t add weight and add some protection. Mostly from scratches. In my case, all of them fell from some surface onto the floor. Usually it’s a metre distance. I think I never dropped a phone from my ear height, so not even 2 m.
I've never owned an iPhone (never will either) but I'm in the opposite boat these days. Cases degrade my phone experience and result in more waste to throw away. These phones are seemingly built like tanks now. I'd be hard pressed to break the screen on this one. It's survived falls on concrete no problem. Generally I don't let it fall because it's too expensive to aimlessly drop.
I was in Costa Rica taking an aerial tramway which was about 75 ft up over dirt/rocky hill and my Pixel 6a (with just a basic back case) fell out of my pocket, hit the metal floor and fell out the doorway. The very kind tour people actually went and found it and returned it with not even a scratch on it. Not exactly 16,000 ft, but I was still amazed and felt very lucky. The only damage was my wife being right that I should have put a strap on it.
Seems odd overall, yeah. But this is Apple we're talking about, they generally don't offer customisation. And when they do, they usually just offer a few options instead of freeform.
How you can't just disable the camera on the lock screen without disabling the entire camera app (and no way to disable the flashlight functionality, as far as I have been able to tell) is beyond me. It's not even about customization, these are things people can do without your lock code! Imagine going to show someone a recent photo and something you didn't take pops up instead.
> Imagine going to show someone a recent photo and something you didn't take pops up instead.
this is not true. The camera app opened from the lock screen just shows recent pictures taken with the camera opened from the lock screen. So if you lock the phone, then start the camera from the lock screen, there is no existing photos there.
You're describing a different scenario. I'm talking about someone grabbing a locked phone left on a table, taking an unwanted picture (say of their genitals, just to make it problematic), and then you find out when you go to show someone your recents.
One should not be able to modify the contents of a locked device but you can add photos on an iPhone. The recourse is to disable the Camera app via Screen Time and use a 3rd party camera app for when your phone is unlocked and you actually want to take photos. Unfortunately the flashlight functionality doesn't have such a workaround, but that one is more just a minor battery annoyance.
> You're describing a different scenario. I'm talking about someone grabbing a locked phone left on a table, taking an unwanted picture (say of their genitals, just to make it problematic), and then you find out when you go to show someone your recents.
Oh, yeah, you're right, I definitely didn't read it that way.
Also, I can't really say I've ever had that specific problem, but I guess it makes sense for some people to want to protect themselves from that.
> Also a good reminder that it's a very good idea to have the screen lock after a set time — even if it's long.
It's wild to me especially with how important the device itself and email the device has access to can be that someone in 2024 did not have a screen lock enabled.
The charging cable was attached and ripped out with the phone, so it probably functioned as a tail, reducing the velocity a bit. Still, it wouldn’t be much. Impressive survivability by the phone.
FTA: “one revelation seemed to defy the laws of physics: one of the mobile phones that had been sucked out of the Boeing Co. 737 Max 9 jet’s cabin remained in functioning condition after a 16,000-foot tumble.”
I don’t know what the full paywalled article says, so they may say the same, but I don’t think that is very surprising.
If, then, it drops on something that’s a bit forgiving, the deceleration won’t be excessive, and could easily be lower than that of dropping it on a hard concrete floor from a few meters high.
If the iPhone self-stabilized an acceleration maneuver while using its charging port speakers to build acceleration while playing Metallica, maybe it could reach the sound barrier and truly self-destruct.
I wonder if a smart phone would actually behave differently due to its shape. As kids we loved to throw little paper rectangles because they fall by spinning around the long axis (try it!). Smartphones being rectangles, I could see it auto-rotate like this and slow down further.
I assume it partly depends on how much lateral velocity the phone had. If it landed at a good angle with respect to the train and "slid" away most of it's energy, then perhaps nothing unusual would be noticed.
Anyways is it the obvious thing to lock a phone merely because of a large jolt?
Yes, and planes stay in the sky because they travel and hundreds of miles per hour of relative ground speed. So, you would expect things that fall out of them to have a lateral velocity component in addition to their vertical one.
A jet airplane is low-drag and has thrust from its engines; a phone has neither. The phone’s downward velocity is constantly accelerated of gravity, so it will stay at terminal velocity downward. Its forward velocity begins rapidly decreasing immediately upon leaving the plane, due to air resistance. After just a few seconds, the phone will be traveling mostly-downward.
Of course, however I am imagining a car accident where a phone was displaying maps/music/etc suddenly locking itself. The screen being lit up could save valuable seconds in finding it when it’s tossed around the car
But judging by the downvotes there is something I am missing with this
My old iPhone is in SOS mode after having ported its number to a new one. Perhaps, since their phone was lost, they needed a new phone, especially after having experienced what they did, and ported their number to that new phone.
They could have before, back when I worked for apple support I took call from someone who was in a small prop plane crash and called in because the laptop was still intact but the screen cracked; they ended up comping the entire thing (and some more stuff) because the story was good.
Absolutely. There's a bunch of key words you can still say to talk to engineering if you want to - but they will hang up when they know you are full of shit.
The three iPhones laying on my desk with a cracked screen due to a fall from the height of roughly one meter beg to differ. Good to hear they can survive for some, though.
My first thought was if that hit someone it could kill them, and then i remembered an entire door fell off as well, and all apparently landing in a suburban neighborhood.
My mom's iphone was dropped somewhere in the alps and found a year later by a hiker. Still worked after a charge, in fact the phone itself gave the hiker enough info to get it returned. My sister's phone fell out of a bike basket and was repeatedly run over by cars. We used the "find my" feature and found it in the gutter, screen pulverized, in the shape of a banana but still operational and communicative over USB. Tech can be surprisingly resilient if it doesn't suffer moisture incursion. Or it can die just sitting there like my old laptop's screen. Turned it off a month ago, put it on the shelf, tried to use it yesterday, only the hdmi port gives video.
Used an online calculator — even a meter falls takes the phone up to 10 MPH. Elsewhere in this thread 20 to 40 MPH was given as the terminal velocity of a phone. FWIW.
Presumably the destructive energy on impact will be proportional to the square of the velocity. Even at 20mph that's 4x the energy, 40mph is 16x the energy.
Realistically I think it's because the way a phone gets damaged is highly dependent on:
- Is it in a case
- Which orientation did it land in
- What surface did it land on
I never trusted/liked protective cases. Modern phones are already too big, and I feel like the added bulk makes it more likely that I will drop it. Having been using the same IPhone 12 Pro Max for a few years now without a case. It has survived quite a few falls from a table by now, no screen cracked, only some dents and scratches on the chassis.
Apple’s SE series is actually really nice if you don’t like the trend of bigger phones - it’s the same (or similar) internals as the new ones but in a small form factor (4.9 inches? Whatever the 6s had). I don’t want a large phone that barely fits in my pocket, but I want decent internals, so I have one. Apple is by no means a perfect company but I think the SE was one of their correct decisions.
Yeah, as I see myself using my phone less and less I feel that an SE form factor would be a lot more convenient to me.
Because of remote work I am almost always close to my MBP, my Air, or a tablet. Car infotainment screens are good enough nowadays, and I don't need a giant screen to hail an Uber or paying something.
Giant screens are for me an habit I got when I used to commute hours everyday in a car or bus, it doesn't make too much sense nowadays if I really think about it.
You must be thinking of something else. Maybe the Mini? iPhone 13 Mini was discontinued last September.
1st generation SE had been discontinued long before the 2nd was released, but the 2nd was directly superseded by the 3rd, and you can still get the 3rd new, directly from Apple.
It's still being sold, although we are getting to the end of the two year interval in which it has gotten recent hardware updates. The last two updates occurred in early 2020 and 2022.
That's one thing I find crazy with these phones. The entire point of a glass back is to look good. But 90% of the times, we never see it because people use back covers.
Seriously, I have yet to find something better than polycarbonate for the phone body. It is durable, lightweight, can make removable covers, and let radio waves go though. So sure, it looks cheap, because it is cheap, which is great because it helps make for lower priced phones. And if you are going to put that phone in a case anyways, who cares about how it looks, you won't even see it.
Metal is nice too, I still prefer that cheap plastic, but at least, it is a durable material. But glass is just stupid.
Now I understand the premium feel. But why not go for fancy composites instead. Carbon fiber, graphene maybe. These are both premium and technically good.
I’d be fine with the glass back if the phone had a thin rubber band wrapped around it and bouncy corners, but that wouldn’t look sexy in marketing photos.
I adapted by using the phone with two hands for anything more than a quick peek at notifications.
While I have somewhat long fingers, the sheer weight of the thing makes it uncomfortable to use with a single hand for typing.
Many decent cases are relatively thin and don't add more than a few millimeters in my experience. It's only when you start getting into stuff like Otterboxes or similar that cases have a very chunky factor.
I find that even something like the 15 Pro is borderline too big. It’s already quite hard to use one handed, adding a few mm from a case makes it noticeably worse - for me at least.
I have a 12 mini which is a little large, but sadly they've got rid of that line. A 15 pro is massive. The only current phone which seems to be a reasonable size is the SE.
The silicone cases provice protection to 5 sides of the phone + create a "frame" around the edges of the screen. Wont help you when the screen hits something sharp, but it is still nice protection.
Not to accidentally trigger the 9/11 truthers (it's been too long for them to be around, yeah?) but this reminds me how several of the hijackers' passports were discovered near the various crash sites
my eyebrows may have raised when they left washington years ago, but these recent safety incidents have really caused me to start to doubt the new whartonized boeing's commitment to sparkle motion...
I honestly think that subtle and accepted incompetence is becoming pervasive all around, and airplane manufacturers aren't excluded from that. We need to strongly move back to a meritocracy otherwise our civilization will fall, one airplane door at a time.
I don’t get it. The original tweet says the phone has been found near the road. Where are all the guesses that the phone fell from an airplane? Could it be someone opening email in the car, and someone else (a kid) to take the phone and throw it out of the window. Then they decide ‘oh, duck we don’t have time to look for it’ and continue their journey without the phone. That’s my first thought after reading the original tweet. But I see lots of ‘feel from the plane’ comments. Is it confirmed the phone fell? Of course I believe it survived the fall, considering I myself shuttered a number of iPhones by simply falling out of my pocket on a concrete floor.
The amount of force created when something hits the ground at terminal velocity depends on its mass, which varies with the cube of its size (with additional effects because it's not a cube or sphere). The amount of cross-sectional area over which this force is exerted varies with the square of its size. So when a small object hits the ground, that's a lot less force per cross sectional area than when a large object hits the ground. You'd expect the iPhone to take proportionately less damage than a person even not considering that it also has a smaller terminal velocity.
Interestingly, but last month while climbing (actually doing ferratas, if you don't know what it is check it out, very fun and friendly) in a mountain the phone fell of my pocket, easily 35 meters free fall onto the forest below.
I recovered it (by using find my, thanks Apple) and it was intact.
Two days later it fell out of my pocket while sitting in my tourism european car (short) into the concrete of the road and the glass shattered.
So yeah, the elevation doesn't seem to matter as much as the terrain it hits and the angle.
Really hard to tell for sure, but assuming it orients itself aerodynamically, exposing a 75x10mm surface area to the wind, with a drag coefficient of 1.0 (slightly less than a cube) and a mass of 180g, then omnicalc says it'd be moving at 225 km/h (62.5 m/s), giving a kinetic energy of 352 Joule.
If I had to guess - based on comparisons to energies cited for handgun bullets, less-lethal ammo, and punches - this could be fatal, but (given the relatively large size of the projectile) wouldn't be certain death.
There's also a chance of significantly more drag due to tumbling, which would likely put it into "most likely survivable but very, very painful" territory.
And assuming that hypothetical person wouldn't have survived, who would have been made liable for the person's death? The owner of the phone? Air Alaska? Boeing?
The terminal velocity of an iPhone is around 25-30mph. Past a certain height, it doesn't matter how high up the device is.
Dropping an iPhone out at 16,000ft is probably the same as throwing it off a tall building. I'd imagine a 3 or 4 storey building would be enough to reach terminal velocity.
I think the positioning is even more amazing than the survival. OP's feed doesn't look like they were intentionally searching for it, so the phone had to land close enough to a road/path for someone to be likely to walk past it and see it but not a) onto the road b) into the bush a few feet away.
This must be some elaborate joke. How did that iPhone stay unlocked? The screen stayed on the entire time? And if the screen stayed on the entire time, how does the battery last that long? (In winter weather no less)
The person who found it said in a Tiktok video linked in the Twitter replies below that the phone didn't have a lock on it so he opened it up to that mail page.
I'm not gonna quibble about him changing his story, but it's notable.
So I think we can now update the old "why don't they make the plane out of the stuff they make the black box out of" to "why don't they put the plane in an iPhone case?" right?
When did Mr. Bates, the X poster, find the phone? The time shows 2:21 and the picture was taken during daylight. Is that 2:21AM or 2:21PM? If in 12hr mode I'd expect the later.
If you have one of the idiotic models where the glass extends to the side, you just need to drop it on a hard surface. My iPhone XS is cracked now starting from two opposite corners. Funny enough, the touch screen still works perfectly, it's just the outer layer of glass that's gone so I plan to keep it 1-2 more years. [1]
The newer and older models with a metal band around the edges should be more resilient. I'm probably dropping phones with the same frequency [2], but the older ones with the metal were just fine(tm) when i stopped using them, just the metal band dented in places.
[1] I'd get it replaced but no way I'm paying Apple prices for this old phone, and the 3rd party repair shops warned me they may have to replace the whole display if the outer glass doesn't come off neatly and that will lead to iOS complaining it's not a genuine display onscreen.
[2] or maybe more often, since the rounded edges all glass design is easier to drop...
Once it reaches its maximum velocity the altitude doesnt really matter. However I dont know how to calculate that maximum velocity and the minimum required altitute.
From the very short snippet I can read (paywall) I dont know if the phone landed in concrete or not.
“It was still pretty clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush and it didn’t have a screenlock on it,” from the article. No information how big the bush was but it cushioned the landing.
Drag (air friction) is proportional to the square of velocity. If you know aerodynamic properties of iphone, you could find a value of velocity where drag is equal to gravitational force, at which point the speed doesn't change. You could use it as an approximation of the speed at which iphone hits the ground.
After its initial acceleration, the phone probably decelerated as its altitude decreased. The air density at 5 Km is about 0.6 of that at sea level. As drag is proportional to the air density and the square of the velocity, I think that implies the phone would reach the ground at a speed ~3/4 of its peak velocity (putting aside the admittedly significant issue of its orientation and rotation throughout the fall.)
Nope, at the altitude planes are at, the atmosphere is much much colder than at ground level. Along with that the terminal velocity of the phone is going to be under the speed of sound so there won't really be any meaningful compression going on to heat up the air around it like you get with a descent from space. That heating essentially happens (this is simplified) because a space craft is going much faster than it's terminal velocity at the given altitudes it's passing through so it compresses the air below it, heating it just like you'd expect from the ideal gas law. It happens to be that it heats it so much that it makes a super-heated plasma so you end up with what looks like fire (not sure if there's actual combustion happening, but i wouldn't be shocked) surrounding the craft. That's also why once it's slowed down by the friction and air resistance, the plasma dissipates and is no longer a problem for re-entry.
Now if we were to launch the phone at several times the speed of sound we could probably get the same thing to happen but I'm doubtful that a phone could survive the acceleration in the first place.
It would actually get quite cold, at 16000' you can expect the air to be well below 0 (pick your units, it's fuckin cold).
The only time heating becomes an issue is at supersonic velocities and is due more to compression of the atmosphere against the object then actual friction.
Are you implying that this is some sort of PR plant by Apple, or just saying this is the kind of thing they'll definitely be bringing up again later in actual PR?
I've never seen a single article about Android devices being so durable that it survived a great disaster, or saving its owner's life from polar bear or something.
... What exactly do you think they planned? The photos show a person's name on an email from an airline.
Are you suggesting they planted a fake phone on the side of a road, with a fake email from the airline about baggage for said airline open on the screen, and then had a hired stooge "find" the phone, and then either (a) make a false claim to the NTSB or (b) have a second stooge impersonate an NTSB officer on camera....?
Or perhaps it's more nefarious than that. Apple bribed a bunch of Boeing workers to be shit at their jobs for the last 24 months with the hopes that a panel would fail eventually; Concurrently they hired dozens upon dozens of stooges to take flights on routes using the previously-hobbled Boeing's, each of them carrying an iPhone in every pocket they have, so that when the inevitable happens they can make it rain iPhones, such that eventually some will land somewhere soft enough to survive the fall, and there will be enough of them that people will just find them on their morning walk...
Maybe the Android owners all got eaten by their respective polar bears so there isn't a story to push?
It's simple, and Apple doesn't plan the accident, they just help the story move when their brand is involved - I mentioned it in another thread, but when that kind of stuff happened (at least in 2008) they got moved into a special queue and instead of T2/Customer Care they would get moved to the CCT2 who would often escalate to executive service peeps.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, but this is absolutely common corporate PR 101 practice.
They follow social media, reddit, etc all the time, and if there's an organic story that's good for their brand, they forward it to friendly journalists, provide context on background, etc.
If it's bad for their brand, they search all their internal systems using whatever information they can find and/or correlate, escalate it, and deal with it behind the scenes.
If you ever think downvotes means anything, remember that any criticism of pornography or a simple fact of saying "C is unsafe" gets downvoted into oblivion here.
This seems like a weird place to criticize pornography.
I have noticed that whenever I post truly unknown correct things I've learned at work that I get paid for knowing, I'm more likely to get voted to -2ish or even have people reply to say they don't believe me.
Though, if I reply to them and just restate the same thing in different words, that one always gets upvoted.
You think he found the phone, and before doing anything he called Apple who said "Ok yeah, contact the NTSB, then take some selfies with it and post them on the internet. Once you do we'll make it rain money bruh."
