Apple wants you to try to wreck your iPhone 12
What is that stuff?
There's confidence and then there's that thing that Apple sometimes exudes.
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Is it arrogance? Is it merely an excessive sense of superiority?
When it comes to the iPhone 12, Apple believes this phone is so thoroughly well made that it's happy for you to treat it with utter carelessness and disdain.
I judge this from the company's latest iPhone 12 ad, which is less a torture test and more an exhibition of fiery hell treatment.
Or, rather, Fieri hell treatment.
Here is a cook who channels Guy Fieri, Food Network star, in his entrails, but prepares food like a man stuck on the Staten Island Ferry in very high winds.
There are eggs flying here, flour flying there, and vegetables flying everywhere.
His iPhone 12, though, is the source of his recipe. So the phone is perched amid the chaos, desperately trying to avoid the mess and failing.
It gets dropped. It gets covered in flour. It gets splattered with, oh, what is that creamy stuff?
But through it all, the iPhone 12 survives because Apple claims, it's "more durable than ever."
Mess up your iPhone, just rinse it off, says the ad.
Which is surely an invitation to try it.
I wonder how many people looking at this ad will be tempted to replicate the endurance test -- and, who knows, the chef's choreography? -- to see if their own iPhone 12 survives as handsomely as this one.
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I have some affection for my iPhone 12, but, though my kitchen skills aren't dissimilar to this enthusiastic amateur, I'm not sure I'd tempt fate in such an enthusiastic way.
Yes, I've dropped my iPhone from around 5 feet onto a concrete floor and nothing happened. (No, no case. Those things are the very definition of sacrilege.) I'm not sure, though, whether such a constant besmirching of my phone would yield the perfect result.
The Ceramic Shield may, indeed, be an enormous step forward. The water and dust resistance may, indeed, be of an iP68 level. Still, I try and treat my phone with decency and never take it for granted.
The pain, should it cease to function, would simply be too much.
The ad is put together far better than this chef's dish. Some may find the timing of its release entertaining too. Though Apple tells you "Relax, it's iPhone," some owners have noticed their iPhones 12 have not been quite up to scratch.
It seems that, at least on some phones, the aluminum edges begin to fade, even if they've been kept in a case. This does seem a little soon.
But let's admire a supposedly artistic creator that's happy for you to treat its creation badly.
Which reminds me of the time I saw a Best Buy salesman try to break a MacBook. He didn't succeed.