Smashing open an iPhone

Posted Jul 3rd 2007 12:00PM by Michael Rainey
Filed under: Products and Services, Consumer Experience, Internet, Google (GOOG), Apple Inc (AAPL), Marketing and Advertising

For reasons that are not entirely clear, a couple of young American men recently posted a video on Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube in which they smash an Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone open with a hammer. Apparently, they wanted to know what was inside. Seems like a strange way to go about it, given that it involves destroying the phone.

The video has been immensely popular on YouTube, with nearly 300,000 views so far and no doubt many more to come. This means that about as many people will view this video of iPhone destruction as will own it, at least in the first week of iPhone availability. (See Brian White's post on the number of iPhones sold so far.) Responses to the post on YouTube have been mixed, with a fair number of people celebrating the more or less pointless destruction of a much desired technological object. Maybe this video expresses the inevitable feelings of fear and loathing that accompany every craze and mania, and expose our love of technological baubles as shallow and ultimately empty. But it also shows that smashing things can be really fun.

Take a look and see what you think. (A second video that shows all of the pieces can be seen here.)

For more on the iPhone, see Engadget's iPhone review collection here.

Tags: AAPL, GOOG, iPhone, YouTube

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

7-03-2007 @ 12:39PM

Sheldon L said...

Even more interesting and self referential...will iPhone users be watching the destruction of an iPhone on an iPhone...and furthermore will those that do not have activation from AT&T yet feel like destroying their iPhones?

7-03-2007 @ 2:08PM

george said...

According to numerous published reports, less than 1% of the iPhone buyers could not get activated right away and a large percentage of those were related to their former carriers not releasing their old phone numbers.
I believe the rest were reported to be problems involving AT&T server overload and failures because of the popularity of the device leading to sales far in excess of what was forecasted by AT&T and Apple product managers.
I understand that over 99% actuated within 10 or 15 minutes of setting their accounts up.
Hardly problematic, hardly worth smashing your iPhone over.

7-03-2007 @ 3:57PM

Gumby said...

I recently dismantled my non working LCD 17" monitor to see what was inside. Interesting!! Very simple!!! You even got thin floursecent tubings behind the LCD panel. From the looks of that, any Chinese can build this for less than $50 bucks...