Most of us have, at some point, dropped a phone. Sometimes it hits at just the wrong angle, or on just the wrong surface, and shatters. Other times, it’s miraculously unscathed, either because of sheer luck or because of the way it’s been designed.

In Sunnyvale, California, inside an unmarked and nondescript building, a team of engineers drops more devices each day than you hopefully will in your entire life. The building is home to Apple’s durability labs – among many similar facilities around the world – where phones and other products are thrown, dunked, sprayed, submerged, humidified, salted, buffeted, shaken and dismantled. Not only to test their durability and qualify for certifications, but to guide design decisions from the earliest development stages to help the final devices survive the dangers of the outside world.

This guy really doesn’t like iPhones for some reason.Credit: Tim Biggs

When I visit, the staff are friendly and eager to discuss their meticulous and scientific brand of tech torture (though Apple has not allowed me to quote them). They also give the impression of lab workers who aren’t used to visitors. Their work is largely out of the public eye, even more so than some of the work at the nearby main Apple campus in Cupertino.

Something that becomes immediately apparent is that, while Apple wants to simulate real-world scenarios, it can’t just have its workers drop an iPhone down the stairs or slip an iPad into a soapy bath. The incidents have to be consistent and replicable, so any damage can be understood and mitigated, meaning there’s an awful lot of science involved. And robots.

But the first area I find is largely robot-free. Here, devices are subjected to simulated worst-case environmental conditions. A massive walk-in cupboard has new iMacs operating in 90 per cent humidity, at 40 degrees. A month in there can simulate years of muggy real-world exposure.

Elsewhere, iPhones are being soaked in a high-density........

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