Motorcycles are vibby things. They thrum, shake, and move like grown-up Bop Its!. But that leaves many pieces of tech struggling to maintain their composure, as most aren't built to have such constant force feedback.
I may have bricked a few pieces of tech while riding in my long career.
Yet, a lot of the world rides motorcycles as their main form of transportation. They go to and from work, carry loads, bring kids to school, and use them for fun. They're both utilitarian and help the world go around. And that's a lot of customers you wouldn't be able to serve if your phone just died immediately whenever you started a bike's engine.
Even EV motorcycles feature more vibration and harshness compared to cars.
So what do you do for those customers? How do you ensure their phones will work after a short, medium, or long ride, as well as after years of rides? Well, if you're Apple, you design a shaking robot that can, apparently, simulate specific motorcycle engine vibrations.
Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee was recently invited to Apple's secret iPhone durability testing labs where he got to experience and witness everything that goes into finalizing a design for the next generation of iPhones. There were robot drop tests on different mediums, including pavement, as well as a series of tests to ensure each of the new iPhones earned its IP68 rating for water and solids.
Those were pretty interesting and I highly recommend you watch the full video.
But the one part that got me was something that Brownlee stated near the end of the video when he came to Apple's shake tests. These trials are meant to "simulate" the sort of everyday movement and shaking a device could experience. The jingle in your pocket, purse, or around your car, that sort of thing.
Apple goes a step further, though, and supposedly can test individual motorcycle resonances.
Speaking about the shake table he saw, Brownlee tells the camera, "They're using this machine to simulate years of wear and tear out in the real world. Apparently, they can program in the frequency of a certain motorcycle engine or car engine or subway car or whatever constant vibration they just want to check up on to make sure everything holds up to exposure to it for a very long time."
I would love to know which motorcycle engine vibration patterns Apple uses to test iPhone durability. I'd hazard to guess there's a Harley-Davidson, probably a couple scooters, and maybe a resonance of both 600cc and 1000cc sportbikes, as the two feel wildly different to one another. But it's seriously cool that Apple even thought to do this, and also makes a whole lot of sense.
A lot of East Asia, Asia-proper, Europe, and the developing world use motorcycles as basic forms of transportation. If Apple's products died whenever they threw a leg over, they'd lose those potential customers.
Maybe this is why I haven't been able to break my 13 Pro?
I've reached out to Apple to see if the company would tell me which bikes it programs the shaker bot with and I'll report back if it responds.
