Apple Macbook Air lives to tell its tale of a 1000 ft free fall
“Can your laptop do that?”, is a great question for a South African pilot and Reddit user Av80r, to ask anybody who’s ever dropped an expensive electronic device from any considerable height.
Carl, the pilot who posted the unusual story, lifted off early morning on February 6, from Lanseria International Airport, piloting a CZAW SportCruiser Piper aircraft. At approximately 1000 ft, with wind speeds close to 105 knots, the canopy where Carl’s luggage was stored opened up, dropping all of its contents, including the pilot’s 2011 Apple Macbook Air 13 inches.
The laptop was retrieved later on by a farmer, who managed to post pictures of the device on the pilot’s Facebook wall. The Macbook Air, apparently living up to its name, was still operational after touching ground, reporting “only” a shattered touchpad and a malfunctioning cooling system. The Reddit post was actually typed from the same surviving Macbook, as Carl reports while drafting his detail account of the story.
Even without considering unknown factors like terminal velocity and the characteristics of the impact surface, the conditions in which the Macbook Air was found, were surprisingly good, since the device was still able to boot up and connect to the Internet, all the while with a considerably bent unibody aluminum casing.
Carl’s Macbook Air is certainly not the first Apple product to survive an extreme drop. Early last month, iPhone case maker Urban Armor Gear posted a video of an iPhone being dropped from the Earth’s upper atmosphere, or 101,000 feet, yet the speed (close to 120 Km/hr) or impact (CNET speculated a parachute was deployed on landing) were not the most impressive aspects of the experiment, but rather the extreme temperatures at which the device was subject to, close to -64 Fahrenheit. In such extreme conditions, the battery is the first component to fail, draining its charge almost instantly.
With that in mind, a bit of extra Apple Care protection goes a long way, before attaching that brand new Apple Macbook Pro to a bungee cord.