This Is What Happens When You Run Over Your iPhone with a Lawn Mower
Over the years, Apple has constructed its iPhone to become more resistant to the damage caused by dunks in the water, scratches from keys, and drops to the ground.
Unfortunately for one Illinois woman, the iPhone remains largely vulnerable to damage caused by getting run over by a lawn mower.
Lombard, Illinois, resident Erin McGurk was mowing the lawn at her new house on Sunday when she ran over her iPhone 5s with her Craftsman lawnmower.
“At first I thought the mower had broken when I saw little pieces of black plastic on the ground,” McGurk told Yahoo Tech in an email, “but once I realized that was my phone case in a million pieces, I would have gladly traded breaking the lawnmower instead.”
The resulting carnage shows an iPhone like you’ve probably never seen –– its insides splayed out and chopped up into small, though still recognizable, parts.
You can view a couple more of the photos below. Though McGurk said she thought at first that Apple may be able to fix the phone, she eventually came to the conclusion that “the poor thing was beyond repair,” after which “crushing despair set in.”
It’s not just the loss of the phone that hurts, McGurk said. Losing a $200 device to an accident is rough, but she also lost hundreds of photos from the past several months that she had neglected to back up or upload to her computer.
Even more stinging: Most of those photos were before-and-after photos of her home, which she and her boyfriend had toiled over to remodel for the better part of a year.
“I have been planning to turn the ‘House’ album I had been keeping into a slide show to play during our housewarming next month,” McGurk said, “but now guests will just have to take our word for it that the transformation is amazing.”
Though it’s probably cold comfort, McGurk doesn’t appear to be alone in having run over her iPhone with a lawn mower. A simple Twitter search shows that it happens more regularly than you might imagine, with more photos like McGurk’s posted online for your rubbernecking enjoyment.
(shorteejessejay/Instagram)
(coxy316/Twitter)
(SmandriaSmelson/Twitter)
Alas, even the smartest Apple Genius won’t be able to fix any of these phones.
There are lessons here, of course. The first one might be to leave your phone inside when mowing the lawn. The second one would be that, if you really must have your phone with you, you should buy a super-protective casing –– perhaps one that can stop a bullet.
Finally: Remember to back up your photos and other precious data regularly, either through iCloud, Flickr, or another photo storage service, or by plugging your phone into your computer.
Backing up your phone means that you’ll lose less if you lose your phone. Because you never know when disaster –– or your lawn mower –– could strike.
