Every phone maker dreams of a marketing moment like this — and Apple got one for free. A woman on holiday in Greece dropped her iPhone 16 Pro into the sea off the coast of Athens, and the device kept recording for 11 minutes on the seabed before a diver retrieved it. The footage, since edited into a viral clip, has become the kind of endorsement no ad agency could script.
Liel Farhat says the accident happened during a sailing trip with friends. “I put down my phone to take a picture, it slipped into a net on the yacht, and from there it fell into the water,” she told Israeli news outlet Mako. The skipper reportedly declined to search for it, and Farhat had already written the handset off. Then a friend’s husband — who learned to dive roughly 20 years ago — volunteered to go under.
Here’s the poetic part: he found the phone thanks to the light thrown off by its own recording. The iPhone had settled at a depth of about four meters and was still filming curious fish drifting past the lens.
Now for the engineering reality check. The iPhone 16 Pro carries an IP68 rating. The “IP” stands for Ingress Protection; the 6 means it’s fully dustproof, and the 8 signifies protection against immersion in water up to 1.5 meters (5 feet). That’s the official spec — and Farhat’s phone comfortably exceeded it, sitting at four meters deep.
Two caveats worth flagging:
- Apple classifies the iPhone 16 Pro as water-resistant, not waterproof — an important distinction that manufacturers rarely put in bold.
- The IP68 immersion rating is measured in freshwater. Farhat’s phone took a bath in seawater, which is far harsher on electronics and connectors.
Despite all that, the outcome bordered on absurd. “When I received the phone, I saw that it was not damaged at all,” Farhat said. “I just took a towel, dried it, and that’s it — it worked.”
The internet noticed. Her video has racked up 13.5 million views and 3.7 million likes since it was posted three days ago, with commenters praising the surprisingly crisp underwater image quality and sharing screenshots of the marine life that photobombed the shot.
It’s not the first time an iPhone has laughed in the face of physics. In 2024, an iPhone survived a 16,000-foot fall from an Alaska Airlines plane after part of the fuselage disintegrated shortly after takeoff. As stunts go, an 11-minute dive into the Aegean is comparatively gentle — but it’s a far better advertisement for the camera.
Our advice? Enjoy the video, marvel at the survivability, but don’t treat your own iPhone 16 Pro as dive gear. Farhat got lucky. IP68 was never meant to be a challenge.
