How Phone Cases Are Tested to Their Limits, Featuring OtterBox

Hey guys, Adam Savage here in my cave. As you know, here on the channel, I film a lot of my videos using just a phone. And a few weeks ago, I built this filming rig using an OtterBox case and a MagSafe charger. OtterBox is well known, of course, as a maker of high-quality phone cases, but what does that actually entail? What goes into the design, testing, and production of something as seemingly simple as a phone case? Well, it turns out, quite a lot. The engineering team at OtterBox gave me a tour of their amazing production facility where they prototype their products, but more interestingly to me, they stress test those products. They torture. They abuse. They destroy them in order to figure out how to make them better. It's like my dream come true. Here is what we learned. This has a max of 10,000 pounds. I want to just make a guess. If it crushes, it's going to be well over 4,000 pounds crushing. 2,000. 3,000. 4,000. 5,000. 6,000. Wait. We just lost the class. Is it deformed? Oh, yes. Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at that. Yeah. It is totally. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We know that right now. Oh, yeah. There's plenty of pancakes. However, whatever's in here, it's still okay. I think you made it. That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. The whole process begins in this room. Tell me what this machine's all about. This is the 3D scanner that we use. This is a very unique machine as it has two heads. So we have an optical head on top and one on bottom, and then we have a glass plate in here. An optically clear plate? Yes. So it takes two images and then stitches them perfectly. Correct. So that alleviates a lot of those extra steps on the back end. I'm curious about the plug in the bottom. Is that something you scan so that you know the negative contours of the port? No. So that's an old plug that I snipped because I have to powder these. I have to powder it to get the reflection. I see. It's easier to spray and handle it that way. I went with way more complicated explanation for that. Okay. So you scan it and you get the image here. Is this image just ready for you to use industrially? No, not at all. So when we get this image, we actually have to go and take it into a different program and create a NURB surface. And then from the NURB surface, it goes to the engineers and they actually take that NURB surface and create what they call a zero surface, which is where we get the CAD or we wrap the CAD around it or the design around it to create our cases. There's a lot of prototyping that goes after this. So once we get our nice shape that we think it's close to with all the contours, we print shells and then we use the shells actually to test fit over the device. So even after doing the scanning, and this is to a resolution of what? This one is to one thousandth. Okay. So even with a resolution to a thousandth of an inch, you can go to prototyping, print up two shells and they don't fit? Correct. Wow. Because there's still error. Yeah. Because we're taking it into a CAD program and we're designing around it and we're manipulating the scan. So we still need to double check, triple check, quadruple check. Everyone always thinks of digital as like the solution to accuracy. And it's nice to keep realizing that there has to be an interface with the real world. Yes. Okay. So once it leaves here with the proper NURB surface, it goes to prototyping and that's when you guys start printing the next step. Yes. So this is where the first prototype happens. Does this print in final materials? Is it like, is it elastomeric, rubbery? So this machine will do dual materials. So it'll do a hard and an overmold and print all in one. So it's a, it's acrylic based material. So let me get a scraper and you know, you can scrape this off. And this is one of the elastomeric. Oh, watch band. Yep. That is cool. And then this is one of our cases and you can see that there's still quite a bit of support material on there. You can just scrape it off with your fingers. And so this is, this is the material that will come off, but you'll end up with a prototype that you'll see how this works with the phone. Exactly. Is this super close to your final, final manufacturing material? Not super close. It gives a decent representation. So we, we prototyped throughout the stage quite a few times. So once we get everything where we think the, the, if it's correctly on the device, we'll actually go and we'll shoot a mold later. So we'll print a mold on these machines and then we'll shoot it out of polyurethane. And you can print it on hard plastic and you're doing vacuum casting in the polyurethane. Yeah. Yes. Amazing. Oh, that's such a cool, I love that mix of the old and the new to get it to work. So if you just scrape it off. So that's actually the support material. Talk about oddly satisfying. Yes. People love to come down and paint parts. Can I come and spend a couple of days just doing this? Anytime. That's amazing. That's like my favorite support I've ever removed from anything. Yes. It's a lot better than SLA or anything like that. I can't imagine these are super fast printers. They're not super fast printers, but they're extremely accurate printers. So we're holding tolerances about 3000 some days, which is better than theirs is like five to seven, but we maintain, we keep them extremely clean. We do all the upkeep here in house. Now is this color, a color you can choose, is this print in colors you want? This one doesn't, but our next machine does. This one. And you can scrape off if you want. Really? So these are, this is insane. I literally think I know someone with this phone case. You can 3D print this? Yes. I didn't quite realize that this was possible. Wow. This is like a CMYK printer in layers? Yes, it is. So it uses many different materials and it'll actually print graphics, it'll print Pantones so we can match our Pantones. We can use these for cell samples going out to our customers for like a first, like, okay, this is what it's going to look like along with the press sheets. And I can scrape? Yeah, you can scrape. I'm terrified of hurting something. You won't. Okay. Now I'm curious about the floral print here, why it's printed both upside down and right side up. Is that to kind of also understand the tolerances of the machine? No, that, so if you, when you have the support, sometimes it comes out better with the graphics upwards. I see. So we have to check that out. Oh, that is amazing. And you include the space for embedding the magnet or the coil. So that, that is the MagSafe. Can I peel this one up? Yes, please. I just want to see this up close. Oh my God. That is so satisfying. I'll get the trash can for you. Oh, thank you. I'm making a mess. No, that's okay. It's kind of on brand. Wow. Oh, this is so much more fun, even than it looks. That's insane. And this is the hard stuff. Yep. That's all hard. Okay. So there is a bay here with all the materials that we can actually use in this machine. Oh my gosh. So it's not just CMYK. You can spot color any specific color you want? Yes. Oh, and you could do it in any resin you want. Correct. But of course, different resins also have to be color matched to different standards, right? Yes. Oh my God. So it can be a pain. Yeah, I can imagine. But what's also cool about this is we can put different materials in and we can blend them together as a digital mix to come up with different properties. So if we wanted to do like an ABS-like material and have those properties or a polypropylene material, then we can blend the materials to come up with those properties. But do you envision a future where 3D printing can be your manufacturing process? I do for certain products. Amazing. Yeah. But I think that's where the industry is actually going. It's going to the additive industry. And we're on the cusp of that right now. And economy scale is just around the corner? Yeah, just around the corner. So there's some really interesting, cool equipment, machines, and technology out there that we're looking at to actually enable lower run manufacturing. I mean, and all of this kind of problem solving you're doing with differing materials and color matching and all that, that's all totally vital to know for that future. Yes, definitely. Wow. After you've printed out some prototypes for understanding color and all of that, where does this go from here? So after we have everything nice and vetted out, then it goes to tooling. And then after the tooling, we do T0s, T1s, and then we actually start to go through the testing process. The abuse process. So we're doing dropping, we're doing chambers, but I'll let CJ get into that a little bit more. Zach, thank you so much for showing me your fiefdom here. This is amazing. I would be spending all my nights thinking about weird ---- I could throw onto the plate while printing other stuff. Anytime. Hi CJ. Hey. So this is one of the devices this lab uses to abuse some of, let's say to abuse the products enough to know how well your products work. Is that right? Yeah. That's fair assessment. Yep. Okay. And I'm looking at this, like normally we would shoot this where you would walk me through this, but I'm looking at this and I can tell, first of all, that it rotates on the spindle. So it's, it's sort of like a drop and tumble tester of some sort. But then I'm looking at the pin striping and I feel like I'm sensing a whole nother consciousness about this machine because someone clearly loved this machine and designed it like a hot rod and gave it this magnificent finish. Tell me about that. Yeah. So this machine is actually, this machine has been here for between like 10 or 15 years now. And this is like, this machine is as much a part of like the lab and the lab culture as anything else that we have here. Oh, that's great. So it is like almost like it's a part of Otterbox's origin story to a certain extent. Oh yeah. The, the legend of this machine precedes itself for sure. Amazing. So it is like, it's a, wow. So it's a legit, literally a legendary torture device. Yes. We had developed this again, 10, 15 years ago when it was a little harder to replicate like things that were happening in the field. So the whole inception of this machine is trying to replicate kind of like what happens when someone drops their purse or like a purse drop or a purse tumble. So like you, you get like, people would have like damaged their devices or phones or things like that. And we're trying to figure out like how we can try to replicate that or bring that knowledge into the lab to understand like how those failures happened or how that wear happens over time. And it doesn't matter how much you prognosticate in your own head, how it might've happened. You've got to give it a few million real world iterations to understand. Absolutely. Yep. Yeah. So that's, that's what, that's what this is basically doing. So if we'll take a look here and it's got windows in the side, yeah, we have windows in the side. So we have, we have like a bag of goodies here that we'll usually do, that we'll do, which is stuff that will commonly be found in like either bags or stuff. Oh, so you'll fill it full of crap from someone's purse, like a flashlight and stuff like that. Whatever you want. Yep. And then you put a phone in here. Yeah. So then you'll take your phone and your case and you'll throw that in here. You'll pop it in. We'll run for a number of cycles here. And so as we come over to the side here, that's the main part is we're simulating the length here is one meter. Right. So we're simulating a one meter drop. And this coming over the corner is to get, get you to catch a little bit of air rather than just sliding. Yeah, exactly. So you want it to catch a little air and be as vertical of a drop as possible. Wow. I love the fact that this does hundreds of times per hour, a thing that is always like when you drop your thing and you're like, Oh, please, please, please, please, please. We think of these things as black boxes, right? Their manufacturing is a mystery to us because they're sealed against our inspection and you still have to do real world stuff like this to beat the crap out of it. Oh, all the time. And that's really like that kind of gets at the heart of what my role is and like what our work here is on like on the test team, which is you're taking like either things that we imagine because we use all of these, we use smartphones and stuff all ourselves anyway and we use all of our cases. So we're trying to understand like what would happen to that in the field and bring that back to a test that we can make more repeatable, right? So that's how going from what we see to how we can measure is like that fundamental job of test engineering. So this is a whole lab devoted to abusing things in different ways to learn how they fail and how you can prevent that. Is that right? Absolutely. Can I see some more machines of abuse? Yeah, absolutely. Some more torture devices. So what are these guys? These are our environmental chambers. For subjecting the phones to different environmental conditions, humidity, temperature, etc.? Exactly. Yeah. So as we, it's obviously like not everything is beautiful, like 72 degrees. So unfortunately, you have to take a look at either high or low temperatures to see how those cases are going to react over adverse, more adverse conditions. How bad can it get in here? These will go from negative 40 up to about 200 C. Wow. Oh, okay. Talk me through this. I think I see. This is like the phone booth of death. I can see. I see your face. I did. I know. I see section cups for picking stuff up. That's it. I see a thing to drop them on to. Yep. And this just simulates different heights from one end to the other. That's it. Yeah. You got it. So this is our, this is our drop tester. And basically the reason why this becomes like super important for us is that obviously like I could take my phone and I can just drop it on the ground. Right. I can just do that. I can do that. And we can, we can look at that and say, it didn't break. Excellent. Yeah. But on the engineering side, if you want to get a little more information out of it, well, now you need to, now you kind of want to have a way of controlling that orientation that that device is going to drop in. So you can change out the material that you're dropping on. So it can be concrete, it could be wood, it could be a plywood, and you can change up the height that it's falling from and exactly the orientation. So on our side, we want to make sure we're accounting for all of that. Yeah. I mean, the suction cups are great because it means it can drop it in any orientation you want at a target really specifically and hit it exactly the same every single time. Exactly. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Do you want to run it? Yeah. Do you want to run it? We can put it in any way we want. Actually, you want to play with it? Yeah. You can go for any way you want. All right. So let's try that. Oh, just grabs it right away. Yep. And you shut the door. Shut the door. And then this is your little... You got a little joystick. Yeah. That's great. And it's the little trigger button on the back here. Oh! So you can simulate any height of drop too because it can increase the drop speed. Exactly. Yep. So the drop head will... The way we have it set up right now, you can change the speed if you want to. Right. But we have it set to obviously simulating a free fall. Yeah. So for us, again, we're trying to simulate what would happen if you dropped your phone or it came out of your pocket or you stumbled and dropped it. So there's actually a fun little detail with this is that it does have suction cups. Yeah. But there's actually a little bit of an exhaust at the very end at the bottom. Right. So it doesn't stay stuck to it the whole time. That gives you a free fall, an actual free fall. Oh! So for the last little bit here, it's in free fall. So if I was filming this, what I'd see is I'd see them falling at the same rate but the phone dropping away so there's no bias being imparted by the grabbers. Exactly. Yep. We're having fun with this machine. I know. They know what they have. They know what they got. I love it. A phone booth of abuse. So this is a high-speed camera for filming. What's its frame rate? This can do up to 230,000 frames per second. Wow! Things have progressed. I didn't know they were getting that small. I can't tell you. The whole first three seasons of MythBusters, every high-speed shot we did took 45 minutes to upload. This is great. Triggering a high-speed camera. Okay. In three, two, one. That was like going home to school. I haven't called 3-2-1 to trigger a high-speed camera in a long time. Look at that! You can see where our motion is. So it tells you where the... Oh my God. We would spend, in the early days of MythBusters, we would spend hours trying to find the three frames with a bullet in it and this does it for you. This is your job. Yeah. I love it. I'm jealous. That's great. For some of the other properties, other things we care about trying to understand, one of the big things on phone cases is obviously buttons. Sure. One of the main ways that we try to quantify a lot of the things that we feel or see or interact with, with our cases and devices. Because you're having to protect the outside of the case, which means you're covering over the switch, you want to impart as little extra crap into that experience for the user. You want it to feel as easy as using the phone without a cover on. Exactly. Yeah. That's always the goal. So one of the easiest and best ways that you can do that is... Is that a pressure gauge? This is a handheld force gauge. Oh, amazing! Yeah. So what we'll do is, one of the ways, if we're trying to figure out button force, for example, we can take an existing case or an existing device and we can come in here until you just kind of feel that little click. You go in, do it a couple of times yourself until you get about an average. We'll usually write that down. I don't know if you want to try it, but just so you can kind of feel that tactile feedback. Right. Right? Yeah. And you start to get a force value for how easy or hard that button is to press. Right, right. This isn't the only button pressing that you do here, though. No. So if we want to do... So obviously that can give you just kind of what that force value is. Right. But that won't give you information as to how that will behave over time or if you press it a lot of times. Right? Obviously we care about how that experience is for the user throughout the lifetime. Right, right, right. That they have that case. So we'll try to ramp that up and try to fatigue that, basically. Right. Because if you make a button that imparts very little extra force because it's very light, that may fail after N,000 button presses and you want to be able to correct for stuff like that. Right. Exactly. And while we used to do that with interns... No, I'm just kidding. Let's just sit there. We now go to some of our equipment where we'll do an actual test setup to... There's your little force gauge, your strain gauge, and that's the button press. And so this knows to stop the machine from pressing once it's gotten to a certain amount of force? Yeah. So I have it set to a force value. So this will press to a certain force and we can kind of just let this move and groove as long as we want. It also looks like this machine could push this all the way through the phone if it wanted to. It could. It definitely could. And so if we look, we can see the graph here. So this is actually... That's the point where you're seeing that button displace. So I have a little bit of an overshoot just to kind of basically make sure that we're testing it a little further than it normally would go. That's interesting. You become familiar with different brands that you cover have different goals for their button presses and you must get to learn those at an intimate level. Oh yeah. You definitely get a lot. You definitely learn a lot. That's fascinating because that hadn't occurred to me, but a button press would be a specific point of view that every different manufacturer would have as what their ideal is. Yes. Yep. That's cool. I love it. You end up with this spreadsheet. Yeah. Of the comparison and how it ends. Oh, wow. Right. So you can graph it over time. Yep. So this is like years and years and years of, between this and the purse, this is years and years of abuse to a phone. Oh, absolutely. That is awesome. Okay. What else do you have here? Again, we care about fatigue and how stuff is going to behave over time. So this machine is functionally very similar to our dual column universal testing machine, except this is a rotational one now. For this one, we're simulating basically like if you have this case and over the lifetime of its use, how is that going to look? How is it going to react? Right, right, right. Is it going to break? What's going to happen to it over time? Just a little stepper and a, yep. That's it. I love it. It's like, it feels so simple, but it feels correct for some reason. I don't know why. I like this one for some reason. It's almost like it's the first thing you'd think of and you'd be like, they got to do something more sophisticated than that. And the answer is no. If it works, this is as complex as we need to make it. Yeah. That's really kind of what you're getting at. You, we, our tests are to, are as sophisticated or as simple as they need to be. Okay. What did these three things do? They seem to be pressing on cases. Yeah. So these are our abrasion testers. So if you're thinking about rubbing, um, or any kind of abrasion that you'd normally get or foam normally see through its lifetime, that's what we're trying to simulate with these. So it's just scratching them in what I'm seeing here are different grades of scratchy material that it would likely encounter. Yeah, exactly. So we have a steel wool over here, which is like a little bit more aggressive, obviously. Yeah. Um, we have, these are a little blue jean pucks. So exactly like your jeans. So these will be, these will, will approximate kind of like, if you think about putting your phone in and out of your pocket, a lot of times you don't necessarily assume that that's abrasion, but over time, like that will add up over a large number of cycles. You're pulling atoms off, right? Yeah, exactly. And as we kind of just get them going, that's what we start to... I love how quiet these all are. I would think of a lab for abusing phones. I would think would sound like, eh, kunk, er, bunk, you know, and phones spilling over, but it's all very quiet. This is wonderful. Again, also weirdly satisfying for some reason. I don't know. I totally agree. I can't pinpoint it, but it's weird and satisfying. And so this is also, is this also to sort of take a look at the color fastness of your products as well? So we do have specific color fastness, but I think more specifically for like graphics and how those graphics will wear depending on how those graphics are applied. Right, right. That's where we'll see how those will hold up over time also. Oh, neat. All right, CJ, tell me what this machine's all about. So this is a impact tester. Oh. They call it notched iZot or an iZot impact tester. The way... So it's like a standard material test that you'll usually do in terms of understanding like the impact properties of the material. Okay. Which again, like you'll then take, try to take that material information and understand like, let's say one has better impact properties versus another one. Then you can compare those and say, okay, for our application, maybe we want to prefer material A. I see. As opposed to material B. This whole thing will swing down. And so after it swings through and hits that material, it will continue to swing up to a certain degree. Right. And that's the degree that you measure. Ah. So, you know, the energy that went in and the energy that is absorbed by that material. That's fascinating. And you guys are building this. This is something you're working on right now. Yeah, yeah. So we're making this. We're building it kind of from the ground up. And you always have, you know, we're always adjusting and evaluating like the needs of the lab. Right. And trying to respond appropriately to what we need. It's also fun to build new machines. It is. It just is fun. You can buy this style of machine. But at the same time, you could also build it. I'm right there with you. CJ, thank you so much. This is such an amazing place. What a pleasure. Cheers. Full disclosure, I love your stuff. And I have owned a bunch of these, including this and this. And I think I had one of these. And I definitely got one of these recently. But this is sort of an unofficial history of OtterBox. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. A lot of people obviously know us for our protective phone cases. Yeah. But where we actually started was a little different. And a lot of people wonder, where did the name OtterBox come from? That's because we actually started with just a simple, waterproof, crush-proof box. And I think this is the very first thing I had of yours. A photographer gave me, I hired him to do a photo shoot. He delivered me this big, fat SD card in a clear one of these. And I still have it. It's one of my favorite little boxes. I mean, they are indestructible. So you can get one. You'll have it for life. And this is really where we all started. And it kind of evolved from there. So people were using kind of these larger sized ones to put PDAs in. Do you remember back in the day? I do. My first aid kit is in one of these. I actually have my first aid kit in one, too. Because I know everything will be dry and safe. And you can see inside of it. Exactly. You can see inside of it. What we started to do, though, we were getting feedback that they love this for their PDAs. But when they popped them open to actually use them, it was exposed to the elements. Sure. So we started creating like a touch membrane in the top of the boxes. So you can manipulate the PDA through the box. And that involved finding the right plastic, the communicated, the touch. Exactly. And back then it was more buttons and not necessarily touchscreen. So it was a little bit easier. It was a little less maybe elegant than what we're doing today. But it was really the start of this evolution from just the box to a device-specific case. Okay. And so then we started doing device-specific cases. What is this monstrosity? I love this. This is the OtterBox 4600 series. It's for a Fujitsu tablet. So this is one of the very early products. You can see it is very device-specific. Oh, look at this. So much development in here. Soft corners for internal baffling. This must have been a real design process. I think it really was. Yeah. I mean, and it paved the way for what we're doing today. And it was just constant learning process. How can we make it more protective? How can we make it more user-friendly as well? Because you can see this is a little big. And this is an example of that membrane. It is flexible but solid and durable. And I'm sure the end of a long process of material examination. A lot of testing. A lot of failures to get to something that was going to actually work for the folks that were using it. And this would be, again, something that people would use in the field. So this is like, again, that evolution to the box. And then we started doing more device-specific cases. You'll remember BlackBerrys. This is actually, I think, like a Motorola. But like the keyboard. Oh, look at that. With the molded. Yeah. Keep the keys protected. Keep the screen protected. So this is when we started to get more into what you would consider smartphone technology. Right. But, of course, things really took off with Apple introducing iPods. So I had one of these. That is so awesome to see it again. So we went from, this was like the waterproof version. And we realized not everybody needs waterproof, but they still need protection. So it was, again, this evolution from this really ruggedized waterproof case into something that's a little slimmer but still protective. And this is not necessarily waterproof, but more like at least somewhat moisture resistant. And drop resistant. Scratch resistant. And then iPhone. This is actually the first iPhone. This is the waterproof case. Look at that. Cam locks. Wow. Oh. That's so amazing. All the things you plug into. We had to make sure it all works. Yep. Wow. Had to make sure all the features and functions work. That's part of the, you know, our promise with all of our products. I really appreciate the, having that contour shift here. That's really neat. I have never seen this one. I mean, it is, it's an oldie but a goodie. But then, you know, with the, obviously iPhone coming out, consumer adoption of smartphones just really took off. That's when the company really took off and started growing a lot as well. And now, you know, we're making cases for, of course, iPhone, but Samsung and Google devices, other OEMs as well. But it's all about protection, the user experience, and kind of just like this trust and peace of mind that you get having your phone protected. I like these metal hinges on this one. That's lovely. And also, I would, given that smartphone makers are making their electronics more water resistant, that allows you guys to free up some of your previous technology to go in different directions with the protection. Is that right? Absolutely. I mean, every little design change, feature change on a phone, we're changing up the case. I mean, if you think about screen, touchscreen technology, the shape of screens these days, camera technology, all of that goes into thought of how we're designing the cases. How long has Otter been around? We were actually founded in 1998. And so, we're celebrating 25 years next year. In 1998, there weren't really smartphones. No. Not for a while. It was a while. Kristen, thank you so much. I'm always thrilled when a manufacturing company shifts and moves and continues to succeed. That's always a great story. And the tale that these tell is lovely. Well, thanks for coming and checking it out and putting our stuff to the test. That's awesome. I have a question, but first I just want to note that I love whoever is labeling Mouse Mouse. The labeler and I have a very, very important relationship, and I see that person. Okay.