Eg: IPhone SE is said to be water resistant only upto 30 minutes and 1m depth. When something is water resistant, shouldn’t it be resistant irrespective of how long its soaked? What happens post the time limit or depth?
In: Engineering
Water resistant and water proof are actually defined standards in manufacturing.
So while conversationally you may use the terms interchangeably, they actually mean specific things to manufacturers.
Water resistance means it will resist water entering the cavity up to certain tolerances.
Waterproof means that water will not enter at all.
A good way to think about this is a submarine.
If you build a sub, you would likely want to aim for Waterproof right?
What about if the sub is 100ft deep? What about 1000ft deep? What about 10000ft deep.
Each of those depths creates vastly different levels of stress on the sub.
It may be easy to design a sub to withstand the forces at 100ft, but that same design and materials are not likely to stand up to 10000ft.
So a manufacturer you need to understand the use case of your system. In the case of a phone, most manufacturers assume that you are not very likely to check TikTok while drowning in 10+ft of water.
So they engineer phones to survive occasional minor water encounters rather than prolonged exposure or expected operations at depth.
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