The iPhone 16 Pro was removed from the seabed for 11 minutes before it was miraculously recovered.
A woman on holiday in Greece handed Apple a stunning ad after her iPhone 16 Pro fell into the sea for 11 minutes and continued to film until it was recovered by a diver.
Liel Farhat says the device was not damaged after the underwater stunt, and she has since edited the video it took into a viral Instagram video.
“We were traveling with friends in Athens and while swimming we stopped at the beach to jump into the water,” Farhat told the Israeli news site. Mako. “I put my phone down to take a photo and it slipped into a net on a yacht and fell into the water.”
Without a doubt, this video is perfect marketing for Apple. pic.twitter.com/mY5Dg0gyjo
— Melromao (@mellromao) July 5, 2026
Farhat says the captain didn’t want to look for her iPhone 16. “I had already given up hope,” she says. “But my friend’s husband, who learned to dive about 20 years ago, agreed to look for it. He dived and saw it thanks to the light from the video.”
The iPhone 16 Pro is classified as water-resistant, not water-resistant. It has an IP68 rating; IP stands for Ingress Protection, 6 means the device is completely dustproof, and 8 means it’s resistant to water up to 1.5 meters (5 feet).
However, this water immersion rating refers to fresh water, not the seawater that Farhat dropped her iPhone 16 into off the coast of Athens.
“The device fell to a depth of about four meters, and when I received the phone, I saw that it was not damaged at all. I just took a towel, dried it, and that’s it – it worked,” adds Farhat.
Since being posted three days ago, her video has received 13.5 million views and 3.7 million likes. Many Instagram users noted the good quality of the video and left funny screenshots of the fish caught in it.
A curious fish looks askance at the iPhone 16 Pro.
In 2023, a man captured equally breathtaking footage by (intentionally) dropping his GoPro camera into the ocean off the coast of Florida. And in 2024, an iPhone survived a 16,000-foot fall from an Alaska Airlines plane when part of the plane disintegrated shortly after takeoff.
Image credits: Via @LyalFarhat
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