14 DAY TRIAL // After some new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus owners immersed their new iPhones up to 48 hours and brought them back up in perfect condition, iFixit has decided to tear down another iPhone 6s to see why this happens.
Once the iPhone's display was removed, they found a thin gasket designed to mechanically seal the components inside the devices from water (or dust if it ever has to).
By adding this gasket between the phone's frame and its display, Apple managed to fill in all irregularities between the surfaces of the two parts.
This way, the new iPhone models have almost perfectly sealed cases, which makes them virtually waterproof, as long as you don't dive them deep enough to cause a leakage of liquid through the gasket that protects their insides.
As iFixit noticed, Apple has also redesigned the frame of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus by increasing the frame's perimeter lip from 1.89 mm to 2.21 mm, making it 0.3 mm thicker, just enough to contain the new liquid protective gasket.
The new iPhones also feature silicone sealed board connectors
As a bonus, just in case the new protective seal surrounding the new iPhones' frames would give in, Apple has also added silicone seals to all the connectors inside the phones, an implement which appeared in a March 2015 patent describing how board-to-board connectors can be protected from outside corrosive elements using silicone-based seals.
Even though Apple took all these steps to make sure that water or dust would not enter inside the iPhone 6s, the phone's speaker, the headphone jack and SIM tray are still unprotected.
This might be the exact reason why Apple never advertised their new iPhones as being waterproof. Because they're not.
We might, however, see a future IP67 certified iPhone if the rumors saying that the iPhone 7 will be the first waterproof and dustproof Apple device prove to be true.
Until that happens, though, we have to enjoy the relative waterproofness of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus with the added reminder that we might just fill them up with water if the liquid finds its weak spots (the speaker, the SIM tray, and the headphone jack).
