Which rationally makes no sense because most repairs are due to dropping the phone on a hard surface and not water damage. Easier and cheaper repairs makes a lot more economical sense in the long run than water resistance.
Interestingly, that's not what this survey said when it comes to young adults:
New research reveals most common ways in which Brits damage their mobile devices – from dropping their phone while exercising to dropping it down the toilet
www.shinyshiny.tv
Of damaged phones, 60% of 18-24-year-olds and 51% of 25-34-year-olds reported that it was caused by a toilet drop. Which is to say that at least in the UK, in that survey, in 2018, for younger people, water damage
is the most likely cause of breakage. This could be in part because they tend to use heavier cases that protect from hard-surface drops, or because phones have gotten more resistant to hard surface drops, but in any case that toilet damage number drops to
zero if the phone is waterproof.
A different survey I found, with little explanation of methodology or source, showed the most common cause of damage being dropped on the ground, but 2 of the top 5 still being water damage (toilets and other water):
The statistics presents the most common causes for accidental smartphone damages in the United States as of 2018.
www.statista.com
Presumably as time goes by, the statistics will get skewed by the fact that
iPhones don't break when you drop them in water. Same for some other phones as well. By 2018 the statistics would have already started to be affected by that.
Regardless, you also left out the second sentence of what I said there, which explains my preference not from a statistical standpoint, but from a user standpoint (emphasis added):
I'm a lot more likely to get my phone wet than I am to want to get it repaired by someone other than Apple.
My family, personally, keep iPhones for 3 years, during which they're covered by AppleCare. I don't even ever expect to use a 3rd party repair shop; every co-worker who had a phone repaired at a non-Apple shop either ended up with a screen looked like garbage to me, they ended up taking it to Apple eventually because the repair failed after a few months, or the shop broke more than it fixed.
So if/when I need to get a phone repaired, it's going to be done by Apple. Which means, since I have
zero expectation to ever try to repair a phone myself, I really don't
personally care how hard it is, since I'm not the one doing it.
This of course doesn't apply to everybody, but I'd say it probably applies to
most--statistically, how many iPhone users repair their own phones? I think it's safe to say that the number of people who repair their own phones (or would if it was somewhat easier) is lower than the number who drop them in the toilet, probably by a significant margin. Almost nobody repairs their own desktop computers, either, and that's
incredibly easy.
There's also another factor to water resistance versus ease-of-repair: Leaving accidental damage entirely out of the picture, being waterproof provides real-world use benefits. I can take my phone out in the rain and not worry about it, which I would avoid prior to waterproofing. I can use it in the tub without worry. If I really trust the waterproofness, I can do basic underwater photography. I can even rinse it off if it gets dirty.
