How Many Nerds Does it Take to Break an iPhone 5?

There couldn’t be anything more satisfying than being Greg Packer last Friday, the first person to walk away from Apple’s 5th Avenue store with a fresh iPhone 5. Opening that box, I imagine a small string of Packer’s drool collecting in a puddle on the device’s shiny new retina display; gazing at himself in the reflectivity. I’m sure he was finally ready to just enjoy the thing already.

But there are also those, as Tom Cruise explained once, that will go out of their way to confront those situations that ordinary people won’t. And I’m guessing that it must be that sense of heroism that has bloggers, repair companies, and protective-casing outfitters dying to share and log the abuse they’ve inflicted on Apple’s latest toy.

The mass sacrifices have been taken out in every which way, from traditional sport-throwing (which has become an official gaming event in Finland) to running it over, sledging it, flushing it, sniping it, etc. Traditionalized by the violent unboxing of the Apple’s earlier iPhones, I feel like I’m treading on a subject of cult or religion while I write this. But really c’mon dudes. All of this effort? Tens of thousands of expendable dollars spent on production budgets, guns and ammunition, replacement screens, and the units themselves that some poor enslaved Chinese student has been forced out of school to make?

It feels like people deciding to destroy their iPhones despite people tsk-tsking at the wanton excess could at this point emulate a Second Amendment discussion. If we want to trash $600 worth of phone, it’s our right! But maybe that’s taking it too far — it could just be another needless waste, equitable to dumping a little harmless grey-water into the ravine. (What’s so bad about that?) How about the realization of all the opportunities with friends and family lost while waiting for the next great iDevice?

The time spent in lines alone ought to worry us when people are merely waiting to trash the most desired piece of tech gadgetry in existence. For a moment, I got stuck tripping out on the narcissistic display of destroying what other people can’t access. (It’s all wrapped up in a paradigm of The Digital Divide.) But then again, isn’t that what being Lindsay Lohan is all about? Maybe it’s just venerating to mock a viewer’s material inferiorities; to teach us a lesson about durability. Maybe hucking an iPhone at the wall is the supreme manifestation of monkish emptiness and asceticism.

I guess it’s the incentive of YouTube views alone that is enough to trump all of my philosophical meanderings. Touché. Hell, I felt the incumbency weighing down on me, just paralyzed with responsibility to compile this video (see above) of all the whackos taking a stab at breaking their smartphones. Someone had to do it.

I finished putting the video together just short of finding the grandaddy of them all. But it is striking enough to stand on its own. Rising through all the nerddom was New York Knicks’ guard Iman Shumpert, who posed perhaps the most significant question about the iPhone 5 yet: Will it dunk?