This gold Apple Watch spent 9 months underwater and lived to tell the tale

Water Damanged Apple Watch Series (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

An Apple Watch Series 4 has spent nine months underwater.
It was recovered and given to YouTuber JerryRigEverything.
He was able to bring it back to life after replacing a couple of parts.

Apple Watches are generally accepted to be fairly waterproof, but nobody really expects one to survive if it spends too long underwater. That didn't stop one gold-plated Apple Watch Series 4 from doing just that, although YouTuber JerryRigEverything did need to perform some slight surgery to get it up and running.

There's actually a story behind this watch. JerryRigEverything gold-plated it for the infamous Casey Neistat before giving it to fellow YouTuber Dan of "Whats Inside?" fame. Who promptly dropped it in a lake.

Nine months later, he found it and presented it to JerryRigEverything in the hope he could bring it back to life.

Of course, he could!

After replacing a dead battery, cleaning a few contacts, and installing a new 3D Touch layer, the Apple Watch is as good as new. Well, except for a new white-ish ring around the display. But that just adds to the character and the story in my opinion.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.