Apple recently filed a patent at the United States Patent and Trademark Office describing different methods for waterproofing the iPhone, iPad and MacBook.

There are several ways to waterproof a smartphone, including closing all of the open ports and coating the internals with a protective hydrophobic coating.

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Having a waterproof iPhone or iPad could be incredibly useful, especially with Apple pushing into the enterprise world. If the device can withstand different types of terrain, it will make businesses more likely to pick it up in bulk.

It's also a big consumer feature. Sony and Samsung have both tried to offer waterproofing on mobiles.

Knowing how Apple likes to make big steps in hardware, it's potentially working on a way to waterproof the whole device instead of simply making it "water resistant" to a certain extent.

This would require coating and sealing of internals in manufacturing and assembly, which could take over a year to implement at Foxconn and other third-party factories.

Having waterproofing on mobile devices does make them a lot safer and cheaper to insure. A lot of mobile accidents see phones dropped into the bath or getting too much water inside the phone, leading to internal issues.

Waterproofing will most likely not be coming to the iPhone 6S later this year.

But the iPhone 7 should be the first step for Apple. This also means the iPad and MacBook are unlikely to receive waterproofing features until 2016.

TagsiPhone 7, waterproof phones, hydrophobic coating, iPads, MacBooks