iPhones are not waterproof, they're IP68 water resistant. Apple even describes the port as being a liquid egress (and thus ingress) point in their public "oops I dunked my phone in water" support documentation.

    Dry your iPhone:
    
    1. Tap your iPhone gently against your hand with the connector facing down to remove excess liquid. Leave your iPhone in a dry area with some airflow

Taking care to remove liquid from the port just as well makes sense simply because you do not want to have water in there when you plug the phone in and water in ports just doesn’t dry as easily as water on some surface.

In practice iPhones are (like nearly all modern phones) extremely water resistent and very unlikely to be water damaged by exposure to water or even immersion in water.

Phones are quite durable. Exposure to water is always a risk, obviously (so is any handling of an untethered phone in the presence of hard surfaces) but I would argue it‘s one you can reasonably take.

For my personal risk tolerance I sometimes rinse my phone in running water (taking care not to directly point the running faucet at any of the openings of the phone), I generally don’t worry about spills (so the phone might be on the kitchen counter where spills are likely) and I also took it out into the sea to take some photos (but did not submerge it).

The latter period of the G5, were water cooled, IIRC. They suffered from problems due to corrosion, though.

An iPad on the other hard would be pretty easy to make fully waterproof like the phones, since it only has a couple of buttons and one port.

2023 rant: if I press the button on my watch and tell Siri to “start swim workout” when I’m in the water, my watch still expects me to press a button on the screen while I’m in the water.

There are backpacks with bottle holders on the outside, but in my experience, those aren’t very good at holding a bottle.

Not bringing a bottle probably is the best option, but that may not be a good option in very hot climates.

And some backpacks actually have working bottle holders on the outside ...

How would you avoid water damage due to the scenario? Or do you consider it normal and unavoidable?

Most of my cases where me toppling over some classes or bottles in a way where the liquid ended up directly on the open laptop.

On the other hand in my bag I normally have the Laptop in an additional sleeve, sometimes a double one, so any case where liquid ended up spilling in my backpack it at most lead to a slightly damp laptop due to the sleeves getting wet but nothing which causes water damage.

As a side note if used correctly a simple plastic bag (like a thing plastic shopping bag) as an additional sleeve around you laptop sleeve can be a trivial cheap way to get a surprising amount of waterproofing a laptop in a backpack. I don't do this on a daily basis but when traveling or similar I always hope to not forget to do it.

"Out in the field" jobs? That's typically stuff for heavily rugged Windows laptops (e.g. Panasonic Toughbook). I wonder what you could use a Mac device for in that area, the software used for such jobs (e.g. industrial control, car programming or mapping stuff) is almost exclusively Windows-only.

I wonder why Apple has never considered making a toughbook type machine for real field work.

There are a few exceptions. I wonder how many Mac pros they really sell. I assume it’s really a “halo” product that sells more Mac studios and MacBook pros.

Also the Mac in general is a low volume product for Apple. It’s 10% of units in the PC market (but what % of profit?) and about 10% of their revenue. (If they were truly run with a bean counter mentality would they even ship Macs?)

Don't forget Apple's size... the AirPod business, stood alone, would be a Fortune 500 company. Even if an Apple business is a bit small compared to the iPhone, it's still a humongous business by any other comparator.

I'm not an Apple fanboy (e.g. I use an old Chinese Android phone) but I'm still awed by their business.

Apple at the moment doesn't have any marketshare in rugged, "out in the field" laptop computers. Obviously if any company can brute force an entry into any market it's Apple, but they would need significant investments into third parties that hold potential customers hostage to Windows, and Apple Just Does Not Do That unless the third party in question is a direct supplier of theirs.

Macbooks are supposed to look like jewelry.

The idea that is single spilled coffee can cause $1000 of damage or more to a laptop is ridiculous.

But anyway, if you are like me with arm mobility issues and in danger of spilling stuff on your laptop, get some custom made rugged laptop because no manufacturer cares anymore; if anything, they seem to care the other way round.

If you don't have a fan making everything else but the keyboard(and mousepad) water resistant is not hard, and with a bit more trickery about how the keyboard are connected you can get to everything but keyboard waterproof too.

Issue is then you also need a easy replaceable keyboard and hand replacement keyboard out so that people can have them ready them "just in case".

Which both doesn't seem in the interest of Apple if you look at their actions in recent years.

I think currently the best chance for a new consumer laptop which is water proof and convenient to use would be a tablet which has no fan but still provides okay performance and then some "dock on" keyboard like e.g. in the style of the Microsoft Surface or similar. Then you could have a version where the keyboard is also water proof or a version where if it drops in water you replace the nicer to use keyboard with a new one etc.