It's the difference between "I can bend/break it with my bare hands" to "I can't bend/break it with my bare hands". Things stronger than humans tend to last better under use by humans.
I don't see why whether you can bend the phone with your hands is relevant, unless you actually plan to try to bend your phone with your hands. I could probably break my laptop's screen by bending it with my hands. I can tear the pages out of a book. I can rip apart my clothes. But whether or not I can break these items with my bare hands has almost no bearing on their actual lifespan. I'm much more likely to break my laptop by dropping it, destroy my book by getting it wet, and ruin my clothes by staining them.
Things that are stronger generally tend to last better under use by humans or non-humans, but whether you can bend it with your hands is not a good benchmark. But if it bends in your pocket when you're not intentionally stressing it for the benefit of your YouTube audience, that's more troubling.
It means you can damage it with human scale strength. That's an important durability criteria. If you want something that will outlast cows, you make it stronger than a cow. Likewise for any animal or desired user. Humans are not a special exception in engineering terms. That's why roads aren't made of paper and golf gloves should last more than a couple swings. Likewise a phone should be able to handle reasonable human uses.
The average human male can't even bench press their own weight. 500lb of force is in elite boxing range. You'd basically have to be an Olympic level boxer to be generating that kind of force "fairly easily".
Can a human generate power easily in that range? Maybe if you jumped on your phone from a 2 story building, or had amazing squats and dropped the weights on the phone. But no sane company would design their daily-use general purpose smartphone for those kinds of circumstances.
To give you an idea of what human strength actually looks like here's a paper on hand strength.
70lbs is just between the grip strength of a woman and a man.
150lbs is over both.
There are entire categories of human-sized movements that can generate over 70lbs of force. There are surprisingly few that can generate at or over 150. You have to really want to be doing it and you have to be body builder strong.
You might argue that's not what we are talking about, but a phone in your back pocket could easily be subjected to more than your body weight when sitting (flopping?) down on a wooden chair.
PS: One of the classic cellphone tests is driving a truck over the thing. For courtiers it's not uncommon for someone to drive over your phone and generally rugged phones can easily service that.
Under those kind of extreme conditions, I'd have no choice but to go with the most rugged possible phone. I think I have an old Nokia around somewhere.
Sure, but I think the point is more the "when you have it in the front pocket of your skinny jeans and drunkenly run a bit into the edge of a counter top" case that could very reasonably happen in a 2-year replacement cycle of such a device.
Personally, I'll be getting a rigid case that covers the back and sides.
If you run a bit into the edge of a counter top, with 70 lbs of force, I feel, your phone would not be your top concern. Plus I think, people are mostly worried about the phone deforming in your back pocket if you sit down on it. I am not a physics student, but even if you sit down on, say concrete, I think, your ass needs to have some serious muscle tone, such that a metallic object can get deformed without causing you discomfort.
