The Tale of the Lost Apple iPhone Prototype Gets A Little Weirder | The Communication Blog

Saturday, April 24, 2010

The Tale of the Lost Apple iPhone Prototype Gets A Little Weirder

By Matt Jones

However it transpired, a prototype of the next generation iPhone disappeared in a bar in the Bay Area. It resurfaced and is heading back to Apple. The story was broke by gizmodo.com

How this device went missing will certainly take some time to get answered. How does an apple insider come to misplace or loose a device? Drinking... really?

There is a good place to start and that would be with the article on Gizmodo, the how-we-got-this-thing post from this past Monday night. Basically the article talks about how Gray Powell, an engineer for Apple, spent an evening in a Redwood City, California beer garden and when he left he forgot to bring the device with him.

The device was discovered by a patron at the bar. They did return the device up to the front counter or submit to the lost in found. Instead they took the next gen. iPhone home and fiddled with it for the afternoon. They eventually found the iPhone engineer's Facebook page: that of the now hungover Powell. Of course, there was every intention of an eventual return of the device but because of the delay the device was remotely wiped clean, a service which MobileMe Apple offers.

Included in the Gizmodo story were photos and bio info on the iPhone engineer who lost the phone. This information had been gleamed from the fellow's Facebook page before the phone was remotely blanked. The Times and AP have also reported that there was a $5,000 finder fee paid out to the patron how found the phone and took it home.

Apple had asked for the device to be returned and that request was being complied with. The deeper question though is that with the level of secrecy that Apple employs why exactly was the device being walked around with since the device was both unsecured and unreleased.

Previous iPhones which had the newer software versions running were seen around tow and demoed by engineers. These phones were password protected so leaving a phone at a bar offered no jeopardy.

In contrast, the iPad was stored in a blacked out room and had to be tethered to a stationary object. It was going nowhere. Developers who were okd to work on this device labored under extremely secure conditions.

Regardless of what goes on there are things that are going to happen and there are mistakes that are going to be made. Whether this was an actual version or just a decoy is yet to be seen.

About the Author:

The Communication Blog
Bookmark and Share

No comments:

Post a Comment

 

The Communication Blog Copyright © 2009