Unless you are, well, a little bit tipsy and you're brain isn't working straight. Before he even realized it was missing it might have been a few hours later (or even the next morning with a slight headache).
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Apple Demands Prototype iPhone Back
- Thread starter CooKieMoNs7eR
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Unless you are, well, a little bit tipsy and you're brain isn't working straight. Before he even realized it was missing it might have been a few hours later (or even the next morning with a slight headache).
Had it been part of a plan, you wouldn't *know* he never returned. They would have designed the story in a way that eliminates such potential plot holes.
Here's a general rule: If they didn't outsmart you, chances are they never tried, ergo there never was any plan.
Ah but Apple kind of counts on that.... I smell a controlled leak, made to look like an accident. Apple is notorious for controlled leaks, and isn't it interesting that it's almost always the device in its final form and rarely ever a very rough prototype. In other words, a) it's the device as they want the public to see it, and b) if Apple is so leaky how is it that so many rough prototype devices never get leaked? I'm sure there are exceptions, but it seems that Apple often leaks the devices they want leaked, when they want them leaked.
Oh this is such an ugly situation.
Did you read the Gizmodo site? They have the Apple Engineers Bio and everything on there. Talk about embarrassing!
According to Giz, they were called and asked for the request in writing (obviously so they could hawk it on their front page). They also claimed they bought it without knowing definitively where it came from. A little CYA!
I find it interesting, but Giz claims the guy who found it called Apple and was ignored. He even got a case number or ticket for his call.
I wonder how that phone call went? It'll be interesting to see if Giz does a more complete writeup of the components with pictures, or if Apple has politely made a deal with them not to... Possibly in exchange for an early iPhone for review?
Either way, you have to feel bad for the guy, he won't live this one down for a while.
Did you read the Gizmodo site? They have the Apple Engineers Bio and everything on there. Talk about embarrassing!
According to Giz, they were called and asked for the request in writing (obviously so they could hawk it on their front page). They also claimed they bought it without knowing definitively where it came from. A little CYA!
I find it interesting, but Giz claims the guy who found it called Apple and was ignored. He even got a case number or ticket for his call.
I wonder how that phone call went? It'll be interesting to see if Giz does a more complete writeup of the components with pictures, or if Apple has politely made a deal with them not to... Possibly in exchange for an early iPhone for review?
Either way, you have to feel bad for the guy, he won't live this one down for a while.
Interesting thing to note: Grey Powell (the Apple employee who "lost" his new iPhone) has a nice big Zune logo on his MySpace page.
It's all starting to make sense...
Seriously?
Interesting thing to note: Grey Powell (the Apple employee who "lost" his new iPhone) has a nice big Zune logo on his MySpace page.
It's all starting to make sense...
If he wasn't fired already he is now
And how many times has Apple done this? Answer none. Trent Reznor, by your own admission, has.
Tech companies simply do not "loose" prototypes as a marketing scheme by in large least of all Apple - When Apple leaks something, they have specific things that they do - this is as far away from that as possible.
Yeah and Chernobyl was a controlled leak because the area was a little over populated.
the name
it seems that the name will be 'iPhone HD' at least that's what Ives sig says
"Sent from my iPhone HD"
it seems that the name will be 'iPhone HD' at least that's what Ives sig says
"Sent from my iPhone HD"
Just got out of a meeting with my friend who is a Mobile Carrier Distribution & Purchase Account Manger, and he has just flown back to the UK after attending a private buyers conference with some of the major players within the industry.
After showing the pics to him he off the record confirmed that the leaked new design iPhonewas present at the meeting but get this!... there was also an Apple branded device with a physical!qwerty keyboard sitting alongside in a dormant state.
He also confirmed that the demo iPhone 4G had a mobile version of iWorks up and running on it, looks like it may not be a fake after all.
After showing the pics to him he off the record confirmed that the leaked new design iPhonewas present at the meeting but get this!... there was also an Apple branded device with a physical!qwerty keyboard sitting alongside in a dormant state.
He also confirmed that the demo iPhone 4G had a mobile version of iWorks up and running on it, looks like it may not be a fake after all.
Thank you, I meant to write this, but there is no need. Let me repeat it, so it would be told again.
IT WAS NOT A THEFT, THEREFORE THERE IS NO CHANCE THAT GIZMODO COMMITTED A CRIME.
As I said earlier, if you want to be anal and take any action (if you have the right and competence), pray that the device got damaged when they took it apart. Otherwise, Gizmodo acted in good faith and in a reasonable manner, isn't that the case? But I hope that they will ask for evidence that the handset really belongs to Apple and why Apple Inc denied that it did before.
There should be some law against corporations abusing this sort of hype!
You can type in caps as much as you want, but you are wrong (in Britain as well as every US state, I might add--you should ask for a refund on those two years of law school). There is one, exactly one, and only one circumstance under which you something you find becomes yours to sell in this short of a time. That circumstance is that the person who lost it tells you it is yours.
Selling something you do not own is the tort of conversion, and/or the crime of theft by conversion.
The interview with the person who found the phone and information from Gizmodo don't match up. The person who found it claimed it to look just like an iPhone 3Gs but Gizmodo claims the iPhone was running 4.0 far before it was announced. Wouldn't this person notice and discuss that it was running some foreign OS considering we had no idea what 4.0 was going to be like?
From Gizmodo:
During that time, he played with it. It seemed like a normal iPhone. "I thought it was just an iPhone 3GS," he told me in a telephone interview. "It just looked like one. I tried the camera, but it crashed three times." The iPhone didn't seem to have any special features, just two bar codes stuck on its back: 8800601pex1 and N90_DVT_GE4X_0493. Next to the volume keys there was another sticker: iPhone SWE-L200221. Apart from that, just six pages of applications. One of them was Facebook. And there, on the Facebook screen, was the Apple engineer, Gray Powell.
AND THEN
According to the person who found it, this iPhone was running iPhone OS 4.0 before the iPhone 4.0 announcement. The person was able to play with it and see the iPhone 4.0 features.
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Please keep in mind that I really do this this could be the new iPhone, I'm just not buying 100% into it quite yet. Something about all of this doesn't add up for me. I don't care how drunk I am, I would notice my phone missing within it a few minutes. Especially if, you know, it was the unreleased iPhone.
From Gizmodo:
During that time, he played with it. It seemed like a normal iPhone. "I thought it was just an iPhone 3GS," he told me in a telephone interview. "It just looked like one. I tried the camera, but it crashed three times." The iPhone didn't seem to have any special features, just two bar codes stuck on its back: 8800601pex1 and N90_DVT_GE4X_0493. Next to the volume keys there was another sticker: iPhone SWE-L200221. Apart from that, just six pages of applications. One of them was Facebook. And there, on the Facebook screen, was the Apple engineer, Gray Powell.
AND THEN
According to the person who found it, this iPhone was running iPhone OS 4.0 before the iPhone 4.0 announcement. The person was able to play with it and see the iPhone 4.0 features.
----------------------------------
Please keep in mind that I really do this this could be the new iPhone, I'm just not buying 100% into it quite yet. Something about all of this doesn't add up for me. I don't care how drunk I am, I would notice my phone missing within it a few minutes. Especially if, you know, it was the unreleased iPhone.
That makes no sense in my mind. They posted pictures on a rumors site that it may be a prototype phone. They paid $5,000 for something HOPING that it was something big.
I just don't see engadget or gizmodo moving forward without some expectation that the unit was potentially real.
As for being 'someone else's' property. They 1) Knew someone else had found it in a bar, and 2) paid handsomely to get their hands on it.
Call me crazy, but I'm thinking that pretty much seals the deal that they it the phone belonged to 'someone else'.
You think that a company that wont even say when their MBP/Mac Pro/Apple TV refreshes are coming out, or give international customers iPad pricing, would leak a prototype iPhone? Sure, and hell maybe they will give the phones away for free right. Lets all keep dreaming aye
Interesting thing to note: Grey Powell (the Apple employee who "lost" his new iPhone) has a nice big Zune logo on his MySpace page.
It's all starting to make sense...
What on earth is he up to? Good find!
Was this whole thing a controlled leak?
There is no doubt that Apple is getting millions worth of free publicity out of this thing. Has anyone considered that this may have been planned from the get-go?
Is it not unusual that the prototype was allowed off Apple's property - the claim of "field testing" by an intern seems highly dubious.
There is no doubt that Apple is getting millions worth of free publicity out of this thing. Has anyone considered that this may have been planned from the get-go?
Is it not unusual that the prototype was allowed off Apple's property - the claim of "field testing" by an intern seems highly dubious.
Not months later. YEARS later. They float a concept car, pick up the reaction, go back to the drawing table and then after a minimum of 2 years they unveil the end result, e.g. the cool concept car with all the cool parts removed by a nervous committee.
Typically those cars are dummy mockups that can't even be driven.
This phone, however, is about to be released in 8 weeks, and Steve will probably want to say "available today" at the Keynote. The specimen found is fully functional. But the most important clue is the fact that this picture (and others like it) have emerged from China:
That design is identical to the Gizmodo phone.
Now, the iPhone equivalent of a concept car would not have been manufactured in China, it would've been hand made in Cupertino. Why would Apple A) go through the trouble of having prototypes manufactured in China, and B) trust such a prototype to the Chinese when history shows that they leak like crazy?
The prototype stage is looooooooong gone. Mass production should be starting up as we speak -- the manufacturing date of any freshly launched Apple gadget is typically a few weeks before the launch date, and all the depots around the world need to stock up well ahead of the launch date.
Yes, the Gizmodo phone is not FINAL final, or else it wouldn't have placeholder text on the back, but it is *not* some early prototype or test bed.
Good argument, full of valid points. But this line of reasoning doesn't explain away the prior existence of an "early prototype or test bed". In other words, just because it showed up in a bar last week does not prove that it wasn't cobbled together months ago. Why does everyone assume that just because it was running the latest OS (that they can deduce) and has a few of the most wanted features soldered in, and it came off a Chinese assembly line, that it *must* be final?
Admittedly, I don't know boo about how long it takes the Chinese to retool an assembly line, but I have seen examples of conceptual products being revised right to the last minute. One program I watched recently on the subject followed an inventor as his marketing team pushed the final product all the way through production, and the guy was in the factory the night before their launch announcement, making major changes to the finish materials mere yards from the assembly line.
Ironically, this is also the only good argument I've heard for why this could be a deliberate leak and simultaneously proves the product Jobs trots out on stage won't look like this: the features shown here could stem any further Android slippage by impatient iPhone buyers; but if it really is done -this is what they're boxing up, warm up the projector, cue Mr. Jobs- then Jobs has no "nuke" when he walks on stage two months hence. In a deliberate leak, you trickle out information, you don't hand the entire blueprint over to the world press.
Well Gizmodo isn't really telling, only that they paid $5000 for it. According to Giz the founder tried to return it to Apple but apparently they didn't take him seriously or it wasn't given the right priority.
After some weeks Gizmodo got their hands on it. Probably the founder contacted them in some kind of way. Another guess, but a wild one I must admit, is that Gizmodo was tipped off by an Apple representative that stumbled upon the ticket that the founder made. They probably won't give all the details to protect the founder in some ways.
EDIT: read your post wrong: you mean the engineer. The founder/Gizmodo noticed it's Facebook account. Now that I think about it: that is WEIRD. They story tells that he played with the phone a bit. Maybe even looking into his Facebook account that was currently still open. Did he remember the guy's name by head, not likely. After all, the following day it was already wiped. Maybe he wrote it down or something and Gizmodo used the name to look up the Facebook account.
This is true. The big question is do they have enough information to get in front of a judge and will the judge let them proceed (criminal)
Does Apple even want to take it that far.