Come on!
It's suspicious that Apple loses phone in the weeks before a new release. They're doing it to arouse interest. The story hits the media a full 6-weeks before the new device gets officially announced and we clamor to learn more. Our interest gets peaked and our wallets open. All at the cost of the poor guy who finds the phone and tries to make a couple of extra bucks by selling it online.
If true, this looks more and more like deliberate PR stunt. If the phone is found in the same way, iphone 4 was, I hope the judge doesn't allow Apple to pursue charges.
Why would the police care about a lost phone and kick someone's door in straight away ? Unless the police is on Apple's payroll I don't see this happening.
In other news - 1 Infinite Loop has broken ground on an iBar - where all of their employees can drink for free without management worrying about their IP getting left behind...
All I know is that if I was lucky enough to work for Apple I sure as hell would not be stupid enough to lost the new prototype at any cost. How about having a cloned SIM card for another phone when you decide to go drinking and may lose your mind while drinking at a Tequila bar in San Fran?
And honestly, Apple has no right wasting any taxpayer's money using the Police in this matter.
If you or I "LOST" our phone drinking they would tell you to get bent before they are going to do anything cause they aren't responsible in that matter. The San Francisco Police are not Apple's private security firm.
If the phone was "priceless" why is some idiot taking it to a Tequila bar? To test it in "real world" situations? I am sure the 99% of the time that employee has the prototype to test is good enough and taking it to the tequila bar can stay in the truck or something.
They clearly did right? It says right in the article that they traced it back to some random guys house. The cops didn't find anything, but that could just mean the phone was turned off and hiding in his neighbors mailbox.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)