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Prototype iPhone Spotted on eBay
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Cereal. Serial.
As to those who think it's second page material... I'm sure there are a lot of collectors out there who are glad to know about the auction.
Prototypes are often thrown away. I have a good collection of prototypes for flight computers, for example. You would think that companies would hold onto them, but it's a rare corporation with space and foresight for that kind of thing.
I remember wandering through Silicon Valley surplus shops back in the late 70s. You'd overhear groups of engineers, who would stop in front of a bin and exclaim, "Hey look, that's the board we spent a half million dollars developing! How much is it here? Holy smokes, only ten dollars!! "
I find the phrases that appear at the bottom of the screen amusing:
[Skank is the new black]
[Nine parts perspiration]
[Say hello to the Newton MessagePad 3000]
[Skankphone]
[Skank is the new black]
[Nine parts perspiration]
[Say hello to the Newton MessagePad 3000]
[Skankphone]
As usual, I think you are way out of line. It might be one thing FOR YOU to think such things, but to assume and WRITE HERE PUBLICLY this seller stole them from Apple is really, well WRONG.
I instantly think you are talking out of your a$$ and maybe you should stop accusing people of being thieves. Seriously, do you think someone who stole something would openly sell it and publicize it all over.
It's one thing to blatantly offend people all of the time with no clear understanding of what you are doing, but it's really disturbing for you to openly accuse people of stealing.
I think you have written something that is not acceptable, and you should probably apologize or you may regret it. Sooner or later you are going to learn to stop the nonsense and stick to facts instead of accusing people of being thieves. Keeping your personal opinions to yourself, if it isn't about technology, would be appropriate.
You often write things that are often controversial, but to outright call someone a thief is unacceptable here at Mac Rumors. I believe your post should be edited if you aren't smart enough to remove it yourself. Publicly calling people thieves is a little different than the names you usually call people here.
Ok the site name is Mac RUMORS
But June is a ways off and now we're going to start with iPhone AGAIN ?
But June is a ways off and now we're going to start with iPhone AGAIN ?
Yeh. I remember reading that thread a couple of months ago so it seems he's gone and put them on eBay. Interesting.
$810.00 dollars and still going........... any guesses on how high this will get???? My guess is $1,575.00
Price is Right? Whoever can get closest to the actual amount without going over wins. Now we all need to chip in for a prize for the winner to get.
I'm sticking with 1.5k for right now.
I will stick with $10,000. I think the price will surprise everyone. Since it is essentially advertised here, the price will skyrocket over any current prices. Plus, these will be of serious value in the future. The iPhone is an amazing product in only its second version... 20 years from now, after the economy recovers and everything changes, these will be worth a fortune.
So, I will stick with $10,000... as the final bid price. If it weren't advertised here, I think $1500 would be about right.
It's also on a lot of other sites. I do plan on revising my "price is right" bid in a day or two. Remember, you can't go over.
I recall reading a while back in an article about the iPhone's development that whenever they'd give the phone to a partner (or the FCC for testing purposes), they intentionally loaded dummy software on the device to keep the best part of the phone a secret.
It's not like they planned to sell the phone with the software pictures on this prototype!
Does anyone here actually read the posts? Or do they simply see photos of an iPhone on the front page and assume it is a NEW prototype?
I also don't see why everyone is complaining about how ugly the UI is. First of all, if you will remember, Apple had two teams working on the iPhone. One was hardware, the other UI software. That's how they kept is under wraps. The hardware team had these, with crappy looking UI so they wouldn't know the whole package. This was simply used to code and test the core software and how it interacted with the hardware. The UI software team used crappy looking fake iPhones that didn't look at all like the real iPhone and had their beautiful UI on it for testing. Now I think the real money maker would be whoever could get their hands on one of those blank generic phones with the iPhone OS on them and put those up for sale. My guess is that someone has them and is holding out on the eBaying.
Also mentioned in the original post is that one of these prototypes actually has a plastic screen, which is what the original iPhone spec was, before being "upgraded" to glass a few weeks before being released (hah right...more marketing hype). Apparently they were actually going to use plastic but decided glass was superior, probably before the iPhone was even announced, since they are both from before the iPhone was announced and one of them uses glass. Although they could have lowballed the spec for Macworld and then decided in Feb/March to go with glass before ramping up production.
A) He can't be Steve Jobs, because I am Steve Jobs.
B) It's possible but not likely. That sounds just too incredibly difficult a feat to accomplish.
C) "Mac mini with FireWire and two video outputs" springs to mind.