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

| Tuesday, February 1, 2011
By Matt Jones


Gizmodo.com recently broke a story about how a next generation iPhone went missing from a Bay area bar. The iPhone is now heading back to Apple. How the iPhone actually came to be missing was noted as either 'by hook or by crook'.

To get questions answered as to how this came about, will take some time to get the straight answers.

According to the Gizomodo article, Gray Powell who is an engineer at Apple spent some time in beer garden in Redwood. After a few beverages, he left the California water hole and 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.

The Gizmodo includes pictures and bio info on Powell as the patron did manage to get this information from Facebook before the phone was blanked. According to the Times and AP, there was a $5,000 finder's fee paid.

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.

The past summer a person and ran into an Apple developer that was holding an older version of the iPhone but the phone had the new iPhone software on it. This release was one that Apple had already demonstrated publicly. The explanation that he had given was that management was ok with it but he was required to put a password on it that had to be put back on every single time the screen shut off.

There was a story about the security restrictions on the Apple iPad before it came out. The developers that were lucky enough to work on it had to store the iPad in a room that had the windows blacked out and in addition to that the iPad had to be tethered to a stationary object.

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




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