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[Mongrel]

dear god it's just an iphone with an extra camera. it's not like it shoots fucking lasers that will make a hologram of a girl that will have sex with you. The only reason anyone cares about it it's because these people have SCRATCHED THE FACE OF THEIR MIGHTY GOD.

Dude it has sharper edges THIS CHANGES THEIR WHOLE DESIGN MOVEMENT

 

The Sharper Image? 

[Brentai]

Also the backing is ceramic now.

[Büge]

I hate sour apple flavour.

[Spaco]

I dunno, I see the addition of a front-facing camera to be a game-changer, as I assume they are finally getting around to making a true widely-distributed cellular videophone a reality. I mean, you have to have an unlimited data plan anyway to use an iPhone anyway, so why not take advantage of all that bandwidth?

[Catloaf]

But AT&T hates iphones already because they already use too much of their tubes, tubes which they never widen because they're cheap motherfuckers.

[Shinra]

Yeah, unless the iPhone 4 comes with an announcement of WiMax/4g support, I'm not going to be impressed with anything that takes extra bandwidth. AT&T is already the worst in the country in terms of their data service.

I still can't understand what was going through apple's head at the time. You can't tell me this phone wouldn't have been a better fit with Verizon or Sprint.

[Spaco]

Isn't it headed to other carriers in the supposed near future?

[Shinra]

Yeah, but years after the fact.

I'm just saying, there's a reason I don't have an iphone and it isn't the pricetag. I have this dream where I've died and gone to heaven, and I have an apple iphone and I'm with everyone I love and then someone asks me to look up a restaraunt review and I suddenly realize I'm stuck on a data network that is slow as hell, and I am, for all eternity, waiting for the review to finish loading. And then I realize, I'm not in heaven, but I've been in hell all along. I suspect this dream is reality for everyone who owns an iphone.

[Thad]

I think the difference is that people who don't like it actually feel like they have viable alternatives, or will once Google steps up and the two of them have some sort of Kaiju Battle.

As opposed to the other scenario where Apple was like "Hey we're the viable alternative!" and people mostly laughed.

Right, this.  The difference is that 90% of desktops run Microsoft Windows.  You can't make the monopoly argument against Apple nearly so easily.  Leastways, not until all its music players use the App Store.

Yeah I don't think the whole LOL WHOOPS I TOOK THIS ULTRA-SENSITIVE PROTOTYPE TO THE LOCAL BAR AND DROPPED IT thing is fooling a lot of people who don't already love being lied to.  Anybody who's ever been anywhere near a respectable RD department kniws that would pretty much entail a collosal, company-wide fuckup to ever happen.

It's only a big deal because Apple is notoriously secretive about its upcoming products.  I'm as ready to call bullshit on free publicity as anybody, but this doesn't fit Jobs's MO at all.  I've heard stories of him firing people for accidentally revealing much more trivial shit than this.

Rather an elaborate ruse and I'm inclined to trust Occam's Razor on this one.  And of course if it's NOT an elaborate ruse, Gizmodo broke the law; they knowingly bought stolen property.  Yeah, freedom of the press entitles them to break stories based on leaked information, but not to buy shit they know is stolen.

Yeah, unless the iPhone 4 comes with an announcement of WiMax/4g support, I'm not going to be impressed with anything that takes extra bandwidth.

Well, seeing as how the Gizmodo story we are currently talking about specifically refers to it as the iPhone 4G...

[TA]

According to Gizmodo's account of things, the person who found the phone tried repeatedly to get in touch with Apple, and the engineer who "lost" it, to return the phone to them, and he was laughed off or ignored every time.

The relevant statute is California Penal Code Section 485, which reads "One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft."

So, no, not stolen property.  Unless weeks of calling the owners to try to return the device doesn't qualify as making "reasonable and just efforts".

[Brentai]

Rather an elaborate ruse and I'm inclined to trust Occam's Razor on this one.

Yeah but I think the conspiracy theory is the Occam's Razor answer, at least for the question How the fuck did an engineer ever manage to get an incredibly valuable prototype out of the office and why the fuck does he still have a job?

We're kind of in the position here of trying to decide whether Apple is blatantly lying or whether their information security department is just amazingly incompetent.  For some reason this never seems to affect a company's reputation that much.

[Misha]

the 3gs disguise case makes me think that it's more likely to be an actual loss. If they were planting it to be found why would they design and make a disguise for it? Also, field testing signal strength or this alleged noise cancellation extra mic seems pretty plausible to me.

[Royal☭]

What doesn't sound plausible is that Apple wouldn't send any suits or extra backup whose entire job is to tap the engineer on the shoulder and say "Did you forget the iPhone?"

[Thad]

Yeah but I think the conspiracy theory is the Occam's Razor answer, at least for the question How the fuck did an engineer ever manage to get an incredibly valuable prototype out of the office and why the fuck does he still have a job?

We're kind of in the position here of trying to decide whether Apple is blatantly lying or whether their information security department is just amazingly incompetent.  For some reason this never seems to affect a company's reputation that much.

Hanlon's Razor IS a version of Occam's Razor, you know.

I really don't understand what makes it hard to believe that someone might test a cell phone outside of a damn clean room.  When people only test products inside artificial environments and fail to mimic everyday conditions of use, you...well, perhaps worst-case is you wind up flagging fucking svchost.exe as a virus.  The 3G launch was an EPIC fuckup, and I seem to recall some MobileMe problems too.

According to Gizmodo's account of things, the person who found the phone tried repeatedly to get in touch with Apple, and the engineer who "lost" it, to return the phone to them, and he was laughed off or ignored every time.

That initially triggered my bullshit detector, but on R'ing TFA:

I work for AppleCare as a tier 2 agent and before the whole thing about a leak hit the Internet the guy working next to me got the call from the guy looking to return the phone. From our point of view it seemed as a hoax or that the guy had a knockoff, internally apple doesn't tell us anything and we haven't gotten any notices or anything about a lost phone, much less anything stating we are making a new one.

Apple doesn't tell its techs shit?  Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

[Shinra]

Yeah, having worked a tech support job, esp. when it comes to new tech, you don't find out shit.

I remember the launch of the Samsung Instinct. "Hey Eric, this guy is calling in trying to register a samsung i800" "A what?" "An i800. I can't find it in KMS." "...Let me see that. Must be an old phone. Check the big phone list for the old SAmsung models." "He says it's brand new. Looks like an iphone." "...Son of a bitch."

The official announcement that we were supporting the Instinct and the training for it came about 3 weeks after the official launch of the product.

[TA]

That initially triggered my bullshit detector, but on R'ing TFA:

I work for AppleCare as a tier 2 agent and before the whole thing about a leak hit the Internet the guy working next to me got the call from the guy looking to return the phone. From our point of view it seemed as a hoax or that the guy had a knockoff, internally apple doesn't tell us anything and we haven't gotten any notices or anything about a lost phone, much less anything stating we are making a new one.

Apple doesn't tell its techs shit?  Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

This aspect of the story triggers my bullshit detector too, but not on the part of the guy who found the iPhone.  Apple, a company as secrecy-conscious as it is, doesn't immediately make every effort to find the phone?  They don't even tell their techs to escalate calls about a prototype iPhone?  If they fire people who accidentally reveal much more trivial shit, why does Gray Powell still work there?

The whole official narrative stinks.  Gizmodo starts to raise the question themselves:

The only uncharacteristic part of whole story is that Apple had employees using top-secret hardware in the wild, amongst the masses, without so much as a simple password lock. (Though Apple has a history of public testing: They sent 200 field technicians out to vet the first-gen iPhone.) What about Apple's storied  (and absurd) internal security protocols? The leak-hunting Gestapo? Was this an unprecedented, utterly unique slip, or has everyone been giving Apple too much credit?

But they take it the wrong direction.  It seems blindingly obvious to me that the phone was lost intentionally.  Their actions make absolutely no sense otherwise.  Gizmodo tries to claim that that's impossible, because of the backlash and downside, but they assume as a premise of their argument that Apple's planting the phone becomes known.

[Royal☭]

See, while I think it's odd that Apple would have very little protocol in place in case of a lost phone, I also can't think of what they stand to gain from a leak like this.  People are talking about the new iPhone now, but it's not like it would be less of a big deal in June when they announce it anyway.  Apple isn't exactly a company that needs to rely on leaks and subterfuge to generate buzz.

[Zaratustra]

They did kill the thing in like two days. And once it was dead, they couldn't call it or ping it to find its location. Wah wah waaah.

[TA]

Letting Steve Wozniak play with a 3G iPad for two minutes during the iPad launch gets you fired.  But not losing a prototype iPhone?

[Thad]

If they fire people who accidentally reveal much more trivial shit, why does Gray Powell still work there?

Paradoxically, I think it's actually because the story's GOTTEN as big as it has.  This is national news, and if Apple fired him that would be national news, and Apple would not come across looking good for it.  Usually firings can go under the mainstream radar and only get reported in tech journals and suchlike.