Hey guys, it’s Greg with Apple Explained,and today we’re going to explore the history of the leaked iPhone 4 prototype.
This topic was the first place winner of lastweeks voting poll and if you didn’t get to vote, make sure you’re subscribed, thatway the voting polls will show up right in your activity feed and you can let me knowwhich video you’d like to see next.
So if you’re one of my younger viewers,you may not know much about this story since it took place eight years ago, but you needto understand that what we’re about to discuss is considered by most people as the biggesttech leak in history.
And that probably sounds impossible sinceApple is known for being the most secretive company in the world, I mean, they have multiplelocks on labs with unreleased products, they have armored doors, they constantly changesystem passwords, and they even have their own security force patrolling their campusat all times for intruders and spies.
And if that wasn’t enough, every prototypethey built was kept under surveillance with restricted access only to people who weredirectly included in the products development.
And this is why most Apple employees are justas shocked as we are when the company introduces a new product.
There was even a story about a worker beingfired for showing an unreleased iPad to another Apple employee.
So it’s pretty hard to imagine that a supersecret iPhone prototype would appear on a random bar stool twenty miles away from Apple’scampus.
But that just proves that no matter how harda company tries to be perfect, it’ll eventually make a mistake since companies are just madeup of humans, and humans are imperfect.
So this mistake had something to do with anunreleased iPhone 4 prototype, a tech news website called Gizmodo, and a very angry SteveJobs.
So all of this happened back in April 2010when the 3GS was the most recent iPhone model.
An employee named Gray Powell was responsiblefor field testing an unreleased iPhone prototype which would later become the iPhone 4.
Now Gray was a twenty-seven year old Appleengineer who had been with the company for two years, and this whole event actually happenedon his birthday.
Now keep in mind that most of this story isbased on what Gray Powell said happened, so we don’t really know if all of this is 100%true, but we’ll at least get the main idea.
So it was April 2010 and Powell went out tocelebrate his birthday with drinks at a German bar called Gourmet Haus Staudt.
He had a few drinks and even updated his FaceBookstatus from the phone he was testing.
Now the person who eventually ended up withpossession of the leaked iPhone was named Brian Hogan who was at the bar with his friend,and he was sitting next to Gray Powell but obviously didn’t think much about him atthe time.
Eventually Gray Powell left the bar and forgothis iPhone prototype on a stool.
So we know Brian ended up with the iPhoneprototype, but he wasn’t the guy who found it.
Someone else sitting on the other side ofPowell was the first person who actually saw the iPhone on the stool.
He asked Brian if it was his iPhone, and Briansaid no, but the other guy figured it must’ve belong to one of Brian’s friends so he handedthe phone to him saying, “here, take it, you don’t want to lose it.”
Now I’m not sure if that’s actually whathappened or if Brian made that part up to remove some responsibility for taking thephone, but either way he ended up with the phone in his hand, and he didn’t know whoit belonged to.
So he asked around the bar, but no one claimedit.
And then he thought, maybe it belong to theguy who was sitting next to him earlier in the evening, which it did.
Because the person who sat next to him wasGray Powell.
So Brian and his friend stayed at the barthinking he might come back for it, but Gray never returned.
Now Gray and Brian never actually talked orintroduced each other while sitting at the bar, so Brian didn’t know anything aboutthe phone’s owner to try and get into contact with him.
Because of this, Brian figured that if hecould get into the phone and look around a little bit, he’d eventually find the ownersname or even their contact information to return the phone.
So he successfully unlocked the phone andplayed around with it while waiting.
At this point he just thought it was a normaliPhone 3GS but then it started doing some strange things.
He tried opening the camera app, but it crashedevery time.
There were also two weird looking bar codeson the back, and a model number sticker next to the volume keys, so the whole thing justseemed a little off.
Now there was six pages of applications onthe home screen, and one of them was Facebook.
He launched FaceBook figuring that’d bea good way to identify the owner, and that’s when he discovered the iPhone belonged tonone other than Apple engineer Gray Powell.
Now since Brian knew who the owner was, heleft the bar and figured he’d just get into contact with Gray later on.
But when he woke up the next morning, thephone was dead.
It was bricked remotely through MobileMe,similar to the remote wipe feature offered by iCloud today.
And it was only then that he realized thatthere was something strange about the iPhones design.
The outside of it didn't feel right and henoticed there was a camera on the front. Some that no iPhone ever had before.
So after messing with it a bit, he managedto take off the fake 3GS case and realized he was holding a device no one had ever seenbefore.
Its design was completely different from anyiPhone ever made.
With a stainless-steel band around the perimeterand a flat glass back.
At this point he understood how serious thesituation was, he was holding an unreleased iPhone that Apple definitely knew was missingand definitely was looking for.
Brian didn’t want Apple showing up on hisdoorstep.
So he used his own phone to call Apple supportand tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the rightperson, but that didn’t happen.
Here’s the actual transcript of the conversationthat happened between Brian and an AppleCare representative: Hello, thanks for calling AppleCare / Hello.
I think I have some kind of iPhone prototype,or something! / What? / Yeah, it's kinda square, and it doesn'twork.
I found it in a bar.
/ Ok! Thanks for calling.
Obviously no one on the other end took himseriously but who can blame them? I mean imagine working for Apple and somerandom guy calls up claiming he has an iPhone prototype.
I’d probably think it was a prank call orsomething.
Eventually Brian got a ticket number fromApple so he expected someone to call him back, but no one ever did.
Now Gray Powell told his boss that he lostthe iPhone prototype and that news went straight to the top.
Steve Jobs was furious.
But Apple had no way of tracking down theiPhone since it was remotely disabled.
And if you’re thinking, “why didn’tthey just locate it with Find My iPhone,” well they couldn’t because the beta releaseof iOS 4 that the prototype was running didn’t work with Find My iPhone.
So Apple, and Brian, were totally screwed.
At this point Brian figured if Apple wouldn’ttake their own prototype, maybe a media outlet would.
And maybe they’d pay a lot of money forit.
So he called around to different tech blogslike Engadget and Gizmodo and offered them the prototype for $10,000.
Apparently there was a bidding war betweenthe two companies and Brian eventually accepted $5,000 from Gizmodo plus a bonus dependingon how much traffic the post received.
Then on the morning of April 20th, Jason Chenfrom Gizmodo published a post called “This Is Apple’s Next iPhone.”
It was a hands-on tell all about the prototypethey had received from Brian, and Jason Chen gave a detailed explanation why he believedthe device was a legitimate Apple product.
His explanation was so convincing that JonGruber, a well known Apple insider, said himself that the leak was legit.
And this endorsement actually caused Engadgetto revise their article about the prototype to make it sound less skeptical, since allsigns were pointing to this leaked iPhone being the real deal.
Now once the story got out and was validated,every news outlet imaginable ran wild with their own stories.
But the focus of the coverage always cameback to Gizmodo since everyone was wondering how they got the iPhone in the first place.
Some outlets thought Gizmodo was guilty ofreceiving stolen property, and all of this drama quickly got the attention of Apple CEOSteve Jobs.
He actually called Jason Chen himself andsaid “I want my phone back.”
Now this began a series of emails back andforth between Apple and Gizmodo, but Apple isn’t a very patient company when it comesto recovering unreleased products, so they sent a police force called the CaliforniaRapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, whatever the heck that is, and they actually kickeddown Jason Chen’s door, took four computers, two servers, cameras, and an an iPhone.
Now this was technically legal since theyhad a warrant, but this move by Apple was very controversial since journalists are entitledto "shield laws" that protect them from having newsroom equipment seized.
But no charges were filed against anyone inthis case.
Now what’s interesting about this wholeordeal is what Steve Jobs publicly said about it compared to what he allegedly did aboutit.
Here’s a clip of him discussing the issueat the All Things Digital conference in 2010 [clip] So Jobs made it sound like he wasn’t really too involved and it wasall being left up to the district attorney and whatever ended up happening was fine withhim.
But sources close to Jobs described a muchdifferent attitude than what he was showing in that clip.
They said Jobs was furious about the situationand was more involved than anyone else at Apple, demanding updates on any new developmentsin the story, no matter how small.
And remember the California Rapid EnforcementAllied Computer Team? Well that turned out to be a private securityforce that was largely funded by Apple, and supposedly it was Jobs who pushed for thatteam to get a warrant and forcefully enter Jason Chen’s home.
Now Apple may have made some morally questionabledecisions during this event, but the real jerks were the people at Gizmodo.
They promised Brian a $3,000 bonus after thepost was published, but never followed through.
They also threw him under the bus legally,so he was burdened with all the attorney fees and court costs that Gizmodo managed to avoid.
Actually, after the whole ordeal was over,Brian ended up losing money and it completely destroyed his personal life.
If you want to read more about how this effectedhim you should read his AMA on Reddit from 2013, its a kind’ve sad but really interestingstory.
And as for Gray Powell, the Apple engineerwho actually lost the iPhone, he continued to work for Apple and didn’t really faceany consequences which is kind’ve surprising, but hey, I guess everyone makes mistake.
So that is the history of the lost iPhone4 prototype, and if you want to vote for the next video topic, don’t forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you nexttime.
This topic was the first place winner of lastweeks voting poll and if you didn’t get to vote, make sure you’re subscribed, thatway the voting polls will show up right in your activity feed and you can let me knowwhich video you’d like to see next.
So if you’re one of my younger viewers,you may not know much about this story since it took place eight years ago, but you needto understand that what we’re about to discuss is considered by most people as the biggesttech leak in history.
And that probably sounds impossible sinceApple is known for being the most secretive company in the world, I mean, they have multiplelocks on labs with unreleased products, they have armored doors, they constantly changesystem passwords, and they even have their own security force patrolling their campusat all times for intruders and spies.
And if that wasn’t enough, every prototypethey built was kept under surveillance with restricted access only to people who weredirectly included in the products development.
And this is why most Apple employees are justas shocked as we are when the company introduces a new product.
There was even a story about a worker beingfired for showing an unreleased iPad to another Apple employee.
So it’s pretty hard to imagine that a supersecret iPhone prototype would appear on a random bar stool twenty miles away from Apple’scampus.
But that just proves that no matter how harda company tries to be perfect, it’ll eventually make a mistake since companies are just madeup of humans, and humans are imperfect.
So this mistake had something to do with anunreleased iPhone 4 prototype, a tech news website called Gizmodo, and a very angry SteveJobs.
So all of this happened back in April 2010when the 3GS was the most recent iPhone model.
An employee named Gray Powell was responsiblefor field testing an unreleased iPhone prototype which would later become the iPhone 4.
Now Gray was a twenty-seven year old Appleengineer who had been with the company for two years, and this whole event actually happenedon his birthday.
Now keep in mind that most of this story isbased on what Gray Powell said happened, so we don’t really know if all of this is 100%true, but we’ll at least get the main idea.
So it was April 2010 and Powell went out tocelebrate his birthday with drinks at a German bar called Gourmet Haus Staudt.
He had a few drinks and even updated his FaceBookstatus from the phone he was testing.
Now the person who eventually ended up withpossession of the leaked iPhone was named Brian Hogan who was at the bar with his friend,and he was sitting next to Gray Powell but obviously didn’t think much about him atthe time.
Eventually Gray Powell left the bar and forgothis iPhone prototype on a stool.
So we know Brian ended up with the iPhoneprototype, but he wasn’t the guy who found it.
Someone else sitting on the other side ofPowell was the first person who actually saw the iPhone on the stool.
He asked Brian if it was his iPhone, and Briansaid no, but the other guy figured it must’ve belong to one of Brian’s friends so he handedthe phone to him saying, “here, take it, you don’t want to lose it.”
Now I’m not sure if that’s actually whathappened or if Brian made that part up to remove some responsibility for taking thephone, but either way he ended up with the phone in his hand, and he didn’t know whoit belonged to.
So he asked around the bar, but no one claimedit.
And then he thought, maybe it belong to theguy who was sitting next to him earlier in the evening, which it did.
Because the person who sat next to him wasGray Powell.
So Brian and his friend stayed at the barthinking he might come back for it, but Gray never returned.
Now Gray and Brian never actually talked orintroduced each other while sitting at the bar, so Brian didn’t know anything aboutthe phone’s owner to try and get into contact with him.
Because of this, Brian figured that if hecould get into the phone and look around a little bit, he’d eventually find the ownersname or even their contact information to return the phone.
So he successfully unlocked the phone andplayed around with it while waiting.
At this point he just thought it was a normaliPhone 3GS but then it started doing some strange things.
He tried opening the camera app, but it crashedevery time.
There were also two weird looking bar codeson the back, and a model number sticker next to the volume keys, so the whole thing justseemed a little off.
Now there was six pages of applications onthe home screen, and one of them was Facebook.
He launched FaceBook figuring that’d bea good way to identify the owner, and that’s when he discovered the iPhone belonged tonone other than Apple engineer Gray Powell.
Now since Brian knew who the owner was, heleft the bar and figured he’d just get into contact with Gray later on.
But when he woke up the next morning, thephone was dead.
It was bricked remotely through MobileMe,similar to the remote wipe feature offered by iCloud today.
And it was only then that he realized thatthere was something strange about the iPhones design.
The outside of it didn't feel right and henoticed there was a camera on the front. Some that no iPhone ever had before.
So after messing with it a bit, he managedto take off the fake 3GS case and realized he was holding a device no one had ever seenbefore.
Its design was completely different from anyiPhone ever made.
With a stainless-steel band around the perimeterand a flat glass back.
At this point he understood how serious thesituation was, he was holding an unreleased iPhone that Apple definitely knew was missingand definitely was looking for.
Brian didn’t want Apple showing up on hisdoorstep.
So he used his own phone to call Apple supportand tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the rightperson, but that didn’t happen.
Here’s the actual transcript of the conversationthat happened between Brian and an AppleCare representative: Hello, thanks for calling AppleCare / Hello.
I think I have some kind of iPhone prototype,or something! / What? / Yeah, it's kinda square, and it doesn'twork.
I found it in a bar.
/ Ok! Thanks for calling.
Obviously no one on the other end took himseriously but who can blame them? I mean imagine working for Apple and somerandom guy calls up claiming he has an iPhone prototype.
I’d probably think it was a prank call orsomething.
Eventually Brian got a ticket number fromApple so he expected someone to call him back, but no one ever did.
Now Gray Powell told his boss that he lostthe iPhone prototype and that news went straight to the top.
Steve Jobs was furious.
But Apple had no way of tracking down theiPhone since it was remotely disabled.
And if you’re thinking, “why didn’tthey just locate it with Find My iPhone,” well they couldn’t because the beta releaseof iOS 4 that the prototype was running didn’t work with Find My iPhone.
So Apple, and Brian, were totally screwed.
At this point Brian figured if Apple wouldn’ttake their own prototype, maybe a media outlet would.
And maybe they’d pay a lot of money forit.
So he called around to different tech blogslike Engadget and Gizmodo and offered them the prototype for $10,000.
Apparently there was a bidding war betweenthe two companies and Brian eventually accepted $5,000 from Gizmodo plus a bonus dependingon how much traffic the post received.
Then on the morning of April 20th, Jason Chenfrom Gizmodo published a post called “This Is Apple’s Next iPhone.”
It was a hands-on tell all about the prototypethey had received from Brian, and Jason Chen gave a detailed explanation why he believedthe device was a legitimate Apple product.
His explanation was so convincing that JonGruber, a well known Apple insider, said himself that the leak was legit.
And this endorsement actually caused Engadgetto revise their article about the prototype to make it sound less skeptical, since allsigns were pointing to this leaked iPhone being the real deal.
Now once the story got out and was validated,every news outlet imaginable ran wild with their own stories.
But the focus of the coverage always cameback to Gizmodo since everyone was wondering how they got the iPhone in the first place.
Some outlets thought Gizmodo was guilty ofreceiving stolen property, and all of this drama quickly got the attention of Apple CEOSteve Jobs.
He actually called Jason Chen himself andsaid “I want my phone back.”
Now this began a series of emails back andforth between Apple and Gizmodo, but Apple isn’t a very patient company when it comesto recovering unreleased products, so they sent a police force called the CaliforniaRapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, whatever the heck that is, and they actually kickeddown Jason Chen’s door, took four computers, two servers, cameras, and an an iPhone.
Now this was technically legal since theyhad a warrant, but this move by Apple was very controversial since journalists are entitledto "shield laws" that protect them from having newsroom equipment seized.
But no charges were filed against anyone inthis case.
Now what’s interesting about this wholeordeal is what Steve Jobs publicly said about it compared to what he allegedly did aboutit.
Here’s a clip of him discussing the issueat the All Things Digital conference in 2010 [clip] So Jobs made it sound like he wasn’t really too involved and it wasall being left up to the district attorney and whatever ended up happening was fine withhim.
But sources close to Jobs described a muchdifferent attitude than what he was showing in that clip.
They said Jobs was furious about the situationand was more involved than anyone else at Apple, demanding updates on any new developmentsin the story, no matter how small.
And remember the California Rapid EnforcementAllied Computer Team? Well that turned out to be a private securityforce that was largely funded by Apple, and supposedly it was Jobs who pushed for thatteam to get a warrant and forcefully enter Jason Chen’s home.
Now Apple may have made some morally questionabledecisions during this event, but the real jerks were the people at Gizmodo.
They promised Brian a $3,000 bonus after thepost was published, but never followed through.
They also threw him under the bus legally,so he was burdened with all the attorney fees and court costs that Gizmodo managed to avoid.
Actually, after the whole ordeal was over,Brian ended up losing money and it completely destroyed his personal life.
If you want to read more about how this effectedhim you should read his AMA on Reddit from 2013, its a kind’ve sad but really interestingstory.
And as for Gray Powell, the Apple engineerwho actually lost the iPhone, he continued to work for Apple and didn’t really faceany consequences which is kind’ve surprising, but hey, I guess everyone makes mistake.
So that is the history of the lost iPhone4 prototype, and if you want to vote for the next video topic, don’t forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you nexttime.
0 Comments