Nik Rawlinson
With iPhone 4 laid bare on Gizmodo, Apple is in a very difficult position…
Well, any suggestion that Apple deliberately leaked the fourth-generation iPhone has pretty much been scotched. If you’re not up to speed, Apple employee Gray Powell was out in a bar testing a live sample. He left it on a seat, under a table or somewhere else and it found its way – courtesy of a $5000 (about £3261) finder’s fee paid to an agent or agents unknown – into the hands of gadget blog Gizmodo. Apple asked for it back, Apple got it back, but not before it had been drawn and quartered and its guts spilled over the net.
What a great wheeze it would have been for Apple to have leaked a prototype in so spectacular a fashion. The world’s hottest phone on the world’s hottest gadget blog. Guaranteed global exposure, blanket coverage on every tech site going, and once again Apple is the only name on anyone’s lips when they’re talking mobile phone.
You can see how it might be plausible, can’t you? Only it isn’t. Apple is famously tight-lipped, and this wasn’t, as I had hoped, its way of leaking information without seeming to have loosened up a little.
Now, I’m not going to go into the legalities of it all and who was right or wrong, but it seems to me that if it’s likely the phone belonged to Apple (why would you be interested in selling or buying it if not?), then it really should have been handed back. That, no doubt, is one of the reasons that on the morning of writing this column, police raided Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house and seized computers that may have helped them to investigate the iPhone’s movements.
How that pans out remains to be seen.
The one party that seems to have come off worst in all this is Apple. It has lost one of its prototype phones and the world is wondering what wrath might befall Gray Powell. Its secrets are out and about in the most spectacular fashion, most likely because of that obsessive secrecy. If it wasn’t quite so stingy with the gossip, this would only have been half the issue it is. Now that the police are involved, it looks like Apple called them in, and it looks like a company for whom getting back its property (quite rightly) and sending a lawyer’s letter isn’t enough.
A public relations failure on all fronts.
Sadly, this story seems to be getting more involved and more nasty with every day. We might have forgotten all about it by the time iPhone 4 hit the shelves, but as things stand, it’s far more likely that this whole sorry affair will rumble on. If Apple wants us to stop talking about right and wrong, and instead concentrate on what looks set to be a great update to the world’s best cellphone, it had better hope this gets cleared up fast.
