Fine, I Guess I Will Write About the iPhone Fiasco

Originally I wasn’t going to touch this topic with a 100 foot pole, but I guess I will write up my views on it anyway. Of course I am referring to the fiasco over the iPhone 4 and Gizmodo. Now let me start out by saying that I do like Gizmodo, I think their coverage of tech is pretty decent, they have a wide variety of writers that cover a gamut of topics, and hell you can’t go wrong with the Hobomodo for getting free shit (like the Google sticker that is now on my laptop, I am a certified fan boy), I think that CNET does a better job of being objective, but Gizmodo is a great place for keeping up on what’s going on with tech.

Ok, so a dude, I am going to take a page from Leo Laporte and not use his name that works at Apple was out for his birthday in a German beer bar, getting sloshed, and he happened to have what looked like an iPhone 3g. Like many a drunken person he left his phone at the bar. I can’t really fault him for that, I used to leave my phone at parties in college (it’s fun to try to figure out where it ended up), I have left my wallet in a cab while drunk, one year I thought it would be a fun idea to balance my phone on the rim of a pint glass, guess what happened next? It fell into the pint glass, which was full of beer. The next morning the phone was dead. We all make mistakes, however in this case his 3g was actually a disguised iPhone 4, so he left a prototype phone, a phone that was not his at the bar. On top of that the phone belonged to Apple who is security nut jobs of a company, nothing they don’t want the public to know is let out of the bag till Steve is good and ready, they play the media machine like a harp, but like every tightly held secret the harder you hold on to it, the more likely it is that something will slip out, and that is exactly what happened. This dude left the phone at the bar, someone that was sitting nearby grabbed it, they say they attempted to give it back, and when that was not achievable he held on to it.

This dude basically figured out that the phone was not in fact a 3g and shopped around for someone that would want to purchase it off of him, he tried Wired, they took a pic and left it at that, he tried Gizmodo and they wrote him a check for $5000 for the phone. Gizmodo then dismantled the phone and posted all the details to their web page this past weekend. I heard that in 1 hour Gizmodo received something like 1 million unique visitors. That is a massive amount of traffic for 1 hour for any web page.

Apple contacted Gizmodo about getting the phone back, and Gizmodo, told them the only way they would get the phone back was to officially request it, this basically would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the phone was real, which they did and Giz sent them the phone back.
In the after math of this the police raided and confiscated a number of computers and electronics from the Gizmodo editors, who did the article on the iPhone4, house as evidence. The local police are treating the incident as a theft and are investigating.

I find a couple of things interesting with this situation; firstly, should the Apple employee be fired?
Personally I don’t think he should be, he made a mistake that is very common, and I think that Apple should realize this and have a bit of a sense of humor about the whole thing.

Next, does this do damage to Apple?
It could be argued that it does, the cat is out of the bag, we have some idea about the iPhone 4 now, and it takes some of the “wow” out of the announcement. This might hold a bit of water, but I think from a practical stand point it really does not hurt Apple at all, anyone that follows tech news knew that there was going to be an announcement this summer and that the announcement was almost guaranteed to be about the iPhone 4. I heard an argument that this might hurt Apples 3g sales since people will not wait till the 4 is official, but we all knew this anyway so I don’t think this leak changed the minds of anyone looking to purchase an iPhone. Either you were cool with getting the 3g now or you were going to wait anyway.

Should Giz, and other blogs, be considered journalists and should they be entitled to the protections associated with that title?
I think that Ryan is going to take a stab at this topic since he is a journalist where as I am just a blogger. I did want to touch on one part of this, and it specifically pertains to the discussion of this on TWIT this past Sunday. One of the panelists said that this would never have happened at one of the big news organization. I totally agree, but I also think that that is part of the problem with the big news organizations. Granted Giz is not small, but you have to start somewhere, why does being owned by a massive corporation make things more legit than being small. I have some strong opinions about the press in general, but I will try not to get all heated here (that’s for a different post), but I do think that new entities that are owned by large corporation kinda hurts the message of that news entity, because now the news is all wrapped up in corporate politics. Giz is like a teenager, young, fresh, rebellious, bucking society’s pressures, playing in an industry of senile giants, that in a lot of ways are too big and ponderous to get out of their own way, and when the young kid shows up they basically yell “get off my lawn”

I would like to consider myself an upstanding person, however if I was the person that found the phone I might have done the same thing. Had I done the right thing and returned it to Apple I imagine my world would have become a nightmare of non-disclosure agreements, and other scary legal documents, which may be the fate anyway of the dude that sold the phone the Giz. I hope he kept the $5000 around for lawyer fees.

Finally, who is to say that this is the final prototype, yes Apple confirmed that it is a prototype, but for all we know it was a prototype for a particular purpose. The kid that was testing I believe worked for the part of Apple that designed the cell phones radio. It could have been a prototype for that any only that, I find it hard to believe that Apple who basically required the construction of a bunker in order to give developers access to an iPad would be letting the fully developed iPhone 4 walk out the door, but who knows stranger things have happened.