In the first part of this article, I outlined the drama that has unfolded since Sunday in the widespread leak of Apple's yet unannounced next-generation iPhone. In this part, I'll attempt to debunk some of the erroneous theories that have formed around the story.

Apple's fan base is often described as "cult-like," and that's probably an apt comparison. No other consumer electronics company—hell, any company—has enjoyed such die-hard loyalty from its customers. Even in its third generation, the Apple faithful (and newly recruited) lined up in front of retail stores across the country, as if queuing for tickets to a major rock reunion, to purchase what is, ultimately, just a smart phone. Many of them had purchased a practically identical device less than a year ago, and we're already lining up again, credit card burning with excitement. [Full disclosure: I was among them]

So it's not the least bit shocking that any news about a radically new and improved iPhone would draw in the feverish attention of thousands, nay, millions of enquiring minds. This was a big story—quite possibly the biggest story in technology since the announcement of the original iPhone. And like all big stories, it drew the creative minds of thousands who weren't quite convinced what was being reported was the whole truth.

As I mentioned in part one, a few of these creative theories have picked up quite a number of followers. Perhaps it's because Apple's impeccable record in maintaining ironclad secrecy has rarely shown more than the slightest slip-up (and never so far in advance of an announcement), and some simply can't accept that this revelation could be caused by something as simple as a drunken engineer being a bit absent minded. Perhaps it's because many of us are conditioned to distrust the media and corporations. Whatever the reason, there are three major concepts that continue to swirl through the dialog on this issue, dominating Twitter, Facebook, the comments at the end of every related blog post, and even the casual conversation. 

And, naturally, they're mostly bullshit.

Bullshit Theory #1: The Phone is Fake

This theory has, thankfully, largely died off since I originally set about writing this on Tuesday. However, every new blog post still has at least one commenter that says something asinine, like "Fake Phone." I'll knock this one down first, because it's really easy to do.

First, industrial design is fucking expensive. Just manufacturing an object that looked enough like a genuine Apple product to fool professional reviewers would be extremely difficult. It would require extremely expensive fabrication equipment and a pile of knowhow just to be in the realm of possibility. More critically, however, it would require the artistic ability to match the aesthetics of Apple's design language. Apple's ID is some of the best in the world, and in that vein, even trying to copy it would require some of the best industrial designers in the world. The leaked phone has been greeted with a lot of very strong positive sentiment among existing iPhone owners. This means that, to be a fake, the designers would have to have created something not just as good as Apple's industrial design team, but better. This just isn't likely, unless BMWDesignWorks recently got into the business of screwing with people’s heads.

Secondly, it was full of new electronics. There was a fair amount of Apple branded silicon in that case, including a never-before-seen logic board (sealed in metal), and it all fit together to level of precision rarely seen outside of Apple’s work. Forget the expense of industrial design, electronics design at this level is insane. Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars figuring out stuff like this, and it's completely implausible some Chinese knock-off factory could fake it—let alone some group of guys looking for a few days of Internet fame.

Lastly, Apple asked for it back. If it was a fake, there's no way Apple would bother doing this. The New York Times is even convinced. Enough said.

Bullshit Theory #2: Gray Powell is Doomed and Will Never Work Again

The second most common theory floating around the interwebs is that Gray Powell, the young Software Engineer who is said to have lost the prototype phone, has been fired or, worse, is being tortured in the "Cupertino Hilton" by the Apple Secret Police.

To start, Apple doesn't have secret police. Yes, there is a formidable security presence at the Cupertino campus, and yes, Apple's device control and information control policies are some of the most stringent and highly neurotic developed ever. But there are also laws in this country, laws that prohibit you from having your own corporate police force and unlawfully detaining people. There are no 12-hour interrogations at 1 Infinite Loop. There are no interrogations at all. There are anecdotal reports of those who leak information being (gasp!) escorted out of the building and terminated. Oh the humanitiy!

Secondly, we haven't heard anything from the dude. There's no conclusive evidence that he's been fired. In fact, it's much more likely he still works at Apple, because if he were looking for a new gig, we would probably know about it. While I'm certain that Apple's NDAs would prohibit him from saying that he did or did not lose anything—even after his employment ended—they can't keep him completely silent about whether or not he's still employed (the man would have to be given the chance to find a new job). The simplest logical assumption on why Powell is still (and so vehemently) silent on this subject is that he’s still working at Apple, and he wants to keep the job he still has—and this certainly means saying and doing exactly what his bosses are telling him to say and do.

Before he secured it, his Twitter feed looked like a grab bag of awesome times—right up to and after his name got plastered all over Gizmodo's front page. If you assume (as Giz asserts) that Apple knew its device was lost, and thusly who lost it, his tweets would probably reflect the woeful, broke, unemployed existence that everyone assumes he must be suffering. The truth is, his suffering likely only started once his name and social networks were made “hot news” to the entire internet-enabled world.

Finally, not every company is as insane about security as Apple. In fact, hardly any are, and they would probably love to have a former Apple iPhone engineer on staff, especially if he was trusted enough to carry the device outside of the campus. If the poor chap is fired, he'll probably be flooded with job offers just because of his recent notoriety. 

Bullshit Theory #3: The Controlled Leak

This, by far, is the most pervasive of the cockamamie theories swirling around the leak. For the uninformed, the belief here is that Apple is directly responsible for these photos and articles—they purposefully leaked the phone so as to generate hype around the device prior to launch. The common catalyst for this is that the Microsoft KIN and HTC Droid Incredible launched this week, two phones that genuinely pose a potential threat to some of the iPhone's seemingly unstoppable market share hegemony. 

The most likely reason for the pervasiveness of this meme is a John Martellaro article from just a few months ago in January, where he describes how and why Apple does controlled leaks. However, as he notes, "The communication is always done in person or on the phone. Never via e-mail. That's so that if there's ever any dispute about what transpired, there's no paper trail to contradict either party's version of the story."

There are several more reasons why this doesn't make any sense, and the first is brand positioning. In marketing, we talk about brands a lot. It's a dominant and pervasive element to how marketers think in the contemporary era. I work in advertising, and one of the litmus tests for any creative work is to determine that it's "on brand." Work that is not on brand doesn't typically even get shown to a client, let alone get made.

Apple's brand is unequivocally about controlled messaging and broad targets. Take the iPad: the Apple marketing gurus know that the device is imperfect, and doesn't meet everyone's desires (particularly that of technology enthusiasts who read blogs like Gizmodo). But Apple doesn't care to invite alternate descriptions of its devices—it picks a message and it hammers the shit out of that message and that message only. "A revolutionary and magical device at an incredible price." Is the price incredible? Maybe not to some, but Apple doesn't care about your input—they've decided that's the selling point and they will continue to repeat that line everywhere from the website to the quarterly financial conference call.

In other words, Apple doesn't believe that all press is good press. They only want the press they write. Apple likes guys like Walt Mossberg, who write high-reach puff pieces for major mainstream publications, and follow their content guidelines. It's how they control the brand image, and the brand image is decidedly not compatible with Gizmodo. They hate uncontrolled speculation and banter from the Internet's tech enthusiasts on such blogs. Even if Apple were to engage in a viral marketing stunt, it would be extraordinarily controlled, and they would never ever choose Gizmodo as the primary source. Nor, would they drop a working prototype into the world uncontrolled where it might end up at the engineering lab at HTC instead of the desired blog front page.

The second reason this doesn't make sense is the way Engadget behaved when publishing the first story. When Engadget broke the news on Sunday, posting the first public photos of the device, they updated the story constantly. They were the first to mention that the source that purportedly had the phone was asking $10,000 to see it, and then almost immediately redacted that comment. They carefully re-worded the article throughout the morning. The only logical reason for this is that they were conferring with their legal advisors on what was safe to say, and that was nebulous and evolving territory. If this had been a controlled stunt, the publication wouldn't have had any need for this. These exposés would have been written far in advance of publication to provide Apple with opportunity to review the stories and control the stream of information.

The third show stopper for this theory is the iPad photo that Engadget published a full day before Gizmodo came out with their in-hand report. In this photo, which depicts an iPad bolted to what is apparently an Apple test bench, the next generation iPhone makes an appearance slightly obscured in the upper right hand corner. It had been overlooked upon the photos original publication—not surprisingly because it's blurry and everyone was looking at the big iPad in the middle of the frame. But after seeing the photos posted earlier in the day, it was hard to deny it appeared to be an almost identical object. 

This photo, which Engadget used to claim "proof" that the photos of the next-generation iPhone they had were genuine, was originally published on January 27th, just a few hours before the iPad announcement that same day. There is no reason for this photo to be leaked by Apple—the hype for the iPad on the day of the event was already outrageous, and leaking a photo of test bench 3 hours before show time does more harm than good. So why would this be a smoking gun in the story of the iPhone HD? Why would it even appear if this were a planned leak?

Obviously, it wouldn't have. For this to be part of a planned leak, Apple would have had to purposefully stage this photograph four months ago with the expectation of this revelation later, and that elevates this into "The Martians shot JFK to protect Area 51" territory. This shot is absolutely unauthorized, taken most likely by an Apple employee or contractor trying to get a few hours of fame before the announcement, and there is no question the boys in Cupertino are pissed about its existence. It simply would not have been part of the conversation.

Finally, the silver bullet that invalidates this lunacy is the sheer complexity that would be required to plan something like this. Constructing a leak this convoluted and detailed would be a masterpiece, and is completely unprecedented. Trust me, I've worked in big ad agencies, and this shit is more than simply "hard to pull off"—it's damned near impossible (which is why you don't see a whole lot of marketing like this). Viral marketing almost always gives itself away. The most creative minds in our business still leave behind a faint stink of “ad man” thinking all over the viral campaigns we create. This saga has been too multi-faceted to be crafted. And, there is no clearer example of this than the story of the Apple employee who supposedly lost device. 

That person, for this to be planned, would either have to be real or a fictitious character, meaning Apple would have had to have either sacrificed an employee's reputation or invented a character. If the character is invented, that means they created months of social network contributions, connected him to fake friends, built-out a fake LinkedIn employment history, etc. An epic task in and of itself

However, obviously Gray Powell is a real person who does work at Apple (some of my Friends are even connected to him on LinkedIn)—and, if this is a media stunt, that means we must assume he either volunteered to have his reputation publicly destroyed and scrutinized (unlikely), or Apple decided to sacrifice an employee without telling them to achieve a marketing stunt (insane/criminal).

End of story—it’s not a stunt. This poor guy really did lose a phone.

So, can we finally put these rumors to bed?

Tomorrow, in the final part of this post, I'll be outlining what (most likely) really did happen, and what the future holds for the parties involved.

Graffiti Analysis 2.0: Digital Blackbook from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Yesterday was a big day in tech news. In case you've been living under a rock, Sunday, April 18, began with some photos appearing on Engadget asking The iPhone 4G: is this it? at about 7:45 in the morning. 

In this several-month old photo, leaked just before the official announcement of the iPad, you see what appears to be an iPad bolted to an Apple test bench. Everyone looked at this photo, and saw an iPad, only to have the photo's authenticity pretty much verified a few hours later when Steve Jobs showed us all an identical device on stage in Cupertino. What we missed then is what was important Sunday—a seemingly identical device as seen in the earlier pictures obscured in the corner. Shortly after this, a Chinese site called WeiPhone added more fuel to the fire by releasing photos of what appeared to be component parts of an identical device. Engadget went out on a limb, compiling the evidence, and claimed it "confirmed".

Speculation continued to run wild through Sunday and into the morning yesterday. Until, that is, Gizmodo published a story under the title "This Is Apple's Next iPhone" which pretty much put any and all speculation to rest. Especially when DaringFireball editor John Gruber wrote on his blog that he, "...called around, and I now believe this is an actual unit from Apple — a unit Apple is very interested in getting back."

The Gizmodo story was pretty much inarguable. They had the device in hand (they had presumably paid the source to acquire it) and had taken about two dozen first-party photos and a few videos of it. They had disassembled it, and it was decidedly new in design and very clearly Apple's handiwork. It had been hidden inside a custom-made case to give it the external appearance of being an iPhone 3GS. It took until about noon for (almost) all speculation to shift from whether or not the device was legitimate, to how in the hell Gizmodo managed to get it in the first place and whether or not this would spell legal jeopardy for the Gawker-owned property.

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton made no qualms about his affiliated publications engagement in "Checkbook Journalism," and posted a few unabashedly confident tweets through the day, including this gem. 

Denton went on through the day, promising that the back-story of how his publication attained the device would emerge, and that "it would be a corker".

The corker, published at 8:10PM EST, was this dubious and overly prosaic piece that significantly changed the dialog around this story. It outlined (and personally identified) an Apple Software Engineer in the iDevice QA department named Gray Powell.  The article not only surfaced Powell's Facebook profile and directly linked to his Flickr page (which, at the time, featured several remarkably high resolution Hipstamatic photos), but it cast him in a decidedly negative light—as a bumbling drunkard who, in a beer-induced haze during a birthday celebration, absent-mindedly left Apple's prized prototype alone on a barstool. It took a mere three hours for Powell to secure his social networking pages, remove Exif data from his Flickr stream (and, ultimately, remove all photos from public view), and retreat into the darkness of the internet. Shortly after the Gizmodo article ran, his individual Flickr photos were receiving over 200 views per minute.

At the same time, this article drew a picture of the discoverer of said device as an innocent bar-goer, who had a "Random Really Drunk Guy" force the phone into his hands, searched for the owner with earnest, and only discovered the secrets of the disguising case when Apple remotely bricked the phone the next morning. Gizmodo claims that their source called a bunch of numbers at Apple trying to return the device, but was only greeted with doubt and ignorance. In other words, they claim he made a valiant effort, thwarted by Apple's bureaucracy, to do the right thing before deciding to sell pictures of the device to the highest bidder.

Immediately, many who were watching the news with curiosity suddenly shifted to anger (full disclosure: myself included). There began a growing sentiment that, while Gizmodo may be entitled to take any means necessary to scoop it's competitors as a legitimate news source, and that Apple should be afforded no special protection in retaining their secrets from a hungry press, that specifically naming Powell and posting abridged transcripts of their conversations was unethical. This also led to increasing speculation as to whether the story was legitimate, the true motive of the source, and whether or not Gizmodo had acted in an unethical or potentially illegal manner in reporting the story.

Throughout all of this manic banter, one party remained atypically silent: Apple. No cease-and-decist letters were sent to Gawker or Gizmodo, nor any other publication. No warning shots were fired. Finally, at about 8:30pm California Time, Apple SVP and General Counsel Bruce Sewell sent a brief, succinct letter to Brian Lam, the Editor of Gizmodo, formally requesting the return of the device.

 

Gizmodo posted the letter under the cheeky headline "A Letter: Apple Wants It's Secret iPhone Back" shortly thereafter. The post was even more informally written and self-protective than the previous two, with Lam almost bending over backwards to insinuate how Gizmodo was operating completely within the law throughout their actions. He cited a comment from their legal team, and described his joy of being able to return the phone to Apple as  "warm, fuzzy, huggy feelings of legal compliance."

This is the story that has been reported. However, there are still rumors and speculation abound on this subject. In fact, by reading the comments on any blog covering this story, it would appear only a minority of readers are taking all of this at face value. The are a few big conspiracy theories that are still swirling in the inter-webs:

1. Apple is behind all of this—it's a well-organized viral media stunt intended to build hype for the forthcoming device and derail momentum for emerging smarphones such as the HTC Droid Incredible and the Microsoft KIN. In this scenario, Powell is a chosen character from the Apple staff, Gizmodo was handed the phone (or it was planted at the bar, purposefully) and the back-story of it's loss and ultimate recovery are fictitious works designed to stimulate the curiosity of readers.

2. Powell is the one who will take the blame for losing (or, in some particularly twisted minds, personally selling) the device, and will face the full fury of Apple's legal department. In this scenario, his life is now ruined and he's being interrogated like a Foxconn employee by Apple's Worldwide Loyalty Gestapo Team.

3. The device is a fake (or a bench "mule", a non-production form-factor used for QA testing). In this scenario, there's nothing to see here—it's either not an Apple product or Apple lost something that bares no resemblance to the final product. Move along. You've all been trolled.

None of these are true, and in the next post in this series I'll explain why these theories don't hold water. The truth, as it is appearing to me, is that the device was either lost by or stolen from Powell, and the person who sold it to Gizmodo knowingly committed a crime by doing so. Furthermore, Gizmodo either wantonly or unknowingly committed several crimes by acquiring the device and then publishing the photos and specifications of it.

For me, this is the most interesting scenario of all, and in part three, I'll explain why I think this is the case, why Apple has not taken any action yet, and what I imagine the future holds for Gizmodo (spoiler alert: it's not good).

Stay tuned.

[UPDATE: 12:42P] Gizmodo is now reporting in this article that Apple was unable to retrieve their iPhone in the few weeks leading up to the stories publication because of poor training and a technical bug in the software of the device.

First, claims Gizmodo, mid-level employees at AppleCare failed in fielding calls from the source when he was attempting to return the device because they were naturally unaware of the specifics of any prototypes, nor were ever trained to handle such a call. They actually include a "quote" (more a retelling), "allegedly" from the unnamed AppleCare Tier II support reps who fielded the very call from their source.

Secondly, Gizmodo tested the MobileMe "Find my iPhone" lo-jack feature on a build of iPhone OS4 on a 3GS device and discovered those features are currently broken, and therefore have concluded Apple would have been unable to use that service to locate and recover the device. They dutifully point out that MobileMe's remote wipe was also broken in the same build, which seems to contradict the "bricked by Apple the next morning" claim, but point out that they "apparently" used the remote wipe command in the Exchange gateway.

However, Gizmodo has not confirmed that the device they found was running the same build of iPhone OS4 that they tested with (likely the first developer seed) nor if they bothered to see if the alternate Exchange remote wipe command worked instead—an interesting question since Apple doesn't use Exchange servers, but rather utilizes their own Mail.app and iCal systems (ask any Apple employee). I suppose Gizmodo is leaving it up to us to fact-check these details. More to come, for certain.

I couldn't resist.

I think it's the same reason I hate it from time to time.

It brings me things like this...

Now that your mind has melted, this is a scene from Hard Ticket to Hawaii, and you can learn more about it here.