Why the hell is Apple letting their employees carry around super-duper secret next-gen electronics in the first place?
And their ridiculous overreaction to Gizmodo has really changed the way I think about them, and I am sure I am not alone. You don’t want people publishing sneak reviews of your product? Try not losing it in a bar.
wmd
Any publicity is good publicity?
Dave Fud
This one is strictly due to the CEO driving the culture of Apple. Steve Jobs is the only person who is allowed to think in Apple. If you know anyone who works there, it is a very strange sort of place, and not somewhere I would invest after the demise of Jobs as CEO.
demkat620
Oh boy, it’s about to get stick dog ugly in here.
I said it before, Apple and their propietary bullshit are the worst.
Makewi
What if it wasn’t actually lost in a bar? What if it was stolen and the thieves just claimed to find it in a bar?
Jon H
“Why the hell is Apple letting their employees carry around super-duper secret next-gen electronics in the first place?”
Testing, I assume. Eating their own dogfood, as it were, by handing out some number of prerelease models for use in typical conditions, rather than just doing testing in the lab.
This particular employee was pretty stupid to take it to a bar on his birthday, which is highly correlated with getting shitfaced, especially when you’re in your 20s.
It’s a bit of a surprise that he hasn’t been fired.
JeffH
I assume the employee was doing field testing, seeing if the phone would work in generic everyday use.
r€nato
They have to test the phone ‘in the wild’ to get a true idea of its performance.
Personally, I have an iPhone and I *always* know where it is, even though I often misplace my keys and wallet.
If I had been trusted with an iPhone prototype, it would probably be chained to my wrist.
…come to think of it, after this episode Jobs is probably going to enact that policy.
BethanyAnne
As I understand it, you have to test the devices in the real world at some point, if you want to know how they work in the real world. Especially if Gizmodo is right about the back being a new radio-transparent ceramic they invented a few months back. You really would want to know how these devices work in, say, a crowded bar. You might not want to find out how good German beer is at the same time, though. :)
r€nato
@Jon H:
I’m betting it’s only a matter of time. He’s probably already been relegated to editing technical manuals or something low-key like that, then he’ll get a quiet shove out the door once this all blows over.
At least he didn’t commit suicide, like the Chinese Foxconn employee who lost his super-duper double top secret iPhone prototype.
Walker
My understanding is that by California law, the finder was supposed to turn the phone into the police (no calling a generic Apple line does not count). So selling the phone is technically theft.
Not saying that this excuses the raid. But this is not a case of finders keepers.
BethanyAnne
And they’ve had around 100 of each of the previous generation in “in the wild” testing. Humans make mistakes. If the person who initially got the device is telling the truth, they tried to get it back to Apple for a week before cashing in via Gizmodo.
r€nato
I’m still an Apple fanboi (for good reasons, not to self-validate my computer/phone buying decisions).
But this episode just reeks of the worst of Microsoft. I know Jobs values corporate secrecy, and for good reason since so many competitors are trying to copy their successes. But this was indeed too heavy-handed, and if Apple does more of this shit in the future, they are really risking their street cred as the ‘good guys’.
Quicksand
@r€nato:
There’s usually no need for shoving if the new job duties are crappy enough.
demkat620
@r€nato: Oh I hear ya!
I have an Ipod touch. It is my lifeline at work. I carry a regular Samsung phone. Now the husband has an LG touch and let me tell you, I’d rather repeatedly punch myself in the neck than use his phone.
Nobody has perfected the touch technology, IMHO, like Apple.
r€nato
@BethanyAnne: I strongly suspect that the finder didn’t try very hard. He could have returned it to the bar’s manager, for instance. He was getting a lot of calls from Apple wanting to know if anyone had turned it in.
r€nato
@demkat620: g/f picked up an iPod nano recently. Man that thing is COOL. I love just handling it and looking at it. It has 16gb of flash memory storage, itself a tiny little modern miracle. Even shoots video. It’s not very good video (particularly in low light, where it sucks ass). But it beats the shit out of nothing at all, of course.
Especially if you happen to come upon the next episode of cops mercilessly beating to death a black guy.
N M
yeah i have to say i am seeing the theft angle coming around as more likely.
mr. whipple
The segment on last night’s TDS about this was hilarious.
Trentrunner
1. New/updated products have to be real-world tested. That’s likely why the engineer had it with him in the bar.
2. It’s unclear yet whether the engineer lost it or whether it was taken from him. Either way, failure of another party to attempt to return the iPhone to its owner is a crime.
3. Tech companies, especially Apple, thrive on mystery, hype, and the cachet their brands can generate. Stealing a prototype (not returning it to its owner) of the world’s most successful tech product and then selling it to an online site is a crime. The value is far higher than a single iPhone.
4. Apple could, and should, at this point, generate some goodwill by dropping the whole thing.
demkat620
@r€nato: Like the nano. My son has one.
But, I listen to books at work. So the touch for me was a great Mom’s day gift.
And the video playback is outstanding. Trueblood looks pretty good on it.
BethanyAnne
@r€nato: Yea, I should say that the person who sold it to Gizmodo is the one most clearly in the wrong. I lost any sympathy for them when they cashed in.
Turbulence
What I don’t get is: why didn’t Apple know exactly where the phone was after it was lost? I mean, we’re talking about a device that has (1) GPS and (2) a continuous internet connection. I’m shocked that Apple doesn’t send their prototypes out into the world with a background lojack-like app. I mean, they write the software for the device, right? They should have know exactly where it was the minute it was reported missing.
jwb
@Walker: What the guy was supposed to do when he found the iPhone is not really the point. To me, Apple managed to turn a potential for laughs and winning publicity into a big loser. Before this happened, I was thinking about buying an iPad, it being so shiny and all. But when Apple got so dickish about this, all desire for the iPad vanished, and it’s not likely to come back unless I learn that the guy deliberately swiped the phone or the Apple technician was the one actually trying to sell it.
Yutsano
@Turbulence: One would think a feature like this would be a good selling point for them. OnStar for your PDA!
Nerull
Overreaction? Maybe. But buying stolen property is a crime, and blogging about buying stolen properly is really fucking stupid. Being a blogger “journalist” doesn’t mean you can go around stealing things just because they are new tech.
mr. whipple
@Turbulence:
I’m kind of shocked it wasn’t able to walk its way back to Apple.
Mnemosyne
I was sympathetic to Gizmodo up to the point where they paid the “finder” $5,000 for the phone. Isn’t buying someone else’s property from a third party what’s commonly known as “theft”?
Or, as someone quoted in the LA Times put it, “You don’t get to keep that Rembrandt just because it fell off the truck.”
Punchy
Last time I left my phone in a bar…..2 dudes picked it up, but instead of returning it to the bartender, took it all the way home with them to Chicago, only to go to a Verizon store to charge it and get my addy, then spend ~$10 to ship it to me 6 weeks later, at which point I already had a new phone.
At least they didn’t sell it to Gazoo or whatever and on-line post all my stupid-ass text messages I never erase.
r€nato
@Nerull: Gizmodo might have saved itself a lot of trouble if it had settled for examining the prototype and taking pictures of it, rather than actually taking possession of it in exchange for cash.
That’s dealing in stolen property, I don’t care if you consider yourself a journalist or not.
Harley
I read this on my iPad.
Then read Alice in Wonderland to my daughter (complete with animation/illustration). Then ordered the new Martin Amis novel (via the Kindle app). Then wasted time playing Doodlejump. Then, and after Tess is asleep, I’ll watch the latest episode of Ashes to Ashes. Then I’ll set the alarm to wake me to LCD Soundsystem tomorrow morning.
I’m not all that concerned about Steve Jobs’ proprietary bullshit. I don’t buy products from people because they’re good guys. I buy them because their products are good.
Mnemosyne
@r€nato:
If Apple had reacted to that, I might be able to be indignant about it. But if I were a company whose prototype had disappeared, I’d probably freak out, too, if a website announced that they had paid cash for someone to give them the lost prototype. Hello, industrial espionage?
ETA: Heck, I’d be willing to be indignant if Apple had brought the hammer down on the finder for posting pictures on the web. It’s the whole “we’ll pay you $5,000 to take possession of something that doesn’t belong to you” part that I am just not on board with. I think that would be considered receiving stolen goods, at a minimum.
The Grand Panjandrum
Who cares about this shit. AL GORE BOUGHT ANOTHER HOUSE. And Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage (no link to her thought. I can’t bring myself to do it.) is on the warpath. And I’m pretty sure he’s still fat. Oh, the horror …
r€nato
Don’t look now, but the Arizona GOP House o’ Crazy wants to make SB 1070 even worse:
Jenkins
@Mnemosyne:
Exactly. Engadget published photos of the phone days before Gizmodo did. Notice how Apple isn’t “ridiculously overreacting” towards them.
BethanyAnne
Gizmodo said they paid for the device not knowing whether it was the new iPhone, or a fake. Seems like a pretty sketchy claim to me. So far, no one is coming out of this looking good.
evie
Gizmodo bought property they knew was not the seller’s. By California law, that means they knowingly bought stolen property. You really think that’s OK?
Just because Jon Stewart is outraged, doesn’t mean he’s right.
mikey
I suspect John is correct about the general perception of Apple. I remember when the record labels started suing their customers, I thought to myself “why should I make the effort to work with the industry to acquire the music I want in the format I want it when their default assumption is that I am a thief?” And to be honest, I haven’t paid for a whole lot of music since.
As a personal choice, I don’t use apple products (except I’m on my fourth iPod). They are wonderfully designed, but the premium price doesn’t buy any functionality. I have reached a point where I buy computers without hard drives and install nothing but Ubuntu and Open Source software. There’s nothing that apple products can do that my computers cannot. And when I can get a tablet running Chrome or a Lightweight Linux implementation like Moblin I’ll go with that.
Let’s face it. We all spend like 90% of our time in a browser. This whole argument about Apple/Microsoft/Linux is so ’90s. The internet is the O/S, the cloud is the server, and the browser is the client. That’s the model – paying a premium for a particular piece of hardware at this point strikes me as dumb, but if you want to…
mikey
dmsilev
Most people, if they found an abandoned phone in a bar, would hand it to the bartender, who would put it in a box somewhere and wait for the owner to call looking for it.
They wouldn’t take it home and then take the case off and proceed to auction the thing off to the highest bidder. For that matter, if the finder’s lawyer is to be believed, the attempts to return the thing to the rightful owner amount to, in toto,
Note, by the way, that the lawyer is careful to say “offered to call” rather than “call”. That’s not exactly trying very hard to return the thing. Not exactly trying at all, actually.
dms
malraux
@Turbulence: iPhones in general have this ability, but apparently there’s a bug in iPhone OS4 that disables that. The phone was bricked remotely almost immediately though.
dmsilev
Oh, and note that Gizmodo knew enough about the engineer who lost the thing that they felt comfortable plastering his name and personal details all across their website. Presumably, they got that information from Hogan. Who, for some reason, never contacted the engineer directly to say “hey, I found your phone in a bar the other night; come pick it up”.
dms
r€nato
@mikey:
agreed
I don’t pay a premium for hardware just for kicks (really, it’s not a premium if you account for your time and productivity). I pay for Apple stuff because it works, and it works crazy good. Plus, there’s no Final Cut Suite for Windows PCs. Plus, I can run Windows XP on my MacBook Pro.
Oh snap, you got me going… anyway, I don’t pay for Apple’s goods because I think Jobs’ jizz tastes like the sweetest honey.
Hob
I don’t feel particularly bad for Apple, but as far as people being dicks, I’d say Gizmodo is competing pretty strongly in that department. They bragged about buying stolen property, they took the fucking phone apart with no regard to who it belonged to, and then… for no discernible reason except to spread the misery around if they got in trouble… they publicly identified the Apple employee who lost the phone (or had it stolen from him), thereby guaranteeing that besides any shit he’s already in at Apple, he’ll forever be known throughout the tech world as “guy who loses stuff causing big PR hassles.”
Tom in TN
Gotta agree with the general sentiment here. Apple seems to be in the legal right, though it is clearly bad publicity.
It was the CA police who raided the guy’s house, by the way, not Apple’s own private shock troops. They had to convince a DA that there was a case before the cops would move. I don’t see how Steve Jobs is the bad guy here.
r€nato
@mikey:
that’s great that you can do that, but – as I am absolutely fucking weary of pointing out to tech heads like yourself – 98% of folks out there either aren’t capable of doing that, or can’t for various valid reasons. That doesn’t make them stupid or foolish, you know.
evie
@Hob:
It’s silly to say, but Word. I agree with every syllable.
SIA
APPropos:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-april-28-2010/appholes
r€nato
@Tom in TN: Apple sits on the board (yes, really) of the California Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT), which is the particular group of cops who executed the search and seizure.
That right there is incredibly Big Brother-ish. If you think Apple didn’t put in a call – maybe not Jobs himself, but certainly someone who gets paid to keep Jobs happy – I’ve got a
bridgeiPhone prototype to sell you.The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
Gizmodo is pretty obviously in the wrong here, as is the guy who sold the phone (both are clearly illegal under CA law; items more than $250 are supposed to be turned in to the police). But if I were Apple, I’d just be happy that the prototype didn’t end up in the hands of a competitor, and leave it at that.
BethanyAnne
@mikey: I don’t spend that much of my time in a browser. Lots of folk might, I guess, but I do design and content creation. Folk on BJ talking about Ubuntu have gotten me curious enough to install it on a vmware installation on my Mac. It’s been nifty, but right now I use an odd mix of OSes, and I don’t really expect that to change too soon. If anything, as my subset of the design field switches to either Axure or iRise instead of Visio, I expect to eliminate my Windows partition.
MikeJ
@mikey:
Unless you make your living keeping servers running. the internet runs on real physical hardware running a real operating system. And that operating system is generally some flavour of unix (usually with no gui at all installed on the box). As long as you can run x windows on windows or macs or linux, who cares about the desktop?
Billy K
If someone stole your phone and you knew exactly who did it, you’d want the police to arrest the guy too. Throw into the mix the whole corporate secrets angle? Come on. I don’t think it’s too much to have the police involved. This was blatant, cognizant theft.
You folks need to read/watch less MSM coverage of this story. They just want to make it a story about Journalists and Shield laws. Big surprise! It has nothing to do with that.
Martin
Testing. The only way to properly test a cell phone is out in the field so you can see that it switches towers properly, has any EM problems, etc. You can test WiFi in house, but unless your campus is many square miles, you have to go in the field to test cellular.
Apple only puts out a select number of these, and Steve Jobs tracks them out of his office.
Apple’s reaction to Gizmodo isn’t an overreaction. The photos first surfaced on Engadget, and Apple hasn’t said shit about them. The problem Gizmodo has is that:
1) They clearly and knowingly accepted stolen property. Gizmodo, of all people, know that no 4G iPhones have been sold so every single one MUST be the property of Apple. Once they got it in their hands, they should have gone to Apple and asked Apple to cover their $5K outlay. Even if they ran the photos and video, I don’t think Apple would have come down on them. (Like I said, they didn’t come down on Engadget that actually got the scoop.) That Gizmodo held onto the phone for over a week and Apple learned about it from their website was their first mistake.
2) Their second mistake, and the one that will fuck them over hard is that they opened the phone, knowing it wasn’t their property, and published the details. The law does not favor them here, and they could be in serious trade secrets problem here. This isn’t like publishing spy shots of a unreleased car. This is like stealing the car, taking it apart, and then publishing the specs of the engine, transmission, etc.
There’s no fucking way that these guys can claim journalistic shield here. They didn’t receive information, they received property. They knew it was stolen, and even knowing that, they disassembled it to learn more about it and then publish it in order to profit from that. From that defense, I could go steal Tom Cruise’s car and take it apart and so long as I blogged about it claim journalistic shield. There’s no fucking way the courts are going to side with Gizmodo.
As for Steve’s role in Apple, it’s really not what people think. Steve’s role in Apple is to say ‘no’ and he’s really fucking good at it. He said no to 3 years worth of iPhone prototypes until one was good enough to say yes to. That’s added almost an HP worth of market value to the company. As he recently told the CEO of Nike – get rid of the crappy products. He means that. His job is to veto 99% of the ideas that Apple comes up with so only the best 1% get through. There are no half-assed products in the long arc. And Steve has hired people that are as brutal on that front as he is. Tim Cook is every bit as good at vetoing, so is Jony Ive, so is Forstall, so are Johnson and Shiller. That’s the culture of the place now. It’s a culture in Steve’s image, no question, but Steve isn’t critical to the operation of Apple. Anyone who thinks that the #2 company on the S&P 500 is that reliant on one person isn’t being realistic. Apple is WAY too big to run everything through Steve. Hell, the guy wasn’t even there for 6 months, and for years during Apple’s run up he was splitting his time between Apple and Pixar, who was equally solid at execution.
(I should add that I know a number of the people involved in all of this. The media, and guys like Jon Stewart, really have gotten the flavor of this story wrong. Nobody is acknowledging that other media outlets published most of the same information well before Gizmodo did and Apple is leaving them alone. Nobody is thinking through why that is.)
John Cole
They sent multiple officers, kicked his door in, and then loaded a truck worth of stuff and took off.
That qualifies as overreaction.
mikey
@r€nato: Like I say, I just can’t get worked up if you see value in a piece of Apple branded hardware. I used to drive Porsches exclusively. At some point I took a step back and asked myself why? I have a Nissan Altima now – I’m actually just as happy with my car and pay fifteen thousand dollar a year less for it. We all decide what’s worth spending our money on.
Back in ’98 I had to have a PC, a Mac and a SPARCStation in my office. It was loud and annoying, but there was no other way to really get cross platform implementations right. All of that is vanishing so quickly, and I find it absolutely beautiful. As long as it conforms to current standards, it’ll work in whatever browser you wish to use, from Google Docs to Photoshop.com to box.net. I find this a much better environment for innovation – generic hardware, network, api and display standards and the application development frameworks that don’t even CARE about the underlying O/S – that’s the key to ubiquitous technology solutions to real-world problems…
mikey
Mr Furious
I haven’t read anything about this, just followed peripherally…
Did Apple try calling the phone and asking for it to be returned?
I have to imagine they tried that. If not, that was pretty stupid. They could have offered something very nice as a reward.
But the guy who “found” it strikes me as a jerk. If I found someone’s iPhone, I’d make a much better attempt to return it to it’s owner: starting with turning it into the bartender, perhaps? Maybe it’s a sketchy dive bar? There’s always the police…putting up a “FOUND” ad on craigslist…Calling some of the numbers in the phone to identify the owner?
Maybe he didn’t really “find” it anyway. Once he shopped it to Gizmodo and took $5K for it, he became a thief either way.
Pigs & Spiders
This has NOTHING to do with losing an iPhone prototype or Gizmodo publishing every detail about it. Apple’s reaction and the CA police’s reaction has EVERYTHING to do with nipping in the bud a perception that R&D Technology is very valuable. None of these companies that sit on the REACT board want to let these guys get away with even offering to buy unreleased hardware, because if they do it will be open season on their secrets—everyone and their mother will be out hunting new devices.
soonergrunt
@Dave Fud: One need only look at what horrible condition Apple was in during the time when Jobs was not in charge to see where that company is going.
Pigs & Spiders
They sent multiple officers, kicked his door in, and then loaded a truck worth of stuff and took off.
They being CA authorities, not Apple.
mikey
@r€nato: Actually, it’s ridiculously easy. It doesn’t require a “techhead” any more – much to my chagrin. Anybody can do it – hell, Canonical developed a tool called WUBI to implement the ext3 file system and Ubuntu next to Windows without a partition or reformat. It’s really just about what you’re willing to spend money on…
mikey
mikey
@r€nato: Absolutely not. Quite the opposite – smart users determine their software requirements and build their compute/network infrastructure to support those needs. But you ain’t most folks. And at the rate of webapp development and advances, you’ll be able to spend your time in a browser in a few years. Cheers…
mikey
Brandon
@Tom in TN: If you called the cops and told them that someone stole your phone (or your proprietary manuscript or something) and that you had their name, address and knew where they lived, what do you think the cops would do? It is not like the shock troops move in the protection of the little guy. If Apple didn’t like this outcome and had hoped for a different outcome, they could have said so publicly. They have not.
I am not letting Gizmodo off the hook and I find the story about how he had the Gawker attorney write him a sternly worded letter about how the search was in violation of the shield law and how the police took the printout of that email into evidence as hilarious.
With that said, when the facts are this straight forward, what the hell is the point of seizing so much property, particularly for a low level crime? Something tells me that the shock troops are going on a fishing expedition.
mikey
@BethanyAnne: Absolutely not. Quite the opposite – smart users determine their software requirements and build their compute/network infrastructure to support those needs. But you ain’t most folks. And at the rate of webapp development and advances, you’ll be able to spend your time in a browser in a few years. Cheers…
mikey
AhabTRuler
@John Cole:
I thought that was pretty much SOP for just about everything that isn’t a civil complaint?
ETA: Fixed confusing non-sequiter.
boatguy
Wow. John, seriously, you’re getting your facts from Wired, the Politico of tech gossip. Try Gruber.
It’s simple. The iPhone was stolen property. Gizmodo purchased stolen property.
The Apple employee was a friggin baseband engineer. It’s kinda important to test cell radios in different environments.
The police (not Apple) are investigating because someone sold stolen property — not because pictures of the iPhone were published.
Contrary to Gizmodo’s original story, the thief admitted today that he didn’t contact Apple. Of course, he didn’t need to. He could’ve turned it over to the police or simply informed the owner/manager of the bar and left his contact info.
Apple didn’t know where the iPhone was because it was remotely wiped (bricked) as soon as the employee sobered up and realized he lost it.
Cris
We’re doing pretty well in this thread, but I certainly don’t see that this story should set off a traditional platform flamewar. How Apple reacted here has little or nothing to do with the relative merits of their products. I see no contradiction between a company that produces elegant, attractive, slickly marketed and hypnotically expensive devices and one that is run by a megalomaniacal control freak.
Jon H
@mikey: ” I remember when the record labels started suing their customers”
This is nothing like that. Apple’s not going after some teenager.
Apple’s going after a bottom-feeding traffic-whore blog network that paid $5000 for stolen goods that belonged to Apple.
At the very minimum, I’d say Apple can’t afford to let Nick Denton and Gizmodo set a precedent of paying large bounties for stolen goods and getting away with it.
I’m guessing John Stewart wouldn’t be very pleased if Nick Denton paid someone $5000 for a stolen pre-release manuscript of the next Daily Show book and then posted it online for everyone to download.
Jon H
@Mr Furious: “I have to imagine they tried that. If not, that was pretty stupid. ”
The employee may have panicked and remotely locked/wiped the phone.
eco2geek
@r€nato:
You are capable of doing that. If you need to keep a proprietary operating system like Windows around to run games or an application that has no open source alternative, you are capable of repartitioning your hard drive and installing an open-source OS like Ubuntu alongside it.
There’s lots of books and, what, community college classes, among other things, to show you how.
You obviously can’t do much to the computer you use at work, unless you’re the boss. But you don’t have to be a geek (read: enjoys dinking with computers) to install Linux. You just have to be able to read and follow directions.
gwangung
@Brandon:
Couple things.
A) This is NOT a low level crime. When you’re dealing in trade secrets, it’s potentially millions of dollars. And a prototype is pretty much the dictionary definition of trade secrets
B) What most people are missing is that the seizure concerned GIZMODO’S criminal activity, not the person who took the phone. What if the person who took the phone implicated Gizmodo as the one who planned this? Given Gizomodo’s standing offer to pay people to steal prototypes, that’s not a far-fetched assumption.
BethanyAnne
@mikey: Yar, one of the things I have to tell the folk around me all the time is that their view of the average user is prolly way off. So, you know, I prolly shouldn’t think that your comment applies vaguely to me… What I was thinking, actually, was that I don’t spend the majority of my time is a browser… I spend it logged into a Warcraft server ;-)
I buy software for the task first, but if there’s a choice that offers me better UI, I’ll pay tons more for it – goes with the territory of being a UI geek. At the end of a long day on a Windows machine, I have a headache. I don’t have that after a long day in front of a Mac. I wish to hell there was a viable alternative to Visio available for my Mac. Omnigraffle ain’t it.
TooManyJens
@mikey:
Why is it much to your chagrin?
gwangung
@Jon H: Well, I’d say that locking a lost prototype remotely would be standard procedure.
And judging by what actually happened, Apple DID go to the alleged thief’s home to ask for the prototype back. And was refused.
Mr Furious
@Jon H: Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. I was thinking in terms of what a normal person might do if they lost their phone…
Mr Furious
Come to think of it, Apple should have built in a little Mission Impossible tape player self-destruct into it’s prototype.
Problem solved!
Martin
@r€nato: Industrial espionage is a very serious problem in silicon valley. The response team exists for that reason and Apple’s argument in this case is that Gizmodo, because of how they handled this situation, has engaged in industrial espionage.
People also need to keep in mind that Apple has been looking for this phone for a month. Gizmodo held onto it for a week. It seems like a short time frame to many people not familiar with the case, but Apple has been dumping a LOT of energy into this for quite some time.
WereBear
@mikey: I hear ya, Mikey. But this:
Might as well be Aramaic to 99% of the people I know who use computers. Somebody was thrilled today when I showed them how to paste unformatted text in Word.
As far as the iPhone raid goes, I must say that it did seem like an overreaction to bust down his door. This is a couch potato nerdy type, who has the violence potential of a gerbil.
But confiscating all his electronics; yeah, if he’s been paying for stolen property and possibly leaking proprietary information, that’s serious stuff. He’s in a world of legal hurt now.
mikey
@Jon H: Maybe so, Jon, but there’s YOUR perception and there’s the perception of the population at large. Many people are simply not going to think about it in this way, and many people who do aren’t going to SEE it this way. Like I say, I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I’m pretty sure Apple’s hurting their image. They could have done a LOT less and ended up in pretty much the same place….
mikey
dmsilev
@BethanyAnne:
Take a look at the latest versions of virtualization software for the Mac (VMWare and Parallels). They’ve reached the point where you can run a Windows application in a VM, and except for the fact that the application window has the styling of whatever version of Windows you’re running, it integrates nicely with the Mac environment. You can read and write documents on the Mac hard-drive, copy and paste back and forth, etc. If you prefer to do most of your work on a Mac, but there’s some must-have Windows application, it’s a pretty slick solution.
dms
Jon
I wish I knew where I saw this, but somebody elsewhere pointed out that there is a very simple rule of human behavior that everyone knows: if you find something in a bar? GIVE IT TO THE BARTENDER. If you lose something in a bar? ASK THE BARTENDER.
This could all be spun as a wacky misadventure with no real cause for criminal complaint right up to the point where $5K changes hands. Ironically, the money angle is what made this a felony under California law, once payment was exchanged for goods not the property of the seller.
And as many have said, Engadget beat Giz to the punch by two days with pictures and description, and nothing has happened. I’m sure that the Gawker Media people would love everyone to buy the “martyr to the First Amendment” angle, but if I were their lawyers, I would be less concerned with trumpeting to the heights and more worried about pleading down to something that doesn’t end with Jason Chen married to the guy with the most cigarettes (Neal Stephenson gets a nickel). Because we have already established that the DA’s office in San Mateo County is…enthusiastic.
In the interest of full disclosure, I was once a toiler in the orchards of Cupertino Rainbow Produce, Ltd, and I do have a certain affection for the iPhone for reasons I shouldn’t go into. But I’m also a true believer in Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, and I think if the Gawker boys understood “Buy the ticket, take the ride” they might have thought twice about this whole escapade.
Cris
Note to self: do NOT download the “self destruct” app
mikey
@TooManyJens: It was (kind of) a joke. I used to make a bunch of money helping companies deploy interactive content across multiple platforms. We worked mostly in Director in those days, and had to modify the executables to work on the target platforms of choice, along with understanding which file types were expected by a given O/S. Now it’s simple – you develop to the browser, and deploy from the cloud. Nobody needs me, and hey, guess what? I’m unemployed!
mikey
Joshua
What overreaction? Gizomodo purchased stolen property. The police, not Apple, arrested the editor who bought it and then blogged openly about purchasing stolen property and confiscated his computers as evidence in a criminal case.
A crime was committed. The police responded (for once) appropriately.
How, exactly, are Apple overreacting?
Jon H
@mikey:
Frankly, I don’t think this will hurt Apple at all.
I expect the 4G iPhone to sell like crazy.
mikey
@Jon H: I think there’s no doubt about that, but the two expectations are not exclusive of one another…
mikey
Anne Laurie
@Yutsano:
The libertarians would bitch, not without reason, about the Big-Brother-ish possibilities. On the other hand, as someone from the back end of Gen Boomer, I can assure you that people would pay extra to enable a “tracking device”, especially one the user could activate. Anyone who thinks using the landline to find one’s misplaced cell is just silly hasn’t crested 40 yet. Of course it’s gonna be even more desirable for the iPad than the phones, because the tablet is too big to stick in a pocket or hang on a lanyard so those of us in the aging-eyes demographic are going to accidentally leave them everywhere.
Tom in TN
@Brandon: Obviously, one of the reasons the REACT team exists is to protect the extremely valuable IP of Silicon Valley. There was no way of knowing going in whether or not this guy was strictly working for Gizmodo – he may have had other contacts with the Chinese, for example. It seems rather unlikely that he did, but I can understand their panicked reaction. International industrial espionage is not a paranoid fantasy.
As Pigs & Spiders suggested, some of this is undoubtedly deliberate intimidation, as well – there are dozens of companies testing prototypes in the area, and it would seriously cramp the industry if a market developed for stolen equipment. All things considered, I don’t have much sympathy for the Gizmodo crew.
Turbulence
@MikeJ:
As long as you can run x windows on windows or macs or linux, who cares about the desktop?
I recently swapped out a $2K mac book pro for a $430 acer. The mbp was state of the art when I got it last year; the acer is a refurb that I installed ubuntu on. For my purposes, the acer is better. Here’s why:
(1) apt-get just blows away software installation on os x. Almost everything I need is right there, updates are totally seamless, and I don’t have to go hunting across the internet to find software.
(2) OS X’s virtual memory/paging code is complete crap. Seriously. I know enough about kernel architectures to say this. Both laptops had 4 GB of RAM and doing the same damn thing, the mbp was constantly swapping. It is a complete joke.
Now, for lots of people, these things won’t matter, but they’re pretty huge for me.
Martin
@Jon H: That’s not the issue. How many 3G phones will Apple sell before then? If it caused 3G phone sales to fall off a cliff, that’s a $5B revenue hit to this quarter which will fuck up the stock.
The other side of the issue is how much of a head-start do Apple’s competitors get now that Apple’s trade secrets (not the external of the phone which they’re fine on, but the internals which Gizmodo revealed by taking the phone apart) have been published? How soon will these other products hit the market and push down Apple’s sales?
John Cole
Look- I understand and agree with many of you about the stolen property bit, and the proprietary nature, but when you have cops kicking in doors over a stolen phone, a lot of people who have had their houses robbed in a city somewhere and had to wait two hours for a response are sitting there going “WTF!” You don’t get that many officers for a shooting in some places.
This is a PR nightmare for Apple, even if they were the wronged party. If I were at Apple, I would suggest Jobs works to have all the charges dropped and then does something to turn this into a joke or something light-hearted. Invite him to the release of the new phone and give him the first one and say “Since you were so clearly interested in having one, here is the first…” Something.
Mr Furious
@Jon H:
Yeah? I expect sales of the iPhone 3Gs to fall off a cliff in the meantime…
Martin
@Anne Laurie: iPhones already have a host of solutions you can install. Apple was a little dumb to not have one on the phone. Typically these involve having the phone tweet, etc. the phone GPS coords at regular intervals, when it’s turned on, etc. to a user determined address.
I understand that all future prototypes now have a proper lojack that Apple will remove from the shipping versions.
eco2geek
Apple’s got a history of going to absurd lengths to protect their so-called “intellectual property,” from suing to get fan web sites to remove leaked future user interface specs, to suing a guy for putting up a developer copy of a future version of their OS on peer-to-peer. (The reason it was so much of a big deal with the guy who posted their OS on peer-to-peer was that the culprit could hardly afford a lawyer. It seemed pretty heavy-handed.)
In other words, this business with the iPhone is nothing new.
Apple’s not a “good guy,” they’re a corporation whose main goal is to make a profit for their shareholders. Last I heard, Gizmodo and Gawker Media were privately held, but they’re businesses too. They sprang for $5K on what was essentially stolen property because they knew it’d pay off.
This hardly registers on the outrage-o-meter.
victory
My opinion has not changed from this event.
I still think they are just an overpriced status piece of product.
Every product they make from computers to mp3 players to operating systems you can get equal to better products from starting around 1/2 price.
Jon H
@Anne Laurie: “I can assure you that people would pay extra to enable a “tracking device”, especially one the user could activate.”
If you’re on Apple’s MobileMe service, and have an iPhone, you can get the location of your phone via the web, on a map, and even send messages to it.
I believe this requires that you have location services and GPS turned on on the phone, however, which uses a little more battery.
You can also remotely lock and wipe the phone via your MobileMe account page.
Mr Furious
@John Cole: It sounds to me that Apple is going after Gizmodo and Gawker—not the schlub who “found” the phone. He deserves a heavy slap.
Gizmodo will be in civil court post haste. And they deserve it. They didn’t publish spy photos, they did their best to expose everything about the phone’s internals to Apple’s competition.
Jon H
@Mr Furious: “Yeah? I expect sales of the iPhone 3Gs to fall off a cliff in the meantime…”
True. But not because consumers are indignant about Apple’s response. Sales will fall because consumers know a new phone is imminent.
Mr Furious
@eco2geek:
7 million page views and counting for that iPhone post. They won’t exactly be a household name after this, but they’ll be much more widely known.
Martin
@John Cole: Apple will put out a statement at the appropriate time. They’re completely in the right here.
What the public doesn’t realize is that a missing iPhone was known in the community for some time. Not only had word spread that Apple lost it, and that someone found it and was trying to figure out what to do with it, and that several parties were looking for the individual that found it. About a week prior to the photos being published Apple appears to have concluded that this was no longer a simple case of a lost phone but rather a concerted effort to find a buyer for Apple trade secrets.
It’s been presented as one big coincidence by Giz, and perhaps much of it was, but when there are whispers going around the community for weeks about a missing prototype, and then whispers going around that there are buyers for the prototype, a company like Apple is right to assume that something nefarious is afoot. Giz really misread this. What’s more, I know that they were warned by 3rd parties that Apple was going to land on them like a fucking nuke for being involved in something that Apple had long shifted out of the ‘accident’ category to the ‘intent’ category. Remember, the phone was missing from Apple for a month.
Mr Furious
@Jon H:
That’s what i meant. Why buy a phone now if a better one is coming in eight weeks?
99% of consumers would have no idea about the 4G phone until Apple rolled out it’s carefully planned release a week or two before it went on sale. This has the potential to do real, tangible financial damage to Apple. And At&T. Not that I give a fuck about them… :-)
Mr Furious
@Martin: Word.
Jon H
@John Cole: ” If I were at Apple, I would suggest Jobs works to have all the charges dropped and then does something to turn this into a joke or something light-hearted. Invite him to the release of the new phone and give him the first one and say “Since you were so clearly interested in having one, here is the first…” Something.”
Why should he, when the guy only did it to make Nick Denton even more money?
This isn’t an overenthusiastic fan writing blog posts in his underpants, this is a guy who works for a blog network that makes over $10 million a year.
Denton’s also the guy whose Gawker blog has a feature called Gawker Stalker, where NYC celeb sightings are plotted on a map. Often that might not be a problem (for visiting celebs who live elsewhere), but I’d think it could be used to determine the neighborhood where a celeb lives, and the places they visit regularly. Which is rather creepy.
Chuck Butcher
@John Cole:
Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure that if it was my phone and I was taking thousands of dollars of damage for international calls doors would be kicked in…
Jon H
I think the main lesson here: don’t work for Nick Denton, he’ll let you take the fall.
slag
@John Cole: Agreed. You are not alone.
scav
Oh dear, the AppMask splipped a little. Sorta like seeing what really goes on under the Papal gowns. But that Stewart thing is brilliant and is justification enough for every minute of the whole event.
daveX99
I got into Linux because of Microsoft’s shenanigans, and over the years I realized that Apple is not much different. They are working very hard to lock you into their vision, their paradigm. It is really about locking you in as a revenue stream.
That feels creepy.
I can sympathize with everybody who feels that Apple’s products are just so well made that they see no other choice, but that’s not for me. There’s a control-freak feel to it all.
-d.