Jason Chen of Gizmodo shows off an apparent prototype of Apple's next iPhone.
If you've ever had the misfortune of dealing with Apple's PR people, you know the company treats information about its products the same way Kathy Bates' character in Misery treats authors.
So when the popular tech blog Gizmodo revealed Monday it had managed to get its hands on Apple's as-yet-unreleased, fourth-generation iPhone, the Web let out a yelp of shock and schadenfreude. (On Saturday Engadget posted pictures of the device).
It appears somebody (the odds-on favourite is an Apple quality tester or engineer) misplaced the phone in a bar in Redwood City, California. Somebody found it, and it made its way to Gizmodo. It's likely that large sums of money were also exchanged.
Given the extent to which Apple goes to protect such information, Gizmodo is likely to believe that whatever they paid for the new iPhone was worth it. For comparison purposes, the average Gizmodo blog post gets between 5,000 and 50,000 views. As I write this, the iPhone post is closing in on 2-million views. Other tech blogs are seeing a huge jump in viewership simply by posting links to the Gizmodo article.
This is, in large part, Apple's doing. There is much talk of conspiracy theories involving the company deliberately leaking the device, but that seems unlikely. What's more likely is that some unfortunate and absent-minded Apple employee is currently scrolling through Craigslist looking for a new job.
But there's a reason Gizmodo wouldn't be sitting on 2-million pageviews right now if it had acquired, say, the new Windows 7 phone. Apple's insistence on absolute secrecy fuels the market for leaks, be they legit or not. Toward the end of January, just before Apple finally revealed the iPad, you could have taken a picture of Saran wrap stretched around a dinner plate, called it an exclusive image of Apple's new tablet, and drawn a million visitors to your blog. Indeed, about half of Gizmodo's blog post about the new iPhone is a complex justification of why the blog's staff believes this thing they have isn't a hoax.
With the initial frenzy dying down, the question on many observers' minds right now is a legal one: will Apple sue Gizmodo, either over the initial post or to demand that the misplaced iPhone be returned? The latter appears more likely than the former, since suing the tech blog would bring about a wave of bad publicity and would do nothing to suppress the information, which is now everywhere.
In the long run, Apple may have to reconsider its long-running policy of secrecy. With every new product, the immense hype and anticipation fuels a demand for any glimmer of information, and if Gizmodo did in fact pay for the new iPhone, then there's a growing and lucrative market for any Apple employee who wants to spill the beans. Of course, the same hype and anticipation is what causes people to line up overnight to buy 500,000 iPads the weekend they come out, so maybe secrecy isn't such a bad thing.
But none of this is important. What's important is that the new iPhone is slightly more square-shaped than the last one, and its back is made of glass, or ceramic, or something. We're not quite sure.