Why The “Lost & Found” iPhone 4G is a Load of Crap

Consider the following:

Apple is obsessively secretive. It’s almost as secretive as a covert government agency. Like CIA operatives, Apple employees won’t talk about what they do, even with their closest confidants: wives, boyfriends, parents. Employees certainly will not discuss their work with outsiders. Many won’t even refer to the company by name. Like superstitious theater folk who call Macbeth the “Scottish play,” some Apple employees call it “the fruit company.”

Talking out of school is a firing offense. But many employees don’t know anything anyway. Apple staffers are given information on a strictly need-to-know basis. Programers write software for products they’ve never seen. One group of engineers designs a power supply for a new product, while another group works on the screen. Neither group gets to see the final design. The company has a cell structure, each group is isolated from the other, like a spy agency or a terrorist organization.

[…]

Some of Jobs’s secrecy measures get a little extreme. When Jobs hired Ron Johnson from Target to head up Apple’s retail effort, he asked him to use an alias for several months lest anyone get wind that Apple was planning to open retail stores. Johnson was listed on Apple’s phone directory under a false name, which he used to check into hotels.

Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, said he’s not allowed to tell his wife or kids what he’s working on. His teenage son, an avid iPod fan, was desperate to know what his dad was cooking up at work, but Daddy had to keep his trap shut lest he get canned. Even Jobs himself is subject to his own strictures: he took an iPod hi-fi boombox home for testing, but kept it covered with a black cloth. And he listened to it only when no one else was around.

- Leander Kahney, News Editor for Wired.com - from his book “Inside Steve’s Brain”

If you still think that Steve gave a fully-fledged working prototype, to some guy who only graduated college 3 years ago (and by that measure has worked at Apple for less than 3 years with no prior senior-level work experience), and that this same guy then took this fully working unreleased Apple product and went to a bar, got drunk, and forgot about it…..

Well - you’re fucking mad.

I’m fairly sure that the product is real at this point, but the story of “Gray Powell” and how it was “lost & found” is an utter load of crap.

There’s a lot more to this one than Gizmodo are letting on.