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Wednesday, May 12, 2010
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Apple iPhone 4 – rotten security or rotten marketing?
By Rodney H. Brown
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Apparently someone else has “accidently” let slip one of the alleged new Apple Inc. prototype iPhone 4 HD models, which so famously led to accusations of theft and an editor’s door being broken down when it happened the first time.
This time around, the “lost” prototype turned up in the hands of a Vietnamese technology website, Taoviet, and it seems that organization paid $4,000 for this copy of the in-development phone. In comparison, the website Gizmodo paid $5,000 for its own version of the prototype — a move that led to a Gizmodo editor seeing his front door being bashed in by a special computer crimes unit in his California town.
Why all the “quotation fingers”? Because it seems likely now that Apple hasn’t misplaced or lost either of these two phones. I would bet dollars to donuts that they were both strategically “lost” to generate the kind of massive viral buzz that a company can only dream of. And boy did it work. The first appearance of the iPhone 4 HD got national news coverage in print and on the kinds of news shows that wouldn’t have even briefed an official Apple announcement about the phone.
Now, everyone is waiting for a rumored official announcement about the iPhone 4 HD that might be coming at Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference in June. Much speculation is occurring as well about Apple’s relationship with AT&T and its potential relationship with Verizon. Bloggers run the gamut from saying the appearance of the iPhone 4 HD is laying the groundwork for a Verizon launch, to others saying that Apple and Verizon are mortal enemies after the Verizon, AT&T “coverage map” television ads.
A great deal of the iPhone 4 HD attention came because of the aggressive police response to Apple claiming its phone was stolen property. It’s not every day that a working-stiff web editor gets the SWAT-style treatment in his home. And it’s even more rare that such treatment gets called out because someone has a phone that they maybe aren’t supposed to have in their house, and not a meth lab.
And that gets to one thing Apple might need to worry about. If this is part of a massive viral campaign, and the police resources of San Mateo County, California, were deployed because Apple might not have wanted to break the viral nature of its marketing, someone is likely going to jail.
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