Reading through some old CoM posts tonight (for linking and reference in a piece coming out tomorrow), I came across a piece of news we covered years ago that didn’t pay off until this spring.
Way back in 2007, the year the iPhone launched, an AT&T executive told a Kentucky newspaper that Apple disguised its prototypes as something else to avoid arousing suspicion:
So secretive was the project that he didn’t even show the phone to his wife. And when AT&T’s team of testers hit the streets to try the phone in ballparks, subways and skyscrapers, Burns said they used a contraption to cloak the device so nobody would know what the testers were holding.
Burns declined to offer a description of the cloaking device, calling it “something that looked like something else.”
Well, we all learned this spring what that “something that looked like something else” was for the fourth-generation — an iPhone 3G in a protective case, as Jason Chen of Gizmodo showed the world. Strange that this earlier report didn’t come up more often in the massive coverage of the legal rigamarole over the iPhone 4’s “loss”.
This still leaves the greater mystery of how the original iPhone was hidden — putting a case on it alone wouldn’t mask the fact that it was something radically new. Has anyone figured it out? And was it a Zune? I really still hope it was a Zune.
Image from Hideapod.
