Looks like everyone who was called the last hoax were correct. Even dumbass analysts are smartening up and calling this a marketing gimmick. This seems to be some bizarre form of viral marketing to drum up interest in a dead product. Apple must be in Panic Mode after Google announced its Motorola purchase.
Wow, Apple is going down the shitter even faster than I thought now that Jobs is gone. They're out of ideas to the point where they're reusing the same lame "we lost it in a bar" viral marketing strategy from last year. It won't be long before they become irrelevant again like in the 90s.
I couldn't care less about a shitty marketing campaign, it's iPhone, it doesn't need marketing for christ's sake.
How can it be a marketing gimmick if it's not accompanied by any details about the product or photos about the product? How would that help you sell something? People are already aware that they're going to launch the next version of the iPhone this year.
I guess Apple must hire an unusual amount of alcoholics who carelessly handle expensive prototype equipment. That makes sense.
It makes more sense for a field tester to lose the phone in a bar than for Apple to orchestrate stealth marketing that doesn't involve even the vaguest description of the product. Gizmodo had the iPhone 4 prototype in hand and published a relatively detailed tear down of it. That at least has some material in it to fuel conspiracy theories (although the guys that sold the device to Gizmodo being taken to court by Apple over a year later doesn't really fit). And remember that it was Gizmodo that initiated the iPhone 4 "antenna gate" story...so conspiracy theorists want people to believe that Apple contrived a marketing campaign with Gizmodo and the legal battle was phony, but then Gizmodo immediately turned around and pushed a very negative story about the iPhone 4 antenna? Totally convoluted.
Just because the selling of the phone to Gizmondo and analysis of it wasn't planned, doesn't mean the losing of the phone wasn't a stunt. Lack of technical details have hardly ever stood in the way of hyping/selling a new Apple iProduct in the past - just the fact that fans know it's definitely close to market is enough to have them camping outside their local Apple store.
If it were planned, then Apple would have no incentive to take people to court more than a year later. They would be able to release a device that only contained the details that they wanted to be made public, and obviously wouldn't care about seriously pursuing the legal side.
How would taking people to court for leaking information about a prototype make sense as part of an intentional campaign to encourage people to leak information about prototypes??? Look at what's happened with the second incident: no one is leaking information about it. That would be the opposite of what Apple supposedly wants, correct?
Like I said, the leaking of specs is almost meaningless to most Apple buyers. That part was either not intended, or they just sued them regardless in an effort to have their cake and eat it too.
Only in bizarro PVCF world... CNet, which originally reported the second prototype story, has been running speculative articles about the next iPhone (both for hardware and for release date) the entire year. Apple rumor sites have been doing the same on an even more regular basis. All that is happening without any prototypes being lost in bars. Frankly, some of the photo leaks of purported iPhone parts that come out of China would be more likely as stealth marketing than the prototype thing.
True. Most Apple fans are not tech savvy, at all. They don't know and don't want to know what kind of hardware they're running.
Only in bizarro PVCF world...what do you think these are? Where could they have come from? Did somebody find something in a bar???
Do you know when/where these photos of an iPhone 4 prototype came from in 2010? This is just a quiz to see how much the conspiracy theorists on PVCF really know about Apple leaks.
Probably Apple themselves considering they're the ones orchestrating these stupid publicity stunt hoaxes.
No, not your personal theory about the invisible hand behind the idea to release the photos. Where did it literally come from and when?