The Lost Cell

There’s quite a bit of hoo-hah about some poor Apple employee having left a super-secret future iPhone version in a Redwood City bar:

For anyone who has ever lost a cellphone, remember this: it could be worse. You could be the person who left his phone in a bar in California. And it wasn’t just any phone; it was a supersecret version of the next iPhone. That model is not expected to be formally unveiled for a couple of months.

For the people at Apple, it must be like a bad version of the guy walks into a bar joke.

The company is known as the most secretive in Silicon Valley, and leaks are rare. But after the phone prototype was left in a bar in the Silicon Valley town of Redwood City, photos of the device began appearing over the weekend in technology blogs, sparking a frenzy of hype among the Apple-obsessed.

I have seen some little bit of commentary on the incident. Some are thinking about what it means WRT Apple’s intellectual property. Others are interested in the technology. Still others wonder whether Nick Denton, who apparently paid to get the thing so it could be disassembled, is a receiver of stolen goods.

My immediate reaction is that Apple isn’t conforming to Sarbanes-Oxley. If they were they couldn’t have abandoned a piece of important proprietary and, presumably, trade secret intellectual property sitting in a bar. Either it’s a goofy un-Applelike marketing ploy, it should be investigated, or Sarbanes-Oxley is a sick joke.

I know which of those I think is most likely. How about you?

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