Apple Gets Back its iPhone, Gray Powell Turns into Cult Hero

By: Charles Cooper
Topics: In The News ,; Tech Talk

The Flickr photostream page now says this: "gray_powell doesn't have anything available to you."

(Credit: Gizmodo)

For Gray Powell's sake, let's hope that the beer was good.

As the world has since learned in the last 24 hours, Powell is the most famously unlucky software engineer in Silicon Valley today. (Typing in his name mid-afternoon Tuesday, more than 6.42 million mentions of Gray Powell came up.) After bringing a prototype of an upcoming iPhone to a birthday party at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a Redwood City, Calif., beer garden, Powell proceeded to hoist a few-and then forgot the super-secret unit on the bar.

"I underestimated how good German beer is," the 27 year-old typed into a Facebook update from his iPhone, according to Gizmodo. It must have been really wunderbar because Powell broke every book in the Apple rule book. It got worse when another patron at tech blog wound up with the iPhone and sold it to Gizmodo.

And so began a story that has fascinated the tech cognoscenti, where anything and everything related to Apple is pure catnip. Indeed, the guessing game is whether Apple has enough of a sense of humor about the incident to bring Powell on stage and help demo the unit when the product (presumably) debuts sometime later this summer. That would be a crowd-pleaser and Steve Jobs is enough of a showman to appreciate the PR windfall Apple would reap.

That doesn't mean it's going to happen. When it comes to product leaks, Apple reacts more sharply than other tech companies. In 2006, it lost its legal attempt to force two technology blogs - AppleInsider and Powerpage to reveal the sources of confidential information they used in their news stories about Apple.

CNET: Q&A with Nick Denton: How Gizmodo Got its iPhone Scoop
How Apple lost the next iPhone

Officially, Apple continues to treat this incident as a case of lost and found. The company made no mention of the incident during its second fiscal quarter Tuesday afternoon. Officially, Apple has not even acknowledged that this is a next-generation iPhone.

After Gizmodo ran stories with the photographs of the unit, Apple sent a carefully-worded letter to Gizmodo editorial director Brian Lam demanding the return of the "device."

"Dear Mr. Lam, it has come to our attention that Gizmodo is currently in possession of a device that belongs to Apple," wrote Bruce Sewell, Apple's senior vice president and general counsel. "This letter constitutes a formal request that you return the device to Apple. Please let me know where to pick up the unit."

The handover took place Monday night. In the meantime, Powell has become something of a celebrity on Twitter, where the wisenheimers are in rare form: My personal favorite: "I went drinking with Gray Powell and all I got was a lousy iPhone prototype..."

Charles Cooper is an executive editor at CNET News. He has covered technology and business for more than 25 years, working at CBSNews.com, the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet. E-mail Charlie.

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by tsigili April 21, 2010 12:11 PM EDT

I am fairly certain that software engineer, is not being very appreciated by his employer, about now.

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by ToolMangler1 April 21, 2010 4:03 PM EDT: No!!! I am very certain that he did as his boss told him. (Steve Jobs got millions in free publicity by doing this.)


by SusanJ47 April 21, 2010 9:27 AM EDT: Millions of great employees lose their job with *NO* wrong-doing of any kind... and a careless drunk in a bar loses a company's most valuable item... and we should "save" him?

If he loses a 2nd phone... should we continue to save his job?

A 3rd phone?

At what point do you stop this?

If you owned a company... do you like having as many drunk/careless employees as possible?; Reply to this comment

by krotec54 April 21, 2010 12:23 AM EDT

Yes, This dude would have been history in our company. My company had to replace some of the alcoholic techs in our department; they could not keep their mouth shut and always calling in sick.

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by anymousman April 21, 2010 12:47 AM EDT: So you think just because he was drinking on his birthday he is an alcoholic. That speaks for your intelligence level.


by rachelrobot April 21, 2010 4:37 PM EDT: So true. Like you've never had a beer on your birthday. Or lost your phone in a bar. Get a f*cking life.

by RoboBlogger April 20, 2010 10:56 PM EDT

I'm not a big fan of Apple but seeing the prototype with the video conferencing capability I will actually go out and buy one. They should hop to it cause everyone is actually going to want this one.

Hopefully, they drop AT&T as it's standard service provider or switch to something else. AT&T tends to view it's customer's as idiots when it comes to offering its service plans.

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by pete_in_az April 21, 2010 12:06 AM EDT: ATT and Tmobile are the worst carriers out there. Put it with somebody with CDMA like Verizon. And while we are on the topic, Verizon needs to lower the damn prices, this $20 text messaging plan plus a seperate $35 data plan thing is actually painfull to us occasional users.

Hence why I have a piece of **** Tmobile crap ass phone with lousy coverage and horrible data speeds.


by JavMD April 20, 2010 8:08 PM EDT: This dude better have some emergency funds on hand, because i would believe he would be fired or demoted for such a screw up. Good Luck, you might as well, get on a plane and jump out with a parachute, you'll be more lucky than staying at Apple; Reply to this comment