I assume that most of you remember the story of that iPhone 4 lost by an Apple employee in a bar and presented to the whole world before the presentation. That information brought Apple to the center of attention and was the basis of a huge scandal between the company and an American publication, but in the end all the iPhone won, that being the point where sales increased significantly.
However, this is not the first iPhone prototype lost by an Apple employee, the famous Tony Fadell being close to doing the same thing. Tony Fadell is known as the "father of the iPod" for the work done in the development of this product, but he also worked on the development of the iPhone and managed to lose, for a few hours, a prototype of the iPhone 2G.
Many years ago, Tony Fadell was using a prototype iPhone outside of Apple and carried one on a plane trip. The terminal was placed in his pants pocket, but after completing the trip he realized that the prototype was no longer in his pockets, and from here began a real crisis for him.
How Apple secretly recovered an iPhone prototype
Being sure that Steve Jobs would fire him for losing the prototype, as the Apple president warned from the beginning, Tony Fadell went through a serious scare more than 10 years ago. Searching through all the pockets of his clothes, he did not find the prototype of the first iPhone, so he had to call the airline employees to help him find it.
Without telling the employees the importance of the terminal they have to find, the device was recovered from the space between the seats of the plane. It seems that he fell out of his pocket and entered one of the spaces between the seats, and he could have stayed there for a long time if he wasn't so important to the Apple company.
"Steve had expressly told me it was totally top secret. He said he was going to fire anyone who tells the world. I was sweating bullets. I was walking through every scenario thinking about what could happen," he told me. None of them ended well. After two hours, relief – thanks to the efforts of a search party that didn't know what it was trying to find. It fell out of my pocket and it was lodged in between the seats!"
If Tony Fadell had not recovered that prototype of the first iPhone, then Steve Jobs' presentation on January 9, 2007 could have been completely different, with many people knowing what to expect. Perhaps this would have given the first iPhone the opportunity to attract even more customers, but even so, it had an extremely good reception.
