The news of the poor lad who had a few too many drinks then unwittingly left his upcoming iPhone prototype on a bar stool in Silicon Valley has spread like wildfire across both social and traditional media channels over the last day. The hoopla has of course caused a majority of the current event chats around the office to center around the topic. Once the debate over whether the device is the real deal (which it seems to be given the information that has spread) it quickly turns from technical to promotional: did Apple stage this stunt to intentionally “leak” the product?

Although I’m never surprised by the PR prowess of Apple, I find it quite hard to believe that they would drop a bomb like this so far in advance of the traditional iPhone update launch in June. If we were a few weeks out, it might make sense to get the PR machine rolling with a “leak”, but even then sheerly not of this magnitude. Apple is a master at throttling information to build an image exactly the way they want to: in a controlled manner. This latest seems to be anything but controlled.

So I say to those who see this as Apple’s latest stab at PR brilliance, not even the most controlling organizations are always in control. Which in an of itself, could be PR brilliance.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.