The Lost iPhone 5 Fiasco and Apple’s Response Shows Steve’s Authority Remains in Spirit

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(credit: Incase)

1984 was the year Apple released the Macintosh and changed personal computing forever. They capitalized on the device’s inaugural year by creating a Hollywood-grade television advertisement inspired by George Orwell’s masterpiece “1984”, in which a woman wearing an Apple logo being chased by the novel’s Thought Police hurls an Olympian hammer into the projection of the propaganda-spouting Big Brother. The commercial’s message was obvious: the personal computer experience was no longer going to be based on the priorities of bottom line-minded manufacturer moguls. Apple was going to offer the public a computer designed to their wants and needs.

Apple Computer has come quite a long way since 1984. Steve Jobs launched it, was fired from it, returned to it, and most recently left again for good. During that time he led the efforts to create such revolutionary products as the iMac G3, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. The company as a collective is responsible for where personal computing technology is today, and nothing reflects that more than the fact that it’s the second most valued company in the world.

That success, per the Jobs playbook, had been at the cost of individual designer freedom and most important of all, absolute secrecy. Seriously, when it came to the next big steps and the next big decisions, Steve Jobs was adamant about Apple’s motives remaining as unknowable as those of a chess grandmaster. It kept them one step ahead of the enemy in every way imaginable. Jobs, the ruthless genius that he was, always knew how important that secrecy was. At the end of the day, the freedom of expression the Apple experience offered to the public was at the expense of the freedom of expression of Apple employees. Nothing they said or did could ever compromise the secrecy of their projects.

So now there’s this lost iPhone 5 prototype left at a Frisco bar. As you know this same exact event happened last year and is being dealt in a similar way: Apple is the primary investigator of the theft. This was highlighted by the San Francisco Police Department’s admission that they never received a report about an iPhone gone missing at that bad. As it turns out the department’s press team wasn’t alerted that the police were “assisting” Apple with the investigation into who took the iPhone prototype.

So Apple, by-way of police assistance, is currently conducting searches in residences they suspect the iPhone 5 may be being held. The evidence linking these locations was both incriminating and Apple’s to have first before the police: in-phone GPS tracking. The phone was not recovered at the location search, however the inhabitant told investigators he was at the bar the iPhone was last seen the night it went missing.

It’s a testament to how much the Steve Jobs way of doing things remains the core of Apple Computer. Essentially, they aren’t messing around with the confidentiality of the latest iPhone release, which may or may not hit shelves next month. It’s classic Jobs in spirit, as he personally called the possessor of last year’s stolen iPhone 4 prototype asking for it to be brought back to Apple headquarters. In the two weeks since he left his post as CEO, Jobs still holds a presence over the company’s actions even if he isn’t there to execute them himself.

Apple continues to represent personal computing freedom. They accomplish this by preserving secrecy through private police action.