Apple Has Lost 3 iPhones. Is It Losing Control, Too?

Apple has lost not one, but three prototype iPhones in the past year. That’s a perplexing development for a company that is famously tight with security.

A leaked fourth-generation iPhone popped up in Vietnam this week, with a detailed video and teardown photos that show the ins and outs of the hardware. That video follows an iPhone lost in March, and put on display by Gizmodo in April. And there may be a third iPhone prototype out there somewhere ? the one whose disappearance reportedly led a Chinese worker to commit suicide in 2009.

Three lost prototypes would be a big deal at any company, but they’re especially unusual for Apple, which operates on a level of secrecy comparable to the CIA, taking extreme measures to prevent leaks. Former employees have said workers in product-testing rooms are required to cover up gadgets they?re working on with black cloaks, and they must flip a red warning switch when prototypes are unmasked to tell everyone to be extra careful. The company is known to even spread disinformation to its own employees about product plans to track down leakers, according to The New York Times.

So what gives with the repeat leaks of the most anticipated handset of the year? With the case of the Gizmodo iPhone, the answer is obvious: An engineer field-testing the next-gen iPhone left his prototype in a bar. We’re guessing that Apple’s field-testing program has been severely curtailed since that happened. But the other two iPhones overseas point to a bigger problem for Apple: The bigger the company gets, the more partners it must work with, and the less Apple has control over the whole process.

More disconcerting is the rumor that the Vietnamese man may have bought the prototype for $4,000 from the black market. Gizmodo paid $5,000 for the lost iPhone in California. These transactions raise questions of whether Apple’s partners — or unscrupulous people with access to those partners — might create a business out of pilfering and leaking products.

It also makes you wonder how much of this goes on unpublicized. Perhaps companies who produce knockoffs have had their hands on a next-gen iPhone prototype for months, or perhaps one of these will make their way to a major competitor like HTC.

This is getting pretty ugly, and we can’t imagine Apple is going to sit still. But what can they do? Leander Kahney, former Wired.com news editor and owner of the Cult of Mac blog, said he spoke to a private eye about how trade secrets leak. In 2008, the characteristics about the second-generation iPhone were leaked because the suppliers creating the plastic cases likely had connections to those creating third-party protective cases for the iPhone, Kahney said. (They are all in the plastics industry, after all.) In that scenario, Apple would simply have to fire the unfaithful supplier.

In the case of the Vietnam iPhone, Kahney said he believes this was an act of corporate espionage. However, MacRumors’ Arnold Kim told Wired.com he disagreed, because if a spy stole a phone, he or she would probably keep it quiet rather than sell it to a publication.

Whatever the case may be, Apple is likely tracking down the people who ended up with the latest prototype to determine where it was sold, and ultimately, who sold it.

“It’s a major problem for them and a major leak,” Kahney said. “Intelligence about what components they’re using is extremely valuable. The economic stakes are huge.”

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