The Other Engineer Who Lost The iPhone 4th Generation Prototype
The Web is abuzz for the past two days with complete details/photos/videos of the 4th generation iPhone. Gizmodo got this yet to be released 4th generation iPhone after it was allegedly misplaced by an Apple employee Gray Powell. Sure Powell has committed the mistake of his lifetime and could very well be sacked by Apple. In turn Apple also stands to lose marketing worth millions of $$ it gets before major product launch. But this post is not about iPhone and Gray Powell or Steve Jobs. It is about Sun Danyong. Who is Sun Danyong? He was an engineer at Foxconn (Company that manufactures iPhone for Apple) who committed suicide last year after he misplaced the prototype of 4th Generation iPhone way back in July. We wrote about this back then and it goes like this…
Sun was responsible for shipping 16 iPhone [4th generation] prototypes to Apple. The story goes that when he reported this to his boss at Foxconn he was interrogated and later goons of Foxconn illegally searched his apartment and then physically abused him. He later committed suicide by jumping from a 12-story building on 16th July.
Chilling. An engineer kills himself because he lost an iPhone and coud not take on the goons of Foxconn. Thank God US is no China and Apple no Foxconn other wise we could have imagined the fate of poor Gray Powell. On the other hand this also goes on to show the kind of secrecy Apple enforces across its production chain. This Omerta thing of Apple goes just too far some times.
My best wishes to Gray Powell. Quite fatefully he has anyway made Apple pay for what ever happened to that poor engineer in China. Rest In Peace Sun Danyong.
Good to hear that. This is the last straw for apple in my eyes. From now own, apple is evil.
Did you ever stop to think that this type of publicity may have been staged and has only made iPhone users and people sitting on the fence want it more?!!! Back in the 90’s I was working as a strategy guy for the a the then new AT&T Wireless. We are launching this ‘new’ tech and it was a huge secret. The tech was SMS which no one could wrap their minds around as to its ‘commercial value’. We leaked a secret months before the roll out at the trade show. The up shot was we got much more play out of people sharing the secret that we could have paid for in advertising! Gray Powell is now switching to strategic marketing for Apple I hear!
(Twitter: @ mayank25may )
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I did wait and think about it Steven but coudnt convince myself that why would a company like Apple which already gets loads and loads of free press before the launch of any product would want to do such a thing. Is it that after this people would line up and buy iPhone 4g and woudnt have done that if this woudnt have happened? Or have a they got more press in a weeks time than they would have got almost for a month before the keynote and then after the keynote with all the surprise stuff and all… i dont think so.
thanks !
I would have totally agreed with you had it been for some other company but not for Apple whose whole marketing strategy revolves around secrecy.
Also, appreciate your sharing the AT&T story!
(Twitter: @ mayank25may )
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Also, you might like to check out this related discussion we had on Buzz http://www.google.com/buzz/techdusts/ega86k3qxW6/The-Other-Engineer-Who-Lost-The-iPhone-4th