Apple Suffers 'Major iPhone X Leak'

Details of new iPhones and other forthcoming Apple devices have been revealed via an apparent leak. From a report: Two news sites were given access to an as-yet-unreleased version of the iOS operating system. The code refers to an iPhone X in addition to two new iPhone 8 handsets. It also details facial recognition tech that acts both as an ID system and maps users' expressions onto emojis. One tech writer said it was the biggest leak of its kind to hit the firm. [...] "As best I've been able to ascertain, these builds were available to download by anyone, but they were obscured by long, unguessable URLs [web addresses]," wrote John Gruber, a blogger known for his coverage of Apple. "Someone within Apple leaked the list of URLs to 9to5Mac and MacRumors. I'm nearly certain this wasn't a mistake, but rather a deliberate malicious act by a rogue Apple employee." Neither Mr Gruber nor the two Apple-related news sites have disclosed their sources. However, the BBC has independently confirmed that an anonymous source provided the publications with links to iOS 11's golden master (GM) code that downloaded the software from Apple's own computer servers. It's a big blow to Apple, which uses surprise as a key element at its events. The leak could take some wind out of its sails as it looks to wow consumers. In 2012, Tim Cook had said the company was planning to "double down on secrecy." At the quarterly earnings call, he blamed the leaks about the upcoming iPhone models as one of the reasons that slowed down the sales of current generation iPhone models. However, an analysis published over the weekend found that Apple itself has been the source of several of these leaks in the years since. Earlier this year, the company held a meeting to boast about its internal progress to curb leaks. The hour-long recording of the meeting ironically got leaked. Nearly all details, except the final press renders of the new iPhone models, have leaked. In a subsequent post, Gruber wrote: The BBC doesn't say definitively that the leak was sent by an Apple employee, but I can state with nearly 100 percent certainty that it was. I also think there's a good chance Apple is going to figure out who it was. [...] That person should be ashamed of themselves, and should be very worried when their phone next rings. Moments ago, 9to5Mac reported about a new tvOS firmware leak, which appeared "to be out in the wild today" that details the upcoming features of the next generation Apple TV streaming device.

Comments

Oh Please!

[fustakrakich]

"Leaks" about Apple products are just hyped up press releases.

Re:Oh Please!

[Anubis IV]

Sure, Apple "leaks" stuff all the time, as most large organizations do, but those mostly follow the same few patterns that you see at all large organizations:
- They use "leaks" to clear out details that they'd rather not have sharing a news cycle with their big announcements
- They use "leaks" to prepare the media and the public for a shock it won't like (e.g. higher prices, no headphone jack, etc.)
- They use "leaks" to get people excited about products by hinting at features

What the "leaks" NEVER do is spoil events by stealing thunder from their keynote addresses, which is exactly what happened here when you look into exactly how much got out. In fact, this one gets even worse, since it...
...spoils nearly all of the major news for their annual iPhone launch
...spoils the first event at the brand new location they spent billions of dollars building
...spoils the event that coincides with the 10th anniversary of the iPhone
...spoiled details about an updated Apple TV that wasn't on most radars
...spoiled everything just two days before the event, utterly deflating it

So yes, Apple "leaks" things, but as a company that directly or indirectly employs hundreds of thousands of employees, they occasionally actually leak things too, and this DEFINITELY falls into that latter case.

Re:Oh Please!

[freeze128]

...or maybe the leak drives focus AWAY from a CEO who is not as good at showmanship as the previous CEO. Honestly, It's only 1 day before the scheduled announcement. It's not enough time to allow any competitor to develop a competing product. After Tuesday, who cares if there was a leak? Everyone will know about the new products and features anyway.

Re:Oh Please!

[0100010001010011]

Didn't a GPU leak during Jobs' tenture cause Nvidia or AMD to lose placement in Apple products for a while?

Re:Oh Please!

[DontBeAMoran]

The iPhone 8 is literally an uglier iPhone 7 that will be easier to break due to the glass back.

And even that is not new at all. The iPhone 4 already had an easy-to-break glass back.

Re:Oh Please!

[DontBeAMoran]

...or maybe the leak drives focus AWAY from a CEO who is not as good at showmanship as the previous CEO.

Just because Steve Jobs really knew how to present things in a keynote with showmanship and Tim Cook sounds as exciting on stage as a monotonic teacher... eh... never mind.

Re:Oh Please!

[Anubis IV]

It's not about the competition. It's about controlling the narrative. If you control the narrative, you get to be the one who starts off in control of setting expectations and reactions, which can have a massive impact on how your products are perceived by the public.

Consider, for instance, how differently the release of information about specs can go. Apple's iPhones aren't known for having the best specs, but they generally seem to punch above their weight, which is to say that despite their specs frequently being worse on paper, user benchmarks and real-world usage suggest iPhones are generally able to get more performance out of lesser hardware.

Now image a few scenarios, one where they control the news, and some others where they don't:

A) Apple announces the new device, but doesn't mention most of the specs, instead merely presenting some pretty graphs that show a massive year-over-year gain in terms of performance, battery life, and the other metrics that users care about. The headline news will be that "great" just became "even better!". If anyone tries to air concerns about the specs, their voice will be drowned by mainstream coverage of headline features. If anyone has questions about the device's performance, they'll be shown the pretty graphs. The actual specs won't come out until the phones are in people's hands. At that point the tech sites will do their usual comparisons against the competition, but any concerns about unflattering comparisons will be rendered moot by the benchmarks and firsthand accounts that will also be coming out at that time. Apple maximizes the number of people who believe their phone to perform well with great battery life, resulting in great unit sales.

-- or --

B) The specs leak in the months before the official announcement. Tech sites do their usual deep dive on the specs, but without any performance charts, firsthand accounts, or benchmarks to go by, all they'll report are the by-the-numbers comparisons that are likely to be unflattering for Apple. With blood in the water and nothing coming out of Apple to the contrary, mainstream sites will start reporting on the growing concern over the performance of upcoming models. The longer it goes without an answer from Apple, the more news cycles these concerns will be stretched across, thus reaching more people. By the time the iPhone is actually announced, everyone from your grandparents to your sister's cousin's roommate will have heard that the new iPhones perform poorly and have worse battery life. The pretty graphs, real-world usage, and benchmarks all showing otherwise will eventually assuage most concerns, but not before some damage will have been done. People that would have bought the new iPhone now won't.

-- or --

C) The specs leak just a few days before the announcement. While not as bad for Apple as (B), this one results in less enthusiastic reporting about the headline features as the surprise has already been spoiled. Additionally, nearly every report will be damped by a perfunctory mention of the leaks. The new iPhones will sell fine, but the overall reaction will be less enthusiastic than it would have been otherwise.

Re:Oh Please!

[dgatwood]

Yep. That's why I skipped straight from the original iPhone to the iPhone 5. The 3G was too soon, the 3GS still didn't have a front-facing camera, and the 4 and 4S had that stupid glass back like they were designed by somebody who flunked out of their mechanical engineering degree program....

Re:Oh Please!

[Anubis IV]

Yup, I believe it was nVidia that spoiled the surprise, and Jobs yanked their cards entirely from all Macs. Apple seems to have softened a bit since then. I've seen other CEOs announce things before Apple on a handful of occasions without Apple dropping them entirely, but Apple does seem to take punitive measures still.

For instance, you'll see estimates suggesting that the mix of supplies for a particular part will be 80-20 from companies A and B. When A then says something before Apple is ready, you'll hear a few weeks later that the mix ended up being closer to 50-50 between companies A and B, rather than the 80-20 that was originally thought.

I'm guessing Apple either bakes it into their contracts or else has enough wiggle room in their contracts that they can punish their suppliers in those sorts of ways.

Re:Oh Please!

[jbmartin6]

I'm not convinced 'spoiled' is the correct adjective, none of the leaked features were anything to get excited about.

Re:Oh Please!

[unixisc]

"Leaks" about Apple products are just hyped up press releases.

Not just that, leaks about those products are another reason to buy up existing iPhones like 7, 6s while they are still around. Before the newer phones are out that get rid of the home button, and lord knows what else. Not to mention a $400 hike in the prices of the phones.

Re:Oh Please!

[Anubis IV]

Thankfully I have an Anonymous Coward to correct me. Please, feel free to do so. I actually do accept reproof when I (quite frequently) get things wrong, so if I did get something wrong in this case I would welcome any correction you might be willing to offer.

Re:Oh Please!

[Anubis IV]

Thanks for the correction. Could've sworn it was big green. Not sure how I got it confused.

Re:Oh Please!

[gl4ss]

well they need the surprise element so that even fanbois are reminded that the features already exist.

if it is already discussed in the media that the features exist, then the journalists have harder time putting up headlines like apple does it again or something.

really though, you can't tell the difference between iphone 6 and whatever their latest thing is.. like if you look at someone using it. it looks the same. nobody cares if it's the newest or not. thats the problem.

apple is already at a place where they need an actual low range phone and they don't want to do that, instead they sell 3 year old models with no future sw support as the low end phones.. that's not gonna cut it.

Re:Oh Please!

[tlhIngan]

Yup, I believe it was nVidia that spoiled the surprise, and Jobs yanked their cards entirely from all Macs. Apple seems to have softened a bit since then. I've seen other CEOs announce things before Apple on a handful of occasions without Apple dropping them entirely, but Apple does seem to take punitive measures still.

Every company does this - they say something is embargoed until a certain date. Which means you may know what you're making, but you're not allowed to say anything about it until a date has passed (usually the announce date).

Writers often sign NDAs for products with embargo dates on product release date - this could be a video game, a piece of hardware, or other thing. It's why you suddenly see reviews of a product often on the date a product is released - the writers had access to the product weeks in advance so they could write their articles, but they are banned from releasing their reviews until the product launches.

Cynically, it's why a game that didn't provide advance launch copies to reviewers (and thus no reviews on release day) is often remarked as being "bad" - the company knows it was horrible, so they didn't provide advance copies, trying to cash in on maybe a few days of pre-orders and early sales before reviews go out saying how bad it is about a week later.

Apple used to scour websites all the time, and every time leaked photos got out, they'd force them to be taken down. Apple stopped doing this years ago (probably around the iPhone 4 era) when it became well known that if the images stayed up, they were fake, but if they were taken down, then they were real. Now Apple leaves them up so people have to guess if they are fake or real images.

And yes, any company breaking embargo can face a lot of penalties - from reduced sales, fines, to simple cancellation of the order. Retailers who break embargo face short-shipments to simple delivery on or after release date (retailers normally get the product well in advance so it will hit stores well before release date, so having delivery arrive on release date means the distributor will be delivering direct to stores, or worse, to the store distribution warehouse where it'll have to be rush-shipped to stores who will not have anything for days after release).

Re:Oh Please!

[mjwx]

So yes, Apple "leaks" things, but as a company that directly or indirectly employs hundreds of thousands of employees, they occasionally actually leak things too, and this DEFINITELY

Came direct from the Marketing department.

These leaks are getting worse because Apple is struggling for relevance in a world where they're now almost beyond passe. This is just an outcry saying "Please, please pretend I'm still relevant". The mere mention of speculation of the hope of a leak before an Apple product announcement used to generate hundreds upon hundreds of comments. Now we can barely get 100 in a whole day and half of those are people saying " Yawn, this was completely expected".

Apple? Surprise?

[known_coward_69]

You could have surprised me. Every release they "leak" the details the morning of the presentation. This just happened a day early

Meh

[Kokuyo]

It's been so long that any phone producer has come out with some major game changing technology that all this leaking and presentation stuff has become one giant marketing circle-jerk.

When rockstars party, the music isn't all that important. The important thing is that the druges are pure and the groupies ready for anything.

Like it matters when Cook is presenting

[93 Escort Wagon]

I realize most anyone would pale as a presenter in comparison to Steve Jobs... but Tim Cook really is the wrong guy to have up there. He could announce "Apple has established a moonbase" and somehow make it sound boring.

Additionally - if the leak regarding turning one's facial expressions into emoji really is "damaging" to Apple, then tomorrow's presentation is going to be quite the snooze fest. Seriously, is that supposed to be a surprise announcement that's supposed to wow people?

Re:Like it matters when Cook is presenting

[Dixie_Flatline]

Tim Cook does virtually none of the presenting—most of what he does is the feel-good stuff, financials and introducing other people, so I'm not sure what you're complaining about. He's taking on the stuff that nobody could make particularly interesting anyway.

Re:Like it matters when Cook is presenting

[DontBeAMoran]

Just wait until he tries to demo the animoji thing. Even the emojis will look bored.

Re:Like it matters when Cook is presenting

[R3d M3rcury]

Kind of like John Sculley.

I remember being at WWDC in '91 when they were introducing System 7. The man was an utter snooze. Hell, even Bill Gates gave a better presentation...

Re:Like it matters when Cook is presenting

[mjwx]

Just wait until he tries to demo the animoji thing. Even the emojis will look bored.

Aren't these "Animoji" things pretty much what 19-20 year old Colombian/Filipino girls already send me over Facebook/Whats App? Animated pictures of anthropomorphised bears/cats blowing kisses or heart floating away.

I hope they're incompatible with Android. Realistically I don't want this crap from a 32 yr old man-child fanboy whom I definitely don't want to see sans pants. This is one feature I'd be happy to have as an Iphone exclusive.

Oh right

[Lucky_Strikez]

How about: "Apple suffers planned media hype disguised as leak."

Subject

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

At the quarterly earnings call, he blamed the leaks about the upcoming iPhone models as one of the reasons that slowed down the sales of current generation iPhone models.

Nope, that's BS for investors. I will name three other more pertinent reasons:

Firstly, yearly upgrades are very incremental for all intents and purposes. I'd even venture to say that the modern smartphone warrants an upgrade every two to three years.

Secondly, iPhones are not so much better than their sub $400 Android counterparts. They are better, true, but they don't justify a twofold increase in the price.

Thirdly, you cannot expect to sell in increasing quantities absolutely the same bulky design with huge bezels for three consecutive years. People expect to get some tangible changes from their upgrades, and a new design (even if it's slightly different as seen in the car industry) is quite important.

Re:Subject

[Dixie_Flatline]

I don't think that second reason is particularly relevant. Apple is still taking away 90% of the industry's profits (or have they dropped to the high 80% range?), and often end up supply constrained at the beginning of the cycle. Apple understands the market really well, and they're selling about as many phones of that price as the market can bear.

Your design comment is probably the strongest—even though the design was a bit different, it wasn't enough. The internals of the 7 are a huge upgrade, but people want it to look different and be noticeably better at everything. Apple and most other high-end phone manufacturers are running into the issue of their phones just legitimately being so powerful it's hard to say that the additional power they're throwing in has *too* much of an affect on day-to-day use. Sure, you and I can talk about geekbench scores and their multi-core design, but if it isn't making the phone visibly better, it's hard for an average consumer to decide to get the new phone if their current one isn't broken—which is effectively your first point. I can bet there are some people that did defer the upgrade for this year's phone, just as the 6 pulled upgrades forward by a year, but it's hard to believe it's the dominating factor.

(I heard recently—on Gruber's show—about a survey that asked people when they upgrade their phones. The most common answer was apparently 'when my old one breaks'.)

Re:Subject

[dgatwood]

The internals of the 7 are a huge upgrade ...

They're a huge sidegrade. They made some things better, like the taptic engine, but they made others worse, like the headphone jack. And to users, the former is completely irrelevant.

One of the first things SJ did when he came back to Apple was remind folks that people don't buy computers based on specs. Nobody cares if the CPU in a new phone is faster unless their current phone isn't fast enough to do the job. Nobody cares if the taptic engine can make it buzz differently. And so on. These are all just spec noise.

Apple's biggest problem is that even the iPhone 5 was fast enough to be somebody's last phone, ignoring the whole lack of 64-bit app support. Now that every phone Apple sells is "good enough", I can't imagine any feature that would be so compelling that it would be worth spending a thousand bucks to upgrade an iPhone 5s, SE, 6 series, or 7 series except in response to a hardware failure. Everything that could plausibly be added to a phone at this point is either software or falls into the "nice to have" category, at most. The only possible exceptions are all niche features that target a specific subset of the market and can often be solved with external cases, such as headphone jacks, hardware keyboards, micro-SD slots, IR remote emitters, plastic touchscreens, bumpers, waterproofing, etc.

Thus, the cell phone market is a commodity market, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. If Apple wants to pull off any big wins at this point, it will likely have to do so in entirely new product categories.

Re:Subject

[Dixie_Flatline]

There are two big features that I think people would jump ship for: the camera and the size of the screen. (Setting aside that I actually think the form factor of the 5/SE is the best one in hand.)

And indeed, Apple saw massive uptake of the original iPhone 6 because of the bigger screen, and the iPhone 7+ was more popular than expected. So if we're talking specifically about the 5/5s, we can definitely see a reason to upgrade there.

There's a smaller—but still notable—subset of people that are going to upgrade because of the camera. When I look at my iPhone 6, the biggest thing that I envy from the newest phones is the better cameras. It's the one feature that you can see the difference in, if not every year, definitely once every 2 years. (I bought one of the new 9.7" iPads this June, and I'm in the weird position of preferring that camera and software because it can do live photos, which are fantastic if you have fast moving things in your house, like children or cats. Of course, it's an enormous hassle to move an object that big into position as a camera for some shots.)

Now, these arguments aside, I'll agree with you about the 'sidegrade'—the 7 is uniformly better than the 6s, but it's still in the same order of magnitude, if you'll allow me to abuse that term a bit.

I think Apple has some room to move—particularly with ARKit coming—so I wouldn't say Apple is out of possibilities for big wins in the smartphone space. And hey, you never know what's going to be big and amazing until after it happens. But by and large, I think you're right, and the iPhone will become the device that you have that anchors the rest of your amazing and magical Apple products, just as the Mac used to be.

Re:Subject

[dgatwood]

There's a smaller—but still notable—subset of people that are going to upgrade because of the camera. When I look at my iPhone 6, the biggest thing that I envy from the newest phones is the better cameras.

IMO, we're a few years past the point where camera improvements became incremental. I can't really get excited about 2/3rds of a stop in a camera that packs that much resolution onto such a tiny sensor. The only way to get a big win (in aperture or in pixel size) is to make the camera bigger, which means making the phone bigger, which Apple will never do. Almost everything else, with the notable exception of the plus-model-only stabilization, is software/firmware changes, which you can just as easily do on existing hardware.

The one hardware improvement that would make a real difference in the camera is a global electronic shutter, and even that isn't a huge win. :-)

Re: Subject

[joh]

My iPhone 4 is still fine too. Never used a case. My iPhone 6 has no scratches either. What do you people do with your phones?

Re:Subject

[dgatwood]

The second camera is a novelty toy, and unless you're shooting video, so is image stabilization on such a wide-angle lens. In the rare situations where it matters for stills, it only matters because the iPhone's sensor is way too small with way too low a max ISO. Of the DSLR lenses I own that most closely match the iPhone's focal length, one is half a stop slower and has no IS. The other has IS, but is almost two stops slower, and the IS only matters at the longer end of its zoom range, where the iPhone (including the new one they just announced ten seconds ago) does not have IS.

At best, the difference between even an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 7 might make the difference between getting 10% of the shots I could get with my DSLR and 11%. The improvement certainly doesn't hurt, but none of those improvements are enough to make me upgrade my 6s, and that's speaking as somebody who takes a *lot* of photos.

RTFS much?

[Yaztromo]

I know it's too much to ask people to RTFA, but you can at least read the summary.

This wasn't a features leak -- this was a leak of the entire iOS 11 Golden Master source code. Apparently for all current Apple products at that. Sure, some people have used the leak to divine what new features are in iOS 11 -- but the real damage is that the entire source for iOS 11 GM is now out there in the wild.

That certainly isn't something that happens prior to every presentation.

Yaz

Re:RTFS much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yoz, apparently it was too much for you to read as well ... it's the master build not the source code. Yuuggge difference.

Re:RTFS much?

[DontBeAMoran]

So you're saying that iOS 11 is now open source? Hurray!

Re:RTFS much?

[Anonymous Coward]

A GM build != source code. We will see the GM build dropped or slated to drop tomorrow. iOS source, code, on the other hand is kept secret, and if there were a leak of that, there would be witch hunts.

Re:RTFS much?

[Yaztromo]

No, it's bad reporting on the BBC's part:

However, the BBC has independently confirmed that an anonymous source provided the publications with links to iOS 11's golden master (GM) code that downloaded the software from Apple's own computer servers.

Having looked into things further you are correct that the leak was of compiled binary data -- which isn't code. The BBC article says that it was links to iOS 11 GM code that was leaked, hence my error.

Yaz

Re:RTFS much?

[Yaztromo]

Mea culpa. As I mentioned above, however, the BBC reported that the URLs were to iOS 11 GM code. The BBC misreported, and I based my comment off the bit of misinformation. What they should have said was that the binaries were leaked.

I'd still say that's bigger (for Apple) than your usual "rumour" leak. At the very least, they have an unknown untrustworthy actor within their organization, who is acting with an agenda against the company in general.

Yaz

Re:RTFS much?

[DRJlaw]

Having looked into things further you are correct that the leak was of compiled binary data -- which isn't code.

Object code is not code, when you require it not to be in order to save face.

Maybe leaked via browser history?

[ljw1004]

Maybe the leak wasn't deliberate?

Is it possible that an employee navigated to one of those links while they weren't on a corporate VPN? e.g. they had the link and clicked on it while on a home or public wifi? Then a compromised router could have detected the URL and passed it on.

Or maybe they had a web-page open while on corpnet where there was an internal announcement/email that mentioned the URL, and then they took their laptop home and the web-page was still open, and they accidentally clicked the link without realizing that their VPN hadn't yet finished connecting?

Or might the URL have been in an employee's browser history? and malware got on their computer and fetched the browser history?

Let Craig Federighi do the whole presentation.

[Anonymous Coward]

They should just let Craig Federighi do the whole presentation.

He's got the chiseled features of a strong, good looking man. He's got a fun, yet confident, demeanor. He commands respect, yet does so politely and without forcing it out of anyone. He's got the technical chops. He's a family man. And of course, he's an excellent public speaker.

He's been the best part of the past Apple presentations he's been involved with.

He should be the public face of Apple. He's a man that other men respect. He's a man that women find irresistible.

He's a leader. A true American leader.

Re:Let Craig Federighi do the whole presentation.

[93 Escort Wagon]

... and he apparently has time to post comments here on Slashdot!

Re:Let Craig Federighi do the whole presentation.

[cayenne8]

They should just let Craig Federighi [apple.com] do the whole presentation. He's got the chiseled features of a strong, good looking man. He's got a fun, yet confident, demeanor. He commands respect, yet does so politely and without forcing it out of anyone. He's got the technical chops. He's a family man. And of course, he's an excellent public speaker.

He's been the best part of the past Apple presentations he's been involved with.

He should be the public face of Apple. He's a man that other men respect. He's a man that women find irresistible.

Well, the problem is, that's he's a decent looking, fit, white, heterosexual male...and well, we just can't have that these days!!!!

Shame on you!!

Your suggestions were borderline racist!!

Re:Do Apple leaks matter?

[DontBeAMoran]

Why would you want a phone with cutting edges? How would you hold the damn thing? Do you wear a full plate armour every day?

Re:deliberate malicious act by a rogue

[DontBeAMoran]

That was a clear case of copyright infringement.

I'm confused

[hattable]

Did slashdot just link to an article posted on slashdot itself as a story?

Re:I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Did slashdot just link to an article posted on slashdot itself as a story?

Slashdot is basically a giant virtual hamster wheel for the autistic to run around in, so I don't really see the problem in doing something self-referential.

Re:deliberate malicious act by a rogue

[cayenne8]

kinda like when that woman stole the death star plans and leaked them to the rebels?

I thought it was the bothans.....?

Poor bothans...

Re:Do Apple leaks matter?

[dgatwood]

Why would you want a phone with cutting edges?

Because it's thinner.

Re:deliberate malicious act by a rogue

[mujadaddy]

Her name was Minnie Bothans.

THX1138 is now real!

[TheNarrator]

Now you can have a Jesus booth from THX 1138 in real life. It can read your facial expression and ask you "What's Wrong?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Meh.

[antdude]

Even if there were no leaks, Apple stuff had been meh these days. :(

Yes, a "major" leak.

[Trogre]

Just like that guy who "accidentally" left a prototype phone in a bar a few years back.

Hook, line and sinker.

No-one took the obvious joke?

[SuperKendall]

It's a big blow to Apple, which uses surprise as a key element at its events

Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Ok, our two weapons are fear and surprise...