The long, messy case of the lost iPhone 4 prototype that ended up on the front page of gadget blog Gizmodo in 2010 finally came to its conclusion this week, when the two young men who recovered the device and sold it to Gizmodo for $5,000 were sentenced to probation and community service.
Brian John Hogan, 22, and Sage Robert Wallower, 28, plead no contest to misdemeanor theft charges in San Mateo County Superior Court on Tuesday for their role in the year-plus long saga. In turn, they received a year of probation, 40 hours of community service and were ordered to pay Apple a combined $250 in restitution, The Wall Street Journal reported.
That sentence is substantially less than what prosecuting attorneys wanted, CNET reported:
“We asked for some jail time,” Steve Wagstaffe, the district attorney, said today. “The judge considered that Wallower had served in the armed forces and Hogan was enrolled in San Jose State, and neither had any criminal record, and decided that jail time wasn’t required. Someone from my office called Apple’s general counsel. This is a fairly routine theft case. This was a couple of youthful people who should have known better.”
The web has also already declared that the duo got off easy, especially since they made apparently relatively little effort to return the lost device to Apple (Hogan said that a friend of his called AppleCare shortly after he recovered the device, but that was the extent of their attempts, according to Wired).
Apple reportedly freaked out when it realized that one of its engineers lost the device and it had ended up in the hands of Gizmodo employees. Steve Jobs even emailed and called Gizmodo editor Brian Lam directly to ask them to turn over the device. Later, when the blog published photos and specs of the device, Apple attorneys met with the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department and pressed them to investigate the matter further, saying the prototype was priceless.
Meanwhile, Gizmodo editor Jason Chen (who posted the first lengthy description of the recovered iPhone 4 prototype along with a photo of himself in March 2010, only to have his computer equipment seized by the cops) ended up getting off scott free because the San Mateo County district attorney’s office declined to prosecute.
“After a consideration of all of the evidence, it was determined that no charges would be filed against employees of Gizmodo,” the district attorney’s office said in a release given to Gizmodo.
Gizmodo’s parent, Gawker Media, released the following statement in response:
We are pleased that the District Attorney of San Mateo County, Steven Wagstaffe, has decided, upon review of all of the evidence, that no crime was committed by the Gizmodo team in relation to its reporting on the iPhone 4 prototype last year. While we have always believed that we were acting fully within the law, it has inevitably been stressful for the editor concerned, Jason Chen, and we are glad that we can finally put this matter behind us.
And as for the employee who lost the phone in the first place, Robert Gray Powell – who was out celebrating his birthday at the Silicon Valley beer garden Gourmet Haus Staudt one fateful night in March 2010, when he (by his own admission) imbibed a few too many beers and forgot the phone on a barstool – he still remains gainfully employed by Apple, according to sources close to the company. Indeed, the internal repercussions reportedly weren’t that bad, sources told TPM.
Yet, while that case has finally wrapped up and turned out better than expected for pretty much all parties involved, with the exception of Apple, there remains another iPhone prototype unaccounted for, at least in the media. That would be the iPhone 4S or iPhone 5 device that someone else left at a different bar in San Francisco on July 22.
If anything, that case has progressed in an even stranger and more startling fashion, with an Apple security team casing a man’s home in Bernal Heights, California, apparently having remotely traced the phone here. After initially denying any involvement in that incident, the San Francisco Police Department retracted it’s denial and confirmed that four officers escorted the Apple team to the man’s house and stood outside while it was searched. Now, the homeowner, Sergio Calderon, is reportedly contemplating suing Apple for searching his home.
Also, there remains the matter of the lost iPhone itself. Where is it? CNET, which first broke the story in August, stated that it could have been sold on Craigslist for $200.
The San Francisco Police Department requested surveillance footage from the bar where the phone had been lost, Cava 22, but the bar owners said that their system automatically erased the portion showing what happened the night the phone went missing.
Idea Lab has contacted the San Francisco Police Department about the current status of the case and will update when we receive a response.
But with two missing iPhone prototypes in two years, Apple isn’t about to take any more chances: The company posted a job opening in early September for a “Manager of New Product Security.”
“The candidate will be responsible for overseeing the protection of, and managing risks to, Apple’s unreleased products and related intellectual property,” the job description states. (H/T: IT News)
