The Man Who Sold iPhone 4 Prototype To Gizmodo Tells All In Reddit AMA

In 2010, Apple introduced iPhone 4, of course Gizmodo had the iPhone 4 prototype before even Apple introduce it..If you have been following Apple tech news, you may heard from a few years the story of the Apple employee that left his iPhone 4 prototype in a bar.

And to be honest, Gizmodo’s iPhone 4 Scoop 2010, will likely go down as one of the biggest product leaks in history. The guy who found the handset is Brian Hogan. And wouldn’t you know it, he turned up on Reddit last night to do an AMA about the whole ordeal. It’s quite interesting, as he talks about the night he found it, how much money he made and more…

“After the last call both of my friends went to the bathroom, as they left a random drunk guy came out, walked up to me, picked up the phone on the bar stool next to me, and said don’t forget your phone! I told him it wasn’t mine and I didn’t know who it belonged to. Random drunk guy hands me the phone and tasks me with finding its owner.”

Hogan kept asking people at the bar if the handset belonged to anyone, but it didn’t belong to anyone, so Hogan took it home. The next morning Hogan picked up the search again, and began looking at the phone itself for clues. That’s when he noticed that it wasn’t a normal iPhone.

“First I noticed that the screen looked like it had a higher resolution than any iPhone I had seen, then that the case had plastic pieces/buttons in strange places. When I took the case off I found an iPhone with a flat back, flat edges, and a forward facing camera. There were two bar code stickers on the back, and there were a series of x’s instead of a serial number. I was very curious/excited at this point, but I had no idea what I had.”

Just after he knew that the handset belongs to Apple, he quickly phoned the Cupertino company. But his story was laughed off by the front office personnel, so him and his friend Sage decided to start shopping it around to tech blogs to see what they’d pay to see it.

“First Sage contacted Apple to tell them that we think we might have it, and after they blew him off he started contacting different tech blogs to see if they wanted to meet in person and look at the phone (for money). The people at Gizmodo took us seriously, we met, and, they thought it was real too. About a month after that first meeting Gizmodo posted the article leaking the phone.”

As for the money, Hogan says that Gizmodo promised him $5000 up front for the prototype and another $3000 after Apple confirmed it was real. The site apparently never sent him the latter payment, and he says he ended up spending more than $5000 on his lawyer.