Anyone who’s already been following the saga of the iPhone From The Future that ended up in a Redwood City bar knows that the iPhone’s owner (and the Redwood City bar!) have been unmasked as (in order) an Apple Software Engineer named Gray Powell and Gourmet Haus Staudt (German Specialty Store and Beer Garden).
As Appeal pal Alexia Tsotsis notes, you could have read Powell’s tech pundrity on his Twitter feed until he made it private. This is understandable given Gizmodo’s description of Powell as “tired and broken” after their deconstruction of the next-gen iPhone Powell reportedly lost before it was reportedly sold to Gizmodo, which may or may not have made that investment back in pageviews.
There sure were a lot of “reportedly”s in that last sentence! And here’s why: an Appeal reader who says they are Powell’s “good friend” emails that Powell “doesn’t seem to be in any trouble” and that they “suspect this happened on purpose.”
This is certainly echoed by the results of the poll we ran yesterday, wondering how the damn phone ended up in the damn bar in the first place. While (at publication time), 24% of you believed this was, indeed, just a mistake made by Powell, a whopping 58% called this out as a PR/marketing plant. (I am a little disappointed that none of you made any “getting your next Gen iPhone stolen on Muni” jokes. But I will live with my pain!)
While Powell’s screenshot tweets don’t necessarily paint him as a corporate puppet with Steve Jobs’ hand up his ass (and we’ve certainly all left shit in bars!), the skepticism with which the whole story arc’s been greeted, even by those claiming to be close to Powell, certainly gives one pause. What do you think?
