You don’t need this blog to tell you that hot news this morning is that an Apple employee has gone and lost an iPhone5 prototype in a Mexican Restaurant in San Fransisco. This is almost not news because it is becoming a regular occurrence – it happened before with a previous version of the iPhone.
This is quite timely because at Timico we have been studying mobile handset security issues at work. We talked to directors of 200 companies in the SMB sector and found that 76% of businesses had staff who had lost company mobile phones in any given year. Unsurprisingly the bigger the company the more likely they were to lose more phones.
If you extrapolate our data to a company the size of Apple then the chances are their staff lose thousands of iPhones (assuming any other device would be heresy) a year. Statistically someone with a new iPhone prototype is bound to lose it at some stage though you would have thought they would take a little more care. I guess the euphoria of being in an elite band of iPhone testers leaves you a little more than light headed.
Our survey came up with lots more interesting stats which I will be writing more about over the next week or two so watch this space 🙂
3 replies on “Statistics suggest that Apple staff must lose many phones a year #iPhone5”
I think Apple, like most R&D tech focused companies, usually have strict policies that say you should never take a Prototype off-site unless it’s part of a monitored field test (varies between companies I guess). I suspect that the iPhone5 that was leaked is thus a final physical production model, albeit with the iOS Beta 6+ firmware installed.
Anyway it surprises me that this is still such a big deal, iPhone’s aren’t the cream of Smartphone’s like they once were but they still stir up a buzz. I thank my lucky stars everyday for owning a device where I can change the battery without needing to send the whole thing back to Apple or have to plug it into the mains every 8 hours to stop it from running out of juice.
Totally agree with you Mark.
So if he lost his Apple iphone4 at the same time at his Apple iphone5, would he have lost a pair (pear)?
BE.