iphone 5 prototype
It is said to be a test model with a finalized iPhone 5 chassis featuring the tear-drop design. However, the interesting thing about it is that it apparently houses what we assume to be slightly modified iPhone 4 electronics with components such as the A4 chip and even the same amount of memory.
With its past experience, one might think Apple would have been able to track that prototype down in a heartbeat. However, Apple was outsmarted. The person who had access to the prototype wiped the phone’s software, thus disabling the GPS hardware needed to track it down. It was then allegedly sold to one of the iPhone case manufacturers for RMB ¥20,000 (about $3,100). We were told that Foxconn was aware of the loss and had penalized internal management for the incident. We also heard from another source that the person who “lost” it was paid to do so. This case is similar to the iPad 2 leak eported back in June, where three men were jailed for stealing unreleased information about the Apple tablet.
What seems to strongly support the claim that an iPhone 5 prototype with the final chassis design has indeed landed into the hands of case manufacturers is that, weeks ahead of the iPhone 5 launch, we are already seeing best iphone 5 case for sale from many case manufacturers. Some even claim to have shipped “thousands” of these cases.
