As we all may know, the new, highly-anticipated iPhone X was announced for pre-order last week. The highly-anticipated phone sold out in less than a week, without anyone having hands on the phone itself. However, just today, an engineer from Apple was just fired after his daughter posted a hands-on look at the iPhone X.
What for? While many people have posted other videos with the iPhone X in hand, it was the particular phone that Brooke Peterson showed off that caused her father to lose his job. This wasn’t a garden variety iPhone X, as it was her father’s phone, which was an employee model with some secrets that Apple did not want to reveal. Brooke’s YouTube footage showcased both private employee-only QR codes and a Notes app with Apple product codenames. To add to the trouble, Brooke’s video was filmed in Caffe Macs, a cafe on the main campus of Apple’s headquarters in California. Caffe Macs is supposedly a place where employees can chat without fear of being filmed.
Was it reasonable for Apple to take these actions?
First of all, it is a violation of the rules to film on Apple’s campus, so filming a video especially on the iPhone X is a definite violation of the rules. Also, the fact that employee and company secrets were shown in the video for the world to see is also another red flag for Apple. As Brooke quoted, “At the end of the day, when you work for Apple, it doesn’t matter how good of a person you are. If you break a rule, they just have no tolerance.” She continues to say that their family is not mad at Apple and that her “father takes full responsibility for the one rule he broke.”
From a personal standpoint, I think that it was a reasonable action for Apple to take, considering there was a similar situation with Microsoft years ago when an employee’s son showed pictures of the Xbox 360 prior to its release to public. However, it is very difficult not to sympathize with the family. Brooke’s father poured his heart and soul into the project only to be laid off with less than a week to the iPhone X’s physical release to the general public.
My takeaway from this situation is that we should always monitor ourselves and what we post on social media, because without knowing, there is huge potential for major consequences.
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Also, an additional external blog post that I looked into has some interesting input from many different Reddit users: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/79brb1/apple_fired_the_engineer_whose_daughter_released/?st=j9dox7yq&sh=c2eb2e7f
References:
https://gizmodo.com/apple-reportedly-fires-engineer-after-daughters-iphone-1819952027
https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/28/apple-fires-employee-over-iphone-x-video/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/28/16565110/apple-engineer-iphone-x-youtube-video
http://fortune.com/2017/10/29/apple-reportedly-fires-engineer-after-daughter-posts-iphone-x-video/