For Apple, lost iPhone is a big deal

For anyone who has ever lost a cellphone, remember this: it could be worse. You could be the person who left his phone in a bar in California. And it wasn’t just any phone; it was a supersecret version of the next iPhone. That model is not expected to be formally unveiled for a couple of months.

For the people at Apple, it must be like a bad version of the guy walks into a bar joke.

The company is known as the most secretive in Silicon Valley, and leaks are rare. But after the phone prototype was left in a bar in the Silicon Valley town of Redwood City, photos of the device began appearing over the weekend in technology blogs, sparking a frenzy of hype among the Apple-obsessed.

Before long, pictures of the product appeared on Gizmodo, a technology news site, whose editors ripped it apart — as if it were an alien from another planet — to dissect its features. The Web site said late Monday that the phone belonged to an Apple engineer.

Full story: For Apple, Lost iPhone Is a Big Deal – NYTimes.com