It’s no secret that Apple takes ridiculous security measures for its unreleased products that probably put the White House to shame. You can see Apple’s intense determination to recover its lost iPhone prototype unfold in how an internal security team allegedly posed as police and searched a man’s home after threatening his family.
There have been countless stories of the strict protocols that Apple takes to keep its secrets hidden from the preying public, and a new report has surfaced that offers some new insight into how Apple keeps its pre-release hardware on lockdown…
Business Insider has published an interview with an unnamed developer of a very “successful” iPad app that got his hands on an original iPad before the product’s launch. The developer was apparently high up on the food chain, and he and his team got a firsthand look at how Apple kept the device under security.
“The criteria was that we had to have a room with no windows. They changed the locks on the door.
Three developers and I were the only people allowed to go in the room. Apple needed the names and social security numbers of the people who had access.
Apple needed to be able to drill a hole in the desk and chain the devices to desk. They used those bicycle cables.
They had these custom frames built around them so we couldn’t even tell what the iPads looked like. We could plug into them so we could code to them and we could touch the screen and play with that, but we couldn’t see the form factor.
Then they took pictures of the wood grain. If any pictures leaked out, they could trace it back to which desk they came from.
I wasn’t allowed to tell our CEO. I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody anything about what we were doing. I couldn’t even tell my wife.”
As MacRumors notes, those security measures didn’t manage to keep several photos of the original iPad from leaking the night before its launch.
Those Apple blogs are ruthless I tell you! Ruthless!