No news on iPhone 5 features? Why not make your own! Well, at least that’s what a design company apparently decided to do.
With just a few weeks away until the rumored September 12 release date of the iPhone 5, it’s understandable that people everywhere are scrambling for every scrap of information about the highly anticipated smartphone from Apple. One news item that caught people’s attention last week was about an “asymmetric screw” that Apple would be introducing with the iPhone 5.
The internet was in uproar over the announcement, as the new screw would make it even more difficult to do self-repairs on the iPhone 5 and possibly other upcoming iOS devices.
Now, we can tell everyone put away their picket signs and rest easy because it turns out the entire thing was a hoax perpetuated by Day4, a Swedish design company. Today, the guys have come clean and revealed that the entire thing was a stunt to test how easily they can spread misinformation:
“One afternoon we sketched out a screw in our 3D program, a very strange screw where the head was neither a star, tracks, pentalobe or whatever, but a unique form, also very impractical. We rendered the image, put it in an email, sent it to ourselves, took a picture of the screen with the mail and anonymously uploaded the image to the forum Reddit with the text ‘A friend took a photo a while ago at that fruit company, they are obviously even creating their own screws ‘.”
The whole experiment was a success as the ‘rumor’ about one of the possible iPhone 5 features exploded and found itself being spread by major news and Apple fansites within 12 hours.
Day4 ends their “confession” with a call to be more critical and thoughtful of what we read in the internet, because “it is not the last time any of this data will be upon us,” and an apology to everyone who felt cheated by the entire thing.
Asymmetric screw… I can’t believe we all fell for that. It’s not like Apple’s already making it impossible for us to open their products with regular tools. Good one, Day4, good one.