14 DAY TRIAL // Shaquille O’Neal, former NBA star and now an analyst for TNT, reveals in an interview with Fast Company that Steve Jobs denied him the luxury to be one of the first people to own the iPhone.
Shaq suggests he literally begged Steve Jobs to give him the first iPhone handset, but Apple’s co-founder vehemently refused:
"I've always wanted to be the one that's on the edge of technological curve," said O’Neal. “I always wanted to be ahead of everybody else. The great Steve Jobs, rest in peace, when the iPhone was first coming out, I used to call him every other day. Can I please get one first? Can I please get one first? He never gave me one. He said, 'Shaq, I can't, I can't, I can't.' He was a great guy."
Bradley Frank, a celebrity publicist with Rogers & Cowen, recalls an episode when he and his team were shooting the last Old Spice campaign with Isaiah Mustafa, when Apple was shooting the iPad 2 campaign right next door:
“We tried to check it out, but it was like machine-gun guards, check-in at different stations. They had code names. It was like dealing with the CIA. Then they walked their [expletive] right onto our set, and had no issue doing that. They just walked onto our set! We were like, 'What are you doing? You can't do that!' And when the iPhone4 came out, I can't tell you how many clients were like, 'We need that early.' And Apple's like, 'No.'"
Channing Frye, a basketball player for the Phoenix Suns, gets turned down regularly by someone at Apple whenever he tries to get insider information about what’s coming out next.
"My cousin works for Apple, in marketing,” he tells Fast Company. “I bug her every day about what's coming out. All she can say is, 'What you have works perfectly fine.' Literally, they are like a secret society--if I tell, I have to kill you.”