Steve Wozniak on iPhone Prototype Leak, Gary Powell, Fired Engineer

Gary Powell, the Apple staffer who lost a prototype 4th-generation iPhone, hasn’t been fired, sources tell Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak. However, one company engineer who showed him the 3G-capable iPad around launch time has been laid off.

“I don't know anything for real about this iPhone issue, from Apple's perspective,” Wozniak told Gizmodo last week. “I believe (and have heard) that the engineer who lost his iPhone 4G has not been fired. Perhaps the case was examined on an individual basis and determined not to have been one of violating Apple policy too much or not one where Apple was injured sufficiently. I'm glad for now. I hate to see people lose their jobs ever,” he stressed.

“But I can tell you that the test engineer who showed me an iPad after midnight, for 2 minutes, during the iPad launch was indeed fired,” he shockingly revealed. “I opted to spend 2 minutes with Numbers on this iPad, trying some stunts I'd seen on Apple's website demo video,” the Woz continued. “I was not told that it was a 3G model and I had no way to know that. I was told that this engineer had to wait until midnight to show it outside of Apple's secure area. And I'm an Apple employee who he was showing it to. My guess is that he was allowed to take the iPad outside of the secure area but still not supposed to show it.”

Outlining that he didn’t believe Apple was hurt in any way by this, he did reveal the staffer showed the 3G not only to him, but also to “a few people who read Gizmodo.” “In my opinion, Apple was not hurt by my being shown this iPad. And if the employee who showed it to me believed that he could show it after April 3, then that's another factor,” he claimed.

Having talked about this with Steve Jobs – fellow Apple co-founder and CEO – Wozniak was (seemingly) surprised to hear him say, “So it's no big deal,” knowing that the engineer had indeed got laid off.

“I did describe this to Steve Jobs the night of the iPad introduction and he said ‘so it's no big deal.’ We talked about family things after that for a short while. But that engineer did get fired. I'm sure that Apple HR told the engineer that it was because everyone in that same situation gets fired. Does that jive with this iPhone situation? What am I missing here?” Wozniak said.