So this week gave us a genuinely funny bit of tech news, and I dont mean funny-strange, I mean funny because of who did it to themselves. Apple pushed out a firmware build for the still-unreleased HomePod, and within about a day a couple of developers had torn it apart and pulled out basically the entire iPhone X announcement. Face ID. Animoji. The wireless charging mat theyre apparently calling AirPower. Status bar icons with a weird notch-shaped cutout baked right into them. An Apple Watch with its own cellular connection. All of it, sitting in plain strings and image assets inside a build meant for a speaker that isnt even out yet.
I want to be clear that this isnt some elite hacking operation. Steve Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo, who Ive followed on Twitter for a while because they do this kind of poking-around constantly, basically just unzipped the firmware and started grepping through it. Thats it. No jailbreak exploit, no zero-day, nothing that would make for a good movie scene. Apple just left the equivalent of the answer key in a folder labeled ANSWERS and shipped it to anyone with a developer account.
Ive always had a soft spot for this kind of digital archaeology, honestly. Back when I used to mess around with jailbroken iOS builds years ago (badly, and mostly just to see if I could), theres something satisfying about pulling a binary apart and finding strings the company never meant for you to see. Its like reading someone's grocery list and figuring out they're planning a dinner party. Except in this case its Apple's entire fall product line, laid out months in advance, for free, because somebody on a firmware team forgot to strip debug symbols or scrub asset names before a build went out the door.
What gets me is how this keeps happening to Apple specifically. This is a company that famously builds entire fake demo units and makes employees sign away their firstborns before they get near unreleased hardware, and yet the actual leak vector keeps being their own software. Not a disgruntled Foxconn worker, not a stolen prototype in a bar (well, that did happen once, years back), its literally their own firmware doing the talking. You'd think after the last few times this happened they'd have a step in the release process where somebody just runs strings on the binary before it goes out. Apparently not.
Now obviously nothing here is officially confirmed. Apple hasnt said a word, and knowing them they wont until the keynote invite goes out, whenever that ends up being. But when the naming, the feature list, and the marketing copy all show up together in a firmware image, its hard to call it a rumor anymore. Its more like an accidental press release.
Part of me wonders if this changes anything about how Apple runs its keynotes going forward, and part of me thinks it wont, because the surprise was never really the point for most people buying the phone. Youre not going to skip the iPhone X because you already knew about Face ID three weeks early. But it does kind of deflate the theater of it, and I say that as someone who genuinely enjoys watching these events live, bad jokes and all. Theres a specific kind of fun in not knowing, and this week that got taken away a little early for anyone paying attention to tech Twitter.
Anyway. If you want to go do your own digging, the firmware images are floating around and its not exactly hard to find people posting screenshots of the extracted assets. Just dont be shocked if half the fun is already gone by the time you get there, since apparently everyone with a text editor beat you to it by about four days.