Apple gets screwed by online hoax
Stockholm production company Day4 fooled portions of the tech world last week into believing that Apple was working on an odd-shaped screw - an effort to show how quickly people are to believe anything they find online.
The company decided to try an experiment that would drive the point across, and with rumours of the iPhone 5 in full swing, it decided to pull a fast one on Apple, its fanboys and reporters.
Day4 created a rendering of a screw with a weird, asymmetrical head. The screw was supposedly designed to keep Apple users from opening their products. With Apple's track record of keeping controlled environments, this wasn't too hard to believe.
Day4 had a plausible story, and now it just needed a way to get it out.
"Then we waited ..." Day4 said on its website.
It took less than 12 hours before the Reddit post got to tech reporters.
Cult of Mac was the first to post, and it was shortly followed with stories by Yahoo, Wired and MacWorld as well as videos on YouTube and talk on social media.
Day4 apologised to anyone who felt cheated by the hoax, but the company said it hoped its experiment causes people to become more thoughtful about what they see on the internet.
"In this case, it was about a new type of screw, a relatively unimportant news," the company said. "But for us it raises a concern about how we consume information today."
http://day4.se/how-we-screwed-almost-the-whole-apple-community/