Engineer fired for sharing iPhone X

Daughter’s video of smartphone prototype costs father his job

If you work at Apple, you should take a lesson from the movie “Fight Club.”

The first rule of Apple is, “You do not talk about Apple.” The second rule of Apple is, “You DO NOT talk about Apple.”

And you especially don’t let an Apple product be seen in public before Apple wants it to be seen. A nowformer Apple employee learned that lesson the hard way, and is now said to be out of a job.

Over the weekend, Brooke Amelia Peterson posted a video on YouTube in which she detailed how Apple fired her father, who was an engineer with the company. And what was the cause of her dad’s dismissal?

Peterson had earlier posted a video of a day in September that included her going shopping and taking part in some other activities, one of which was visiting and having dinner with her father on the Apple campus in Cupertino, Calif. That video included about 45 seconds of her father’s iPhoneX, which Peterson’s father allowed her to handle and test.

And that’s what got Apple mad.

Peterson posted the video. The video went viral. Apple asked Peterson to take the video down. She did. Apple fired her dad.

In her video, Peterson laid out what had happened, and didn’t really blame the company for giving her dad the ax, saying, “They had to do what they had to do.”

There hasn’t been any word about Apple maybe taking mercy on Peterson’s dad and giving him his job back. Maybe Apple’s CEO can give the engineer the equivalent of a presidential pardon and welcome him back? After all, Apple had already showed off the iPhone X, along with the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, at a company event in Cupertino Sept. 12 before Peterson’s video got picked up by various Apple-related blogs and websites and then went viral.

The phone goes on sale at Apple stores Nov. 3. Peterson said she will still buy Apple’s products.