Oops: Amazon page goes live hours before unveiling
Turns out even massive corporations sometimes hit the send button when they don’t mean to. Wednesday morning, Amazon launched a specialized iPhone 7 accessory page hours before Apple made the actual announcement.
Apple is notoriously secretive prior to its product launches and takes great care to keep a tight lid on information about upcoming items, especially its yearly iPhone upgrade. But Amazon, followed by Apple’s own tweets, stole some momentum from the day’s big news.
An Amazon iPhone 7 accessories page was up after 9 a.m. San Francisco time, according to a report on the tech news site Gizmodo.
The accessories page, viewed by USA TODAY, included photos of the new iPhone, one of which showed dual back-facing cameras. It also showed Bluetooth headphones. Later, Apple revealed the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, with water resistance, stereo speakers, and on the larger 7 Plus, dual cam- eras. The new phones will use the Lightning jack to connect headphones, rather than the standard headphone jack.
The page was quickly taken down and replaced with a page saying it could no longer be found, but featuring Brandi, a cute dog who belongs to an Amazon employee. Amazon had no comment on the timing of the page, nor its disappearance.
Apple or Twitter also managed to jump the gun. Just after 10 a.m. San Francisco time, a tweet giving a status update on the iPhone 7 went out. The Tweet was quickly taken down.