San Francisco police said on Friday they had helped Apple Inc security search for a “lost item,” following a week of reports that a prototype of the newest iPhone had gone missing in July.
Officers did not say exactly what Apple had lost, but they left a clue — the San Francisco Police Department’s press release about the hunt on Friday was called “iphone5.doc,” an apparent reference to a new version of the mobile phone that technology industry watchers expect to be released soon.
Apple declined to comment on the matter.
DISAPPEARED
Technology news service CNET this week said an iPhone 5, which has not been released, went missing in a San Francisco bar in July.
SF Weekly, a local newspaper, on Friday quoted a San Francisco man as saying police had come to his house in July searching for a lost iPhone.
Although a prototype of the iPhone 4 went missing last year, police said this time Apple had tracked “the lost item” to a San Francisco house and four police accompanied two Apple employees to the house.
“The two Apple [security] employees met with the resident and then went into the house to look for the lost item. The Apple employees did not find the lost item and left the house,” the police statement said.
It did not say why police accompanied Apple security or the circumstances under which Apple employees “went into the house to look for the lost item.”
Police did not respond to a request for further comment.
SEARCH
SF Weekly quoted a 22-year-old man who described himself as the resident of the searched house as saying the group identified themselves as police and that none had said they were working for Apple.
They had traced the phone to the house using satellite positioning software on the device, but did not find anything in the house, he said he was told.
The man, identified by SF Weekly as Sergio Calderon, could not be reached for comment by reporters.
MIXED MESSAGES
Meanwhile, police gave different versions of events during the day on Friday, while Apple has declined to comment at all.
Hours before San Francisco police issued their statement about the search, San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lieutenant Troy Dangerfield denied that police had been contacted by Apple in connection with any lost phone, or by the person visited by Apple security and the police.
“No one has reported anything,” Dangerfield told reporters.
In general, Dangerfield said, the police department requires a supervisor’s approval for personnel who are not law enforcement officers to accompany police during investigations.
“It’s not routinely done at all,” Dangerfield said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day