GoKawiilThe most consequential YouTube video of Jon Prosser’s career opens on Prosser himself, in a black hoodie and transparent glasses. The backdrop is familiar to viewers of his tech news channel, Front Page Tech, with warm, hanging lights and a bright white “fpt” logo behind him. Prosser stares meaningfully into the camera, and kicks the video off with just one line of introduction: “I have seen some things.”
The video debuted on January 17th, 2025, with the title “Here’s your very first look at iOS 19.” For six and a half minutes, Prosser describes an unreleased version of Apple’s iPhone software, not set to be publicly revealed for another six months. The images in the video, he’s careful to note, are re-creations of what he saw rather than the original images. But the implication is clear: Somebody showed Prosser the unreleased software. “I can say with 100 percent certainty,” he says at the end of the video, “that what I showed you is real.” Then he not-so-subtly asks his viewers to leak him even more.
In that first video, and in two others Front Page Tech published over the next three months, Prosser explained progressively more details of a long-awaited redesign for iOS, based largely on the software in the Vision Pro headset. The videos didn’t get everything right; Some of the finer details were different when Apple finally released the software in June at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The final software wasn’t even called iOS 19 — it was iOS 26. But Prosser was right about a lot of it, and about the big ideas behind the OS and the design system it was based on that Apple would call Liquid Glass. By the time June arrived, if you had seen Prosser’s videos, you already knew the big news of WWDC.
For Prosser, a longtime Apple leaker, this was maybe his biggest scoop yet. But on July 17th, the company filed a lawsuit against him in a California court. In a complaint that also named Michael Ramacciotti as a defendant, the world’s second-largest company alleged a “coordinated scheme to break into an Apple development phone, steal Apple’s trade secrets, and profit from the theft.” It accused Prosser and Ramacciotti of coordinating to break into an Apple employee’s phone, with Prosser as both mastermind and money guy.
Prosser was hardly the first person to ever share information Apple wasn’t ready to publicize. Ordinarily, the company refuses to acknowledge leaks and just continues on as if it’s all still a secret. But this time, the most secretive company in tech decided to pick a fight in public.
Apple hates leaks. It has always hated leaks.
The company loves the art of the grand reveal. Some of the company’s most memorable moments are the introduction of the iPhone — “These are not three separate devices!” — as well as Steve Jobs pulling the first iPod Nano out of the small pocket of his jeans and taking the first MacBook Air out of a manila envelope. Secrecy is so core to Apple’s culture that often, employees join the company not even knowing what products they’ll be working on. Leaks, the company has long said, spoil the company’s planned surprises and rob employees of the joy of finally revealing their work to the public.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images, Turbosquid
Employees at Apple love the surprise, and not just the executives, says John Gruber, who has been covering Apple on Daring Fireball for more than 20 years. While Apple’s biggest events have recently featured recorded video presentations instead of splashy (and potentially risky) live demos, he says that at Apple’s former big live spectacles, a team that was working on a big new feature announced in the keynote would get good seats, “so they got to be there when it was unveiled and hear people cheer.”
The mystery of a new launch, and the rumor and hype cycles that precede it, are also part of the mystique of following Apple. But it’s not just about peeking into technology’s equivalent of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Even small-scale leaks give Apple’s competition an idea of what they might be up against, give ancillary businesses like product accessory makers a head start on what they might want to make, and give regular people an idea of whether it’s worth waiting for the next device.
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