Now you might not think this is possible but it happened, we (the public) only had speculations about the iPhone for most part of 2006 but had no idea on how it looked like until yesterday. It was revealed during the MacWorld event in San Francisco.

Here are some earlier photo’s of the user submitted iPhone prototypes:

LOL, they we’re even close to what the final confirmed one looked like.

So, how did Apple keep it a secret for so long?

Even at MacWorld, top Apple managers were whispering about how this was the first time they saw the design. Steve Job’s did an incredible job keeping this a secret, Cingular, Apple’s partner on this also had no idea. They knew it was coming but didn’t know when. Apple partnered with Cingular in the past to release the not so popular ROKR, the iTunes cellphone. Apple also played bully, and sued bloggers around the world for disclosing information about their iPhones, so If I were to publish this blog entry anytime earlier, I would have been at risk of a lawsuit [[as if I wasn’t an expert on that already]].

Now the iPhone is coming out in June and it’s MSRP is $499 for the 4GB and $599 for the 8GB. If Apple could have kept the iPhone a secret for longer, they would have but in order to file for FCC regulations, they were forced to make it public, this is one of the reasons it is being released in June, instead of let’s say February. Apparently, Steve Job’s also kept it a secret with his family. “Daddy, can you tell us finally what you were working on?”

WOW, This makes me think about how many secrets the government is keeping from us!