iPad info and iPhone sales figures leak leads to Federal Indictment

Seth Weintraub | Dec 16 2010 - 12:06 pm PT

Fortune reports that a Flextronics executive was taped by FBI officials revealing iPhone sales numbers two and a half weeks before the official announcement as well as the existence of the iPad. Flextronics director Walter Shimoon had a conversation with an an unnamed “cooperative witness” in late 2009 in which he revealed:

Apple, he is heard telling CW-2, was “coming out next year” with a new iPhone that’s “gonna have two cameras … It’ll be a neat phone because it’s gonna have a five-megapixel auto-focus camera and it will have a VGA forward-facing videoconferencing camera.” Apple announced the iPhone 4 — with its two cameras — eight months later.
Then he is heard telling CW-2 that “they [Apple] have a code name for something new … It’s totally … It’s a new category altogether… It doesn’t have a camera, what I figured out. So I speculated that it’s probably a reader. … Something like that. Um, let me tell you, it’s a very secretive program. … It’s called K, K48. That’s the internal name. So, you can get, at Apple you can get fired for saying K48.” The iPad — code named K48 — was unveiled four months later.

Flextronics supplies Apple with camera and battery components for its iOS devices (or at least it did). Shimoon and his three co-defendants were arrested Thursday on several changes of wire fraud and securities fraud.