By 2010, the iPhone era was in full swing. Smartphones were still a new and unfinished idea – the iPhone had only just gotten copy and paste! – but it was clear that these big slabs of glass were going to change the way we did pretty much everything.

Apple was also already on an annual launch strategy, so we all knew there was another iPhone coming. Then an Apple employee left a prototype in a bar. Gizmodo bought it, took it apart, published all the sordid details, and pretty much broke the internet. And thus, the story of the iPhone 4 began well before the launch of the iPhone 4.

And that’s just the beginning of the drama! For this epis …

Read the full story at The Verge.