Those iPhone XS and Apple Watch photos? Here's how 9to5Mac found them
Analysis: Logical naming of images and directories made for a clever discovery.
Wednesday at 10 a.m. PT, the world is not only expecting Apple to reveal three new iPhones, but specifically the iPhone XS*.
Why so sure? Because 9to5Mac's noted Apple leaker Guilherme Rambo was the one to bring us the picture you see above -- a picture that looks like it could have been pulled directly from Apple's marketing materials.
And because today, Rambo has revealed that he found the pictures at Apple's own website. Whoops!
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In his own words, here's the clever trick he used:
So, about those marketing images: they came from the recap section of the special event website. I used the URL pattern from the last event and guessed the device’s names. Apple took them down immediately after we published. pic.twitter.com/5ywgetkAbx
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) September 11, 2018
I just took the technique for a spin myself, and it might not have been that difficult a heist to pull off. Observe:
Here's Apple's Special Events website, where the company offers recaps of previous keynotes.
And here's the page for Apple's September 2017 event, where it announced the iPhone X, iPhone 8 and Watch Series 3:
Want to find out where Apple stores those product images? A tool like Chrome's Inspect Element does the trick. And if you compare a few such images, you quickly see Apple's URL format has been pretty consistent, making it ripe for URL hacks. Basically: month-year/productname/image.jpg, more or less. Rambo just followed the trail, started substituting "september-2018" for "september-2017" and "iphonexs" for "iphonex", and the rest is history.
We thought that Apple wouldn't be making this mistake again, but it appears that something similar did just happen again: The latest leak this morning seems to confirm the iPhone XR, iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max names, thanks to a now-inaccessible XML file on Apple's website spotted by Allthings.how.
I agree. Tho people said the same thing last year about the firmware leaks and here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) September 11, 2018
With Apple's announcements just minutes away, we'll soon find out if they'll opt to not use any of the now-leaked images, or otherwise change up their presentation of the products.
Originally published Sept. 11, 2018 at 4:32 p.m. PT. Updated with new info on the Allthings.how story.