Brooke Peterson got her hands on the iPhone X and let the world see it before Apple wanted the world to see it. That’s not smart, and she got her father — an Apple engineer — fired for her iPhone shenanigans on YouTube. (She got access to the phone from her dad.) It usually takes talent or Kim Kardashian‘s build to make a video that goes viral (ask anybody who’s tried). But even bigger than talent is access — and Peterson used access to the latest iPhone as her ticket to the viral video pantheon (right next to Ellen DeGeneres, as Brooke points out). Alas, it’s hard to keep viral a secret (that’s the thing about it) — and YouTube swiftly took the video down at Apple’s request. The fallout is short-lived, except as concerns the perpetrators: Brooke’s video caused her father to lose a gig everybody seems to want: Apple engineer.
Brooke didn’t exactly sneak around — she filmed from inside the Apple cafeteria. So her claim that she didn’t know she was committing a violation is more than plausible. In an explanatory video, Brooke called her dad the “best dad anybody could ask for” and talked about his honesty, etc. Brooke called hers a “little innocent video” among what she characterizes as so many other iPhone X videos that were out there. Her father, she says, “takes full responsibility” for the access mistake. But Brooke seemed to expected a little more of humane, loving Apple and less of the giant corporate intellectual property protecting Apple. She got a rude awakening. “Apple let him go,” she says. “At the end of the day, when you work for Apple it doesn’t matter how good of a person you are. If you break a rule, they just have no tolerance. They had to do what they had to do,” Brooke says, resigned. She’s not mad at Apple, she says. “The rules are in place for the happiness and for the safety of workers,” she says. She’ll keep buying the products and dad will be okay, she says.
