When it comes to revelations about Apple's new machine, the thing that may be most impressive to many people is still the leak that shocked the entire consumer electronics industry in 2010: Engineer Gray Powell left a test machine in a bar in Redwood City, and then photos of the entire machine were obtained and released by Gizmodo.
Since then, Apple’s confidentiality of hardware products has been at the highest level in the world. Whether it is the media or friends in the consumer electronics industry, it is difficult to peer through this moat to see Apple’s true core advantages in the supply chain. Until today, 16 years later, someone began to post unreleased iPhone 18 Pro videos on social media: the footage comes from internal drop testing at Apple’s India foundry.
Then, the video disappeared en masse from major social platforms. The post that posted it was replaced with a line of "Violation of Community Rules" prompt; some of the accounts that posted it were even blocked directly.
This is unusual for Apple - it has always been too lazy to pay attention to the true and false rumors from the digital news circle. This time, it used DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaints to remove these videos from major platforms one by one.
Apple filed a DMCA complaint, causing related leaked videos to disappear from major social platforms.
Image source: X platform screenshot
01What was leaked was not a spy photo
Starting in mid-June, a ransomware group called World Leaks posted files stolen from an iPhone assembly factory owned by Tata Group on the dark web.
Tata has become an important part of Apple's supply chain in India in recent years
Image source:X
The file size this time is 200,000 files, more than 630GB, and contains a large amount of Apple internal information. Tata is Apple's most important foundry and parts supplier in India in recent years. The assembly and some parts of the iPhone are all burdened on it.
This has been called Apple's most serious supply chain leak in recent years by many foreign media. The really serious part is hidden behind the spy photos.
In the viral video on the Sources told Reuters that this is the iPhone 18 Pro that will be released in September.
But the video is only the most superficial and most beautiful thing in this batch of leaks. What really sinks below are the quality inspection standards of Apple's circuit boards, copies of employees' passports, years of system logs, and the iPhone 18 Pro motherboard design drawings and A20 Pro chip specification data sheets verified by digital media AppleInsider. The document is printed with Apple's ", "confidential" watermark and internal code name.
The appearance will be revealed sooner or later, and Apple will make it clear at the September press conference. But how to design the motherboard, what specifications of the chip, and who supplies it with what, these are things that Apple keeps under wraps and will never take the initiative to bring out. This is the problem.
The authenticity of the so-called iPhone 18 Pro drop test screen circulating on the Internet is still unclear.
Image source: Screenshot circulated on social platforms
What Apple is most afraid of others seeing is never what the iPhone looks like.
The product will be released sooner or later. What really keeps it awake is another thing that was leaked this time: who did it rely on to build an iPhone.
Six of the documents exposed this time map the components of the iPhone 18 Pro to specific suppliers one by one - whose chips on the motherboard belong to them, whose batteries belong to them, and whose camera modules belong to them.
This is not as simple as a parts list. It lays out the dependence structure of Apple's entire supply chain: who can't live without whom, and if any link is loose, the entire line will shake. It's clear at a glance.
This dependence is something that Apple has guarded for more than ten years and will never take the initiative to disclose.
Why is it so much more important than appearance?
Paolo Pescatore, founder of PP Foresight, a technology research and consulting organization, commented: What is exposed this time is supplier and component information that Apple will never voluntarily put into the public domain; it is equivalent to giving competitors, copycat factories and people with ulterior motives an opportunity to see clearly how Apple's chain is built and where its weaknesses are.
Taking it apart, this leaked information can be used by several people.
Competitors can follow it and see clearly how much Apple relies on certain suppliers - which link has only one source of supply, and once the supply is cut off, the entire line will have to stop. This kind of "single point of failure" is usually protected by Apple itself.
The copycat factory can obtain the model and path of the components, which lowers the threshold for imitation.
And those suppliers who supply Apple have an extra trump card: when negotiating prices and orders in the next round, they have a few more chips than before - because they now know how many retreats Apple has in this chain.
Apple's extreme confidentiality in its supply chain is essentially a bargaining power. This leak is equivalent to putting this bargaining power on the table.
There is another detail. A leak of this magnitude is not a matter of "random picking". To gain access to 630GB and 200,000 files, attackers often have to lurk in the system for a long time, relying on stolen credentials and lax permission management to move laterally in the internal network unnoticed.
What this sentence really points to is not the security of Apple’s headquarters, but the security maturity of a certain node in its supply chain.
iPhone parts come from dozens of suppliers around the world. Who supplies what and how much Apple relies on whom is one of its most closely guarded trade secrets.
Image source:X
02The cost of spreading risk
What’s more worth pondering is:Why did this batch of stuff leak out from India?
To answer this question, we must first know what Tata means to Apple.
In the past few years, Apple has been doing one thing: moving manufacturing outside of China. Needless to say, the reason is that it is too risky to put all your money and life in one place. India is the most important destination in this great migration, and Tata is the pillar that Apple has personally supported in India.
According to data from market research firm Counterpoint: India is expected to produce 26% of the world's iPhones in 2026; four years ago, this figure was only 6%. Four years, from 6% to 26%. Tata not only assembles complete devices but also supplies parts, making it one of Apple's most important manufacturing partners outside of China. To some extent, it is a template project for Apple to build iPhone supply chain in India.
The more important Tata is in the supply chain, the more troubling this leak is.
Apple's supply chain diversification was originally intended to "reduce risks." But every time a new node is opened, there is one more hole that can be breached.
Risk has not disappeared, it has just changed shape. In the past, Apple was worried about geopolitics and putting its eggs in one basket; now it is worried about whether each new basket is strong. What happened this time was not the Chinese supply chain that had been in operation for more than ten years and had been repeatedly reinforced, but the Indian node that had just expanded and was still very young.
The gap between this is actually "time".
In China's electronics supply chain, Apple and its partners have worked hard for more than ten years to lock down security, control, and processes bit by bit to where they are today. What about India? Apple wants to squeeze the hard work of more than ten years into four years. Production capacity has been increased - 6% to 26% is the evidence - but some things cannot be increased quickly. The time saved is finally paid back in one lump sum in the form of "safety debt".
And the timing of repaying this debt could not be worse.
Just last week, Apple raised the prices of iPads and MacBooks due to skyrocketing prices for memory chips (memory and flash memory), and analysts generally expect iPhone price increases to follow. On the one hand, there is blood loss on the cost side, and on the other hand, there are cracks in trust in the supply chain. The two things collided on the eve of the same September release season-this summer, Apple is not having a good time.
03What can be deleted and what cannot be deleted
Apple's rights protection action this time was very fast. While tracing the relevant persons involved in the leak, it filed a DMCA complaint, causing the drop test video to disappear from X in batches in less than 24 hours - the post was replaced with a violation prompt, and the account was blocked. Even the technology media 9to5Mac withdrew an article reporting on the video that morning.
Here’s a question worth pausing for a moment: Apple has always ignored rumors, so why did it take such a heavy hand this time, and did it really work?
The answer lies precisely in this - these things are real. It is not the speculation of the whistleblower, nor the vague rumors relayed by several hands, but the original documents that flowed out from the foundry. It is precisely because it is stolen confidential information that Apple can use the legal weapon of DMCA to force the platform to quickly remove the product from the shelves and ban the account. In other words, Apple can delete it this time only if these items are genuine - and genuine means that its lethality is also real.
Also involved were old acquaintances in the news circle. The account that posted the video bears the old name of veteran whistleblower Evan Blass, @EVLeaks. After the account was blocked, Blass himself immediately distanced himself from the matter: I no longer control this account, and the video has nothing to do with me.
He also added something very heartbreaking: "It seems that Apple has done something that Samsung has never done."
As a professional whistleblower, Blass has published hundreds of Samsung revelations over the years, and Samsung has never stopped him. This time, Apple suppressed this batch of things.
But there’s another layer worth thinking about.
A reporter from Forbes reminded us of a fact that is easily overlooked: no one can confirm the authenticity of the viral video. It may be based on real material leaked on the dark web, or it may have been tampered with or even generated by AI. An account with the name of an acquaintance, and a video whose authenticity is difficult to distinguish, has been viewed tens of thousands of times.
Today, when "real leaks" and "AI fraud" coexist, it is difficult for ordinary people to distinguish with the naked eye whether what they see is real.
So there was a very awkward scene.
What Apple is acting resolutely and deleting one by one with DMCA is the video layer - the most eye-catching, possibly fake, and least lethal thing. The truly fatal batch of documents, including motherboard drawings, chip specifications, and supplier lists, have long been lying intact on the dark web.
What the DMCA can control is X, YouTube, and those visible platforms. It has no control over the dark web. Apple can make a video disappear from X in a few hours, but it can’t make what TSMC and Qualcomm provide it a secret again.
As of now, the impact of the leak is still unfolding. However, the first batch of related videos and original documents have been deleted by platforms such as Weibo and X. Posts on the platform disappear one by one, but the 630GB of data on the dark web about iPhone 18 Pro, iPad mini and even iPhone Air 2 are still lying there quietly; in two months, Apple will personally tell the world about every detail of these products at the press conference.
But by then, the most difficult part about this phone—who put it together piece by piece—may no longer be “the talk” by Apple.