Lost iPhone case enters Dilbert territory

The case of the missing iPhone is a story that can’t decide whether it wants to be serious or ridiculous.

In the circle of Apple bloggers, the story about how an Apple engineer lost a valuable prototype of an iPhone that may reveal secrets about the company’s future models is serious business. And a police search of a Gizmodo editor’s home shows that local authorities in Silicon Valley are not treating it as a laughing matter.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":178291,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,mobile,","session":"B"}']

But the comics among us want to turn the affair into a circus. First, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak created a stir with a gag T-shirt that said “I went drinking with Gray Powell and all I got was a lousy iPhone prototype.” (Powell is the Apple engineer who lost the phone.) Then today, Scott Adams lampooned the matter in a cartoon released on his website.

“I found this story too delicious to resist, but I worried that the story would become stale before my comics would work through the pipeline. I think the soonest I can get something published is in about a month, perhaps a bit sooner, but I’ve never tested it,” Adams wrote.

He wrote the comics exclusively for his blog readers, and he noted he didn’t need to invent any part of it.

It’s a story you just can’t make up.

[image credit: Scott Adams]

Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Early-bird pricing is available until May 15. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.