The most consequential YouTube video of Jon Prosser’s career opens on Prosser himself, in a black hoodie and transparent glasses. The backdrop is familiar to viewers of his tech news channel, Front Page Tech, with warm, hanging lights and a bright white “fpt” logo behind him. Prosser stares meaningfully into the camera, and kicks the video off with just one line of introduction: “I have seen some things.”
The video debuted on January 17th, 2025, with the title “Here’s your very first look at iOS 19.” For six and a half minutes, Prosser describes an unreleased version of Apple’s iPhone software, not set to be publicly revealed for another six months. The images in the video, he’s careful to note, are re-creations of what he saw rather than the original images. But the implication is clear: Somebody showed Prosser the unreleased software. “I can say with 100 percent certainty,” he says at the end of the video, “that what I showed you is real.” Then he not-so-subtly asks his viewers to leak him even more.
In that first video, and in two others Front Page Tech published over the next three months, Prosser explained progressively more details of a long-awaited redesign for iOS, based largely on the software in the Vision Pro headset. The videos didn’t get everything right; Some of the finer details were different when Apple finally released the software in June at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The final software wasn’t even called iOS 19 — it was iOS 26. But Prosser was right about a lot of it, and about the big ideas behind the OS and the design system it was based on that Apple would call Liquid Glass. By the time June arrived, if you had seen Prosser’s videos, you already knew the big news of WWDC.
For Prosser, a longtime Apple leaker, this was maybe his biggest scoop yet. But on July 17th, the company filed a lawsuit against him in a California court. In a complaint that also named Michael Ramacciotti as a defendant, the world’s second-largest company alleged a “coordinated scheme to break into an Apple development phone, steal Apple’s trade secrets, and profit from the theft.” It accused Prosser and Ramacciotti of coordinating to break into an Apple employee’s phone, with Prosser as both mastermind and money guy.
Prosser was hardly the first person to ever share information Apple wasn’t ready to publicize. Ordinarily, the company refuses to acknowledge leaks and just continues on as if it’s all still a secret. But this time, the most secretive company in tech decided to pick a fight in public.
Apple hates leaks. It has always hated leaks.
The company loves the art of the grand reveal. Some of the company’s most memorable moments are the introduction of the iPhone — “These are not three separate devices!” — as well as Steve Jobs pulling the first iPod Nano out of the small pocket of his jeans and taking the first MacBook Air out of a manila envelope. Secrecy is so core to Apple’s culture that often, employees join the company not even knowing what products they’ll be working on. Leaks, the company has long said, spoil the company’s planned surprises and rob employees of the joy of finally revealing their work to the public.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images, Turbosquid
Employees at Apple love the surprise, and not just the executives, says John Gruber, who has been covering Apple on Daring Fireball for more than 20 years. While Apple’s biggest events have recently featured recorded video presentations instead of splashy (and potentially risky) live demos, he says that at Apple’s former big live spectacles, a team that was working on a big new feature announced in the keynote would get good seats, “so they got to be there when it was unveiled and hear people cheer.”
The mystery of a new launch, and the rumor and hype cycles that precede it, are also part of the mystique of following Apple. But it’s not just about peeking into technology’s equivalent of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Even small-scale leaks give Apple’s competition an idea of what they might be up against, give ancillary businesses like product accessory makers a head start on what they might want to make, and give regular people an idea of whether it’s worth waiting for the next device.
Prosser got into the leaks game by “accident,” he told YouTuber Jon Rettinger in 2020. The first consequential leak he recalled was the Samsung Galaxy S20 and S20 Ultra, which launched in 2020 — Prosser said he was sent prices for the phones by a source from T-Mobile and tweeted them. Samsung, at its reveal days later, then announced the phones with the same prices Prosser had tweeted. “That is a cool feeling,” he recounted to Rettinger. “We told the future. And that’s what started it.”
Even when Prosser was leaking things like Galaxy prices and the time of day an iPhone would be released, he told Rettinger that the leaking life was “a lot more stressful than I thought.” “I know that I play a character online,” he said, “on the show and on Twitter, but really, behind the scenes, it’s insanely stressful.” He said he’d talked to other reporters and leakers who had quit the game when it got too stressful. And he knew well, even then, that “it only takes one wrong leak to ruin a reputation.”
Front Page Tech wasn’t specifically designed to be a leaker channel, but as it became associated with revealing unreleased tech, leaks began to beget leaks. And the channel continued to grow, and it’s now an involved production with close to 600,000 subscribers. In the oldest video on Front Page Tech, a young Prosser stands in front of a white background, dressed casually in a fleece over a red T-shirt, and talks about the latest news in tech for eight minutes. Now, Prosser often stands in front of the big fpt logo, leading with attention-grabbing introductions and breathlessly narrating professionally made graphics of new devices. He’s often wearing black. It’s all, you might say, a bit Jobs-ian.
“I do not intentionally post anything that I do not believe.”
“I don’t make many videos,” Prosser tells The Verge. “I spend days, weeks, sometimes months working on a single video.” As of late, almost all of those videos are about Apple — and many of them purport to have details on still-unreleased devices like the iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone Fold. “I like to fill the gap in between concept and tangible product,” Prosser says. He adds that “I do not intentionally post anything that I do not believe.”
According to Apple’s lawsuit, the company received a tip email on April 4th, 2025. (The lawsuit redacts the sender.) The mysterious tipster alleged that Prosser’s information about “iOS 19” was sourced from an Apple employee, Ethan Lipnik. Prosser, the tip claims, had a FaceTime call between Lipnik “or a friend of Lipnik’s” where the secret interface was shown. “Prosser has details on the Lock Screen, Home Screen, app animations, and app interfaces,” the email said, and Prosser had allegedly recorded video from the call that he was sharing with other Apple leakers — at least one of whom said they knew it was from Lipnik’s phone because they recognized his apartment in the video.
“I am sure that Apple has the resources to further investigate,” the emailer wrote. The email was sent three days before Prosser published his third video about iOS 19. That third video shows many designs resembling what Apple eventually shipped to the public.
Apple’s original complaint says that its subsequent investigation uncovered an elaborate alleged plot. After Prosser learned that Ramacciotti was a friend of Lipnik’s, was staying in his home, and needed money, Prosser and Ramacciotti “jointly” schemed to access Lipnik’s Apple-owned development iPhone, according to the complaint. An audio message Ramacciotti sent to Lipnik, which Lipnik provided to Apple, claimed that Ramacciotti “used location tracking” to figure out when Lipnik would be out of the house for a while. Ramacciotti allegedly somehow obtained the passcode to the development iPhone and FaceTimed Prosser from the device. (Lipnik “had failed to properly secure” the iPhone in line with Apple’s policies, the lawsuit says.)
The day the lawsuit was filed, Prosser posted on X that “this is not how the situation played out on my end,” and that he had the “receipts” to prove it. “I did not ‘plot’ to access anyone’s phone,” he said. In October, he told The Verge that he had been in “active communication” with the company. He told The Verge in February that Apple’s complaint “seems like a dramatic heist movie.”
In a legal response to the complaint filed in October, Ramacciotti defended himself by saying he didn’t know how important the unreleased software was given “Lipnik’s willingness to swipe through” the update a few weeks earlier. (Ramacciotti’s lawyer declined The Verge’s request to interview Ramacciotti. Lipnik didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Ramacciotti denied the existence of any grand plot or conspiracy, disputed a few details of Apple’s complaint — including whether he was tracking Lipnik’s location — and said that he “did not initiate communications with Prosser based on any promise by Prosser that he would specifically pay [Ramacciotti] for Apple information.” Ultimately, Ramacciotti said in the filing, Prosser offered and paid Ramacciotti $650 “at some point after the FaceTime call.” He also said he didn’t know Prosser was taking a video during their call.
A clerk entered a default against Prosser earlier that month after he repeatedly failed to respond to Apple’s complaint. The company said in a filing that Prosser had been served personally on July 29th, 2025, and had missed an August 19th deadline. Apple gets to continue its case against both Prosser and Ramacciotti, only now Prosser can’t participate in his own defense.
According to an April 13th filing from Apple and Ramacciotti’s attorneys, Prosser “indicates he is retaining counsel and intends to move to set aside default.” After serving Prosser copies of subpoenas on February 3rd, the filing says Prosser provided some materials but has “failed to fully respond, or to respond at all, to certain requests.”
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Turbosquid
When The Verge reached out to Prosser in February over X DMs to discuss the lawsuit, he declined to answer specific questions, saying it would “not be wise of me to do so.” However, he says that “it’s important to me that Apple gets the truth they’re seeking, and I’m working with them to ensure that happens.” Prosser tells The Verge he is still in the US.
“We don’t comment on active litigation,” Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy tells The Verge.
The Prosser lawsuit isn’t the first time Apple has taken action against leakers.
The company sued the publisher of the formerly influential Apple-focused site Think Secret in January 2005 along with other “unnamed individuals,” alleging that it believed the site “stole Apple’s trade secrets” and that Think Secret “solicited information about unreleased Apple products from these individuals, who violated their confidentiality agreements with Apple.” Nearly three years later, the two sides settled. As part of that settlement, Think Secret would no longer be published, and the site’s publisher, Nick Ciarelli, said he would be moving forward with his college studies. Think Secret’s website now only shows a message that says “The publication Think Secret is no longer in operation.”
Apple has also gone after employees for allegedly leaking information to journalists. After settling with former design architect Simon Lancaster, who Apple accused of providing trade secrets to an “outside media correspondent,” Lancaster told The Verge that he shared information with The Information’s Wayne Ma.
Last year, the company settled with Andrew Aude, a former engineer who Apple alleged shared confidential information on his work-issued iPhone with employees at other tech companies and “at least three national journalists,” according to a copy of the lawsuit uploaded by MacRumors. “Leaking was not worth it,” Aude said in a statement posted on X.
(Traditional news media publications will report on information that is shared with them, but that information is freely given — it typically isn’t paid for. And when publications report on what might be hacked or stolen information from a third party, they consider it very carefully. The Verge, like most responsible publications, also has a strict ethics policy.)
The most famous Apple leak is almost certainly the iPhone 4, which an Apple employee left on a barstool in California in March 2010. Gizmodo ultimately paid $5,000 for the device, ran a series of stories about it, and received a letter from Apple that said it “constitutes a formal request that you return the device to Apple.” A Gizmodo employee’s house was eventually raided by police, but the case itself was ultimately dropped. At the time, San Mateo County District Attorney Steven Wagstaffe told CNET that investigators were looking for evidence that Gizmodo either participated in the theft of the phone or extorted the person who took it. “We didn’t think [the evidence] supported either,” Wagstaffe said.
“Being sued by the corporate side of Apple doesn’t make me any less a fan of their legacy.”
Prosser tells The Verge that, “With the narrative Apple was originally given, I actually understand why they’d want to file a lawsuit.” But he adds, “I continue to make videos because I know the truth. I make my videos for my audience. Not for Apple. Being sued by the corporate side of Apple doesn’t make me any less a fan of their legacy.”
Since the lawsuit was filed, Front Page Tech has continued to publish. And it has continued to publish leaks about Apple products, including the as-yet-unconfirmed iPhone 18 Pro and a foldable iPhone. Those videos feature the kind of flashy, macro-level device videos you see in practically every Apple keynote. Prosser offers what he says are details about the phones’ sizes, their most important features, and the makeup of the entire iPhone lineup for 2026.
In neither case does Prosser present the same level of detail as he did with his iOS leaks, nor does he make as many references to how he received his information. Front Page Tech videos recently have been a little more careful in that sense, and a little more vague in their sourcing and details. But Prosser has been “leaking” the looming launch of a foldable iPhone in particular for years, and it seems his confidence hasn’t waned a bit.
