The and iOS 8 are finally here, so naturally, online pranksters are trying to convince poor suckers to destroy their pricey new tech.
4chan’s pranksters have taken a brief break from proliferating nude celeb photos and raging over GamerGate to concoct what might be their most juvenile iPhone prank to date.
Late Thursday night, anonymous users of 4chan’s technology board /g/ collaborated on a plan to convince people to zap their iPhones in the microwave.
The following screengrab of the /g/ thread was posted on Reddit’s r/4chan. It shows the community proposing new ideas for pranks.
The brainstorming session jumped to /b/—a place for animal rights advocates and general schemers to gather in disharmony—where some Photoshop junkies whipped up an advertisement encouraging people to microwave their phones to unlock a special feature. They called it Apple Wave.
Using bogus Twitter accounts, /b/ attempted to share the ad and encourage people to bake their phones. The hashtag #applewave has gotten a paltry 500 mentions, which is largely a testament to how pathetic this prank was.
A year ago, /b/ tried to pull off a similar prank when Apple released iOS 7. The idea behind this one was to convince people to dunk their now “waterproof” phones in water.
As was the case with this prank and #applewave, both failed to actually catch on—but it did get a fair amount of press, which made it, in /b/’s eyes, a “success.”
The Apple Wave prank has been debunked on the Independent, BuzzFeed, and a handful of CBS-affiliated sites.
If you were legitimately fooled into microwaving your brand-new phone, please email me at fernando@thedailydot.com so I can laugh at you.
H/T BuzzFeed | Photo by William Hook/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)
