Steve Wozniak Got White iPhone From Queens Teenager

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Do you remember the story of Fai Lem? He was the 17-year-old Queens teenager who was selling parts for the white iPhone that he claimed were surplus white iPhone parts that he purchased directly from Foxconn. That always seemed a bit fishy to us, but regardless, he said he made $134,000 by doing this. And he had one famous customer – Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Wozniak, who started Apple with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne in 1976, still receives a small income from Apple. While giving an interview with CNN, he pulled out a white iPhone, which shocked the CNN reported. I don’t know why, considering that it’s known that Apple employees were issued the white iPhones. But, Wozniak wasn’t given a white iPhone through Apple. Instead, he purchased his parts via Fai Lem’s website.

According to comments made by Wozniak to both the blog 9to5Mac and CNN, when he saw the orginial post on 9to5Mac about the white iPhone conversion kits, he quickly placed his order before it was shut down by Apple. Wozniak wrote to a reader of 9to5 via email:

This Chinese teen sold the white parts on the internet. I got in early (although the kid had already made $130K) and got my front and back plates and modified my iPhone 4.

Just briefly recapping the story, Fai Lem said that he was contacted by a Chinese spammer via email who was offering to sell white iPhones. Since Lem knew his language, they struck up a conversation and Lem bought a bunch of white iPhone parts from him, allegedly the real parts that came right from Foxconn. Lem then begun selling his bits. He’s now being investigated for reselling of stolen parts, since everybody knows that if these parts are legit, they “fell off the back of the truck”.

Anyway, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak bought his white iPhone from the teenager in Queens. Wozniak, who build the first Apple computers in a garage and was a regular member of the Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club was quite the modder and probably would have done something like this back in the 1970s himself.