Apple fired an iPhone X engineer after his daughter's hands-on video went viral

Brooke Amelia Peterson shows off an iPhone X in a YouTube video posted last week. YouTube/Brooke Peterson

A YouTube vlogger named Brooke Amelia Peterson got her hands on a brand-new iPhone X last week.

She got the phone directly from her father, an Apple engineer.

Apple has since fired the engineer, and the video was taken down.

The engineer who let his daughter show off an iPhone X on YouTube has been fired by Apple.
Last week, a YouTube vlogger named Brooke Amelia Peterson posted a video showing off her dad's new iPhone X. The video, shot from within Apple's cafeteria, showcased several features of the new phone.
The video blew up, landing on YouTube's list of top trending videos. It was subsequently removed.
In a new video posted this weekend, Peterson explains that the video was removed at the request of Apple and that her father — an engineer named Ken Bauer — was fired.
"Apple let him go," Peterson says in the video. "At the end of the day, when you work for Apple, it doesn't matter how good of a person you are. If you break a rule, they just have no tolerance."
Though Apple's new iPhone X is already available to preorder and will be released Friday — and Apple had held an event where members of the media could use it to shoot video and take photos — the video from Peterson was a rare, candid look into an unreleased Apple device from within Apple's own staff.
Bauer was seen in the video using Apple Pay on the iPhone X. He handed the phone to his daughter, and she walked through various features.
It's entirely possible that the phone in the video was a preproduction unit. Even if it wasn't, Apple assuredly doesn't want its staff casually showing off unreleased products in unauthorized YouTube videos.
Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

EXCLUSIVE FREE REPORT: The Top 4 Apps and Platforms Takes That Go Against The Grain Report by the BI Intelligence Research Team.Get the Report Now » SEE ALSO: A YouTuber whose dad works at Apple just gave us the best look at the iPhone X yet NOW WATCH: I won't trade in my iPhone 6s for an iPhone X or iPhone 8 — here's why

Amazon has slashed seller fees to try to improve its grocery selection online

Amazon cemented its long-term interest in the grocery industry when it spent nearly $14 billion to acquire Whole Foods earlier this year. Now it’s making a subtler move aimed at improving its own grocery selection online.

Amazon recently told businesses that sell non-perishable grocery items on Amazon.com that it was lowering the fee it charges them on items priced at $15 or less. Amazon previously charged 15 percent on all grocery items, but will now charge only 8 percent on the lower-priced goods for at least the next year.

“To help you list more products and keep prices competitive, we are offering you a limited-time referral fee discount on Grocery products,” the email said, according to a copy forwarded to Recode. “This fee promotion starts at 12:00 a.m. October 15, 2017 (PST), and will run through 11:59 p.m. October 14, 2018 (PST).”

The move could be looked at as a competition-focused one: While Walmart also charges 15 percent across the board for grocery items sold through its online marketplace, its subsidiary Jet.com charges only 10 percent for most non-gourmet packaged foods, according to its website.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the fee reduction seems like an acknowledgement that it’s difficult for businesses to make a reasonable profit when selling some inexpensive groceries online.

Take, for example, a business that wants to sell a 40-ounce jar of peanut butter that retails for $5.49. The easiest way to make the product eligible for the Prime shipping program is to store it in an Amazon warehouse under its Fulfilled By Amazon — or FBA — program.

But the FBA storage-and-shipping fee alone for this one jar would be about $4.44 — in part because of its weight — and that’s before you factor in the cost for the seller to make or acquire the product as well as Amazon’s 15 percent commission under the previous fee structure. The economics don’t really work.

As a result, sellers and grocery brands have had to come up with alternatives to sell these lower-priced grocery staples through Amazon. One popular option is selling a certain product in a more-expensive bulk pack, as you might find in a Costco or BJ’s Wholesale Club.

Others sell their items at a wholesale price to Amazon, which then funnels the low-priced goods into membership programs such as Prime Pantry or Amazon Fresh.

The Prime Pantry program lets Prime members fill a box full of grocery items but it costs $5.99 per box for shipping. Amazon also sells low-priced grocery items through Amazon Fresh, but that grocery program costs $14.99 a month in addition to the regular $99-a-year Prime membership fee.

Still, Amazon recognizes that there are plenty of Amazon customers that will never pay for either program and it still wants those people to think of Amazon as a grocery destination. The problem is, it’ll never win that perception by only selling bulk-size packs.

That’s the context that likely played a big part in Amazon’s decision to lower its fee. (Amazon declined to comment.) The question is whether the reduction is a real solution to the problem.

David Rekuc, the marketing director for the e-commerce consultancy Ripen eCommerce, is skeptical that it is. While he believes there are some types of grocery items that might become profitable with the fee reduction, Rekuc says FBA fees or the cost for a seller to ship the item themselves still make it difficult to profitably sell a single unit of a low-priced grocery item — despite the lower commission.

“It’s nice to see and it may move the needle a little bit,” he said of the fee discount, “but it won’t fundamentally change [Amazon’s] penetration in grocery.”

11:41:00