An eagle-eyed bystander just snapped the mother of all iPhone 17 leaks

The anticipation is building for the iPhone 17 unveiling this fall, and while we still have about a month until a formal announcement about an event, Apple is surely putting the finishing touches on its plans for the new phones. And if a recent sighting is to be believed, some lucky employees already have one.

A post on X this week by Skyfops purports to have seen the iPhone 17 in the wild, and has pictures to prove it. The photos show a person holding a black phone in a case, concealing what appears to be the rumored new camera bar. Skyfops states that the person with the phone was escorted by “security” who would position himself to block anyone from seeing the phone clearly.

In the comments to the original post, Skyfos stated that they saw the phone in San Francisco’s Union Square and that, “They were super obvious walking around with a black brick and a security guard stopping whenever the guy carrying the iPhone stopped.” A later post by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who knows a thing or two about iPhone leaks, simply commented, “Wow. This looks legit.”

The sighting conjures memories of the lost iPhone 4 test unit that was found in a San Francisco bar back in 2015. The person who found the iPhone 4 handed it off to Gizmodo, and it set off a series of events that brought notoriety to the website and exposed Apple’s security issues. At the time, iPhone leaks were still somewhat rare and the discovery revealed numerous features, including the Retina display and flat design.

The iPhone 17 is expected to ship this fall. Catch up on the latest about the phone in our iPhone 17 superguide.