Ted Lasso‘s second season has sparked all kinds of internet discourse over its pacing, direction and just generally whether it’s OK for a show to have nice people doing nice things for each other as the general plot. Some of that talk has been in jest, but the conversations have been fairly consistent in recent days to say the least. But the latest episode of the Apple TV smash hit has some wondering if it’s actually revealed something even more interesting: an unreleased iPhone.
Apple is notorious about its secrecy when it comes to new technology, so the revelation would be a surprise. But a recent scene where Lasso, Keeley, his boss and another character were all eating lunch featured an Apple phone that appeared to lack the latest product’s signature notch. You can see two images of it below.
Apple is certainly known for its product placement in its TV shows, as anyone who watched the first season of The Morning Show can attest. But Lasso, a show where a fake soccer team plays against real soccer teams and was filmed amid a pandemic, makes use of a good amount of CGI to make the show somewhat realistic-looking. So this may just be, well, a fake phone that wasn’t an exact model of a real Apple device. Or a computer-created device that simply doesn’t include all the quirks of the real deal.
Also, given how big a deal Apple makes out of new phone reveals, intentionally sneaking it into a show with little fanfare seems counterintuitive when it comes to marketing. Consider, also, that the phones traditionally get announced in the fall and Lasso‘s second season rollout technically saw it get pushed back a bit when it did not drop Season 2’s first three episodes all at once, as expected during its writing and filming.
In other words, is this a new iPhone reveal? Maybe! But it’s not like we’re getting specs of this bad boy until it’s on a slide above a very sleek stage, so perhaps it’s safe to assume this is a prop problem and not some kind of corporate espionage.