9to5Mac: Here's How We Found Those iPhone XS And Apple Watch Photos

The world is not only expecting Apple to reveal three new iPhones, but specifically the iPhone XS*.

Why so sure? Because 9to5Mac's noted Apple leaker Guilherme Rambo was the one to bring us the picture you see above -- a picture that looks like it could have been pulled directly from Apple's marketing materials.

And because today, Rambo has revealed that he found the pictures at Apple's own website. Whoops!

Guilherme Rambo

So, about those marketing images: they came from the recap section of the special event website. I used the URL pattern from the last event and guessed the device’s names. Apple took them down immediately after we published.

just took the technique for a spin myself, and it might not have been that difficult a heist to pull off. Observe:

Here's Apple's Special Events website, where the company offers recaps of previous keynotes.

And here's the page for Apple's September 2017 event, where it announced the iPhone X, iPhone 8 and Watch Series 3:

Want to find out where Apple stores those product images? A tool like Chrome's Inspect Element does the trick. And if you compare a few such images, you quickly see Apple's URL format has been pretty consistent, making it ripe for URL hacks. Basically: month-year/productname/image.jpg, more or less. Rambo just followed the trail, started substituting "september-2018" for "september-2017" and "iphonexs" for "iphonex", and the rest is history.

Just don't expect Apple to make that mistake ever again. It might obfuscate the URLs -- or better yet, not put images on a publicly accessible server until after the products are announced.

With Apple's announcements just hours away, we'll soon find out if they'll opt to not use any of the now-leaked images, or otherwise change up their presentation of the products.