Leopard’s Time Machine running on iPhone (I kid, I kid)? Or just an odd choice of sample web pages to show off mobile Safari?
As the screenshot above shows, Apple’s latest ad for the iPhone—which is, incidentally, just as impressive as the other highly effective three that appeared on Sunday—focuses a lot on NYTimes.com. But not the NYTimes.com you can go visit today; rather, if you look carefully at the video, it’s the site as of October 2, 2006.
That’s even older than the demo page shown during the January keynote (Jan. 9, 2007).
Why go with a version of the page that’s eight months old rather than something more recent? I’m guessing that it’s because that was a day on which a Nike+ ad was running on the main page, as shown in the video. It doesn’t seem to be related to the site’s interactive features or other recent layout changes; the ad even shows the site’s Flash-based video player, which iPhone now seems to be rendering properly during the demo.