Amazon Prime Video’s latest thriller, Outer Range, starring Josh Brolin and Imogen Poots, has just wrapped up its first season with a double bill finale. The show is a science fiction Western where Brolin’s character finds a black void on his land, but it seems there may even be weirder things going on with the character's smartphones.
Spotted by Reddit user u/SmarmyPanther, the latest episode of the drama features a character using an iPhone, but it is hidden inside a Google Pixel case. You can see the Apple logo through the fingerprint scanner hole on the case, and it’s clear the camera doesn’t fit out of the cut-out either.
It’s difficult to tell the exact model of iPhone, but the vertical camera array on the handset means this is either an iPhone X, iPhone XS, or iPhone XS Max. As for the case, it appears to be the official Material Case for the Google Pixel 3 or the Pixel 3 XL. You can tell that by the rectangular camera cutout, which became square on the following models.
It bears a resemblance to the official Pixel 2 case, but the cutout along the bottom for the charging cable is shorter here than on that case, so I’m pretty confident this is for the Pixel 3 or Pixel 3 XL. Looking at how snug the phone looks in the case, I’d argue it’s likely the iPhone XS Max in a Google Pixel 3 XL case, but the quality of the footage makes it difficult to tell for sure.
This is one of the odder smartphone spots in TV and film recently, with explicit use of an iPhone inside a Pixel branded accessory. Some on Reddit are speculating that this may be due to copyright or product placement issues during the production of Outer Range. Only a member of the crew of Outer Range will be able to confirm for certain what happened here, but I'm pretty sure this isn't a plot point setting up season two.
