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De85 on 28 April 2010
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famousringo said:
De85 said:
TheRealMafoo said:
If the guy from Gizmodo had found the phone, then there would be no crime. But he bought a phone from someone that they knew did not own it. That's against the law. It's why the other tech sites said no.

This will cost Apple tens of millions of dollars, all because a company committed a crime, and Apple is the party in all this your calling a dick?

Come on.

I'm really eager to hear why you think this.  Do you think this story magically made people stop wanting iphones, or that when the next hardware revision is released all the apple fans will just give them the middle finger because they already know what it looks like? 

All this was was free publicity for apple.  I have zero sympathy for them.

I certainly don't have the skills to put a number or even a ballpark on the damages, but there are a few different ways that this impacts Apple's bottom line:

1. Nobody is talking about the iPad anymore. Apple's big new product launched just a month ago, but now everybody's talking about the iPhone prototype scandal. You can buy an iPad right now. You can't buy an iPhone 4 right now.

2. Apple's PR strategy is to keep a tight lid on their projects, then get a bunch of press together and get it on every damn media pipe at once. It's worked pretty well for Apple for quite some time now. That strategy is severely disrupted, because we've all seen the iPhone 4 already.

3. The smartphone business moves pretty fast. How much do you suppose a three month early peek at the exterior and internals of a major competitor's product is worth to HTC, RIM, or Nokia? They will use it to help form their own designs and strategies to compete against Apple.

You're right that Apple's getting some publicity, but it's not wholly positive. The whole affair makes Apple look incompetent, and as we can see in this thread, some people even interpret Apple's complaint to the police as some kind of thuggery. I don't think the publicity from this will compensate Apple for having their launch event torpedoed, let alone the cost in trade secrets.

The iPhone earned Apple $5.4 billion in revenue last quarter. If this scandal puts even a 1% dent in the iPhone's sales for a single quarter, that's tens of millions of dollars.

That's not the fault of gizmodo, Apple just mishandled the situation imo. 

As for your point 1, I don't think that the two events are in any way related, I just think that Apple fanboys overhyped the launch of the ipad, and that mainstream interest lagged behind their own.  Public interest in the ipad was waning even without the new iphone scandal. 

Re: #3, I'll bet any amount you name that all other smart phone manufacturers have development cycles longer than three months for their phones.  Any features that will come out in their next revisions were decided on many months, possibly a few years ago.  If they do decide to copy something they've seen in the new iphone it won't hit the market until well after the new iphone.