Apple says: I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?

And that's why we have laws. So you can hate a company, and yet they still get treated equally.

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.

You could ask Adam Osborne...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Effect

Edit: The other problem with this kind of thing, is often in a prototype, there are features that don't make the final cut. What do you think would have happend to iPad sales if this was an iPad two months before launch, and it had a camera in it?

Shield laws should undeniably have protected the journalists stuff from being raided (requires a subpoena rather than a search warrant when its dealing with a case of journalism with a source like this) which is the DA's fuck up I guess.

Also I find it a bit dodgy that the police unit (a high tech crimes unit) that raided the house has got Apple as part of the steering committee. Hopefully turns out to be coincidence.

So Apple follows up a PR stunt with a second PR stunt. Lovely, and it seems everyone is biting.

The funny thing is I went to High School with Gray Powell...the now infamous Apple engineer. We were in the same computer/network engineering class.

I feel bad for him, he was a pretty cool gi=uy back then..to bad he's inline to recieve the brunt of apples malice.

Good to know. If I ever want to buy stolen equipment, I just need to be a journalist, and then I am above the law.

Thanks for the tip.

You're assuming that the computers were taken to investigate the 'finder' of the phone. Buying stolen property is a crime in CA, and shield laws are a lot murkier when the journalist is the one being investigated.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/can-gizmodo-win-the-iphone-legal-battle/

If a judge ends up agreeing with the EFF on this, just imagine all the fun things that bloggers could do inside their own homes without having to worry about the police showing up. Doesn't seem practical to me in a world where anybody with a computer and an internet connection can become a 'journalist.'