Now, for a company which spends a lot of cash trying to look nice in expensive TV adverts, this is rather a bad bit of PR. Furthermore, Apple is now finding a bit of downside to the considerable media clout that its activities command with a number of prominent and mainstream media sources directing their focus to the company's blunder.

In particular, Jon Stewart has done a piece about the story on his Daily Show, lambasting Apple for their draconian raid on Jason Chen after it was their own error which resulted in the phone being lost in the first place. Perhaps even more interesting is the Techcrunch analysis of the comic segment - which highlights the danger of this mainstream criticism for Apple, as opposed to the blogosphere critiques that it can easily ignore most of the time.

As the saying goes - live by the sword and die by the sword, and indeed no-one will be more aware of this right now than the Apple branding and marketing team who must somehow undo all the bad press that this initially trivial incident is now generating. As a potential legal dispute looks set to unfold in coming days (with Chen recently hiring a lawyer) it looks like the story - and all the surrounding bad press - won't be going away any time soon for Apple. I bet the careless developer who lost the phone has never had a hangover as horrible as this one...

Dejan Levi

Gizmodo compared prices of Macbooks in some of the territories where Apple officially operates (i.e. not through importers), and discovered that Brazil is unsurprisingly the most expensive region for buying such items. This certainly follows that general trend (it is not just Macbooks that cost more over there), but it does also reveal a slightly disproportionate mark-up, in that Apple products seem to be even more over-priced there than other electronics (pretty much double the US price in most cases).

While the justification for the excessive import tax levied on these goods is that it protects domestic production - the reality is that it just rips Brazilian consumers off, who have no domestic rival to an xBox or Macbook on offer for example. Commiserations to our Brazilian counterparts - here in the UK I'll certainly think twice before complaining about tech prices again...

Dejan Levi