Oh dear - things are getting worse and worse by the day for the careless Apple developer who left an iPhone 4G prototype in a bar after popping in for just a few quiet drinks. (For those who are new to the story, all you need to know can be found here, and then here). In short, Apple have compounded the initial individual blunder by taking rather excessive action in attempting to retrieve the phone - by having Gizmodo editor, Jason Chen's, house searched and property seized - due to the belief that he had been sent the phone by the original finder.
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
