If I was working over at Apple's PR department, I think I'd call in sick today. In fact, I think I'd fake something really serious like Ebola or bird flu and try to get the week off, because the brown stuff has hit the fan head on over the bricked iPhones and cleaning up this mess is going to be tricky.
Oh, Adrian, Adrian, Adrian. First of all, as we've established before, Apple PR people don't have to dirty their hands with such trivial things as answering phones and responding to complaints.
And, as much as I'd like to see a little shine taken off of Apple, I don't think it's going to happen. Despite the flimsy anecdotal evidence here that people who don't even have iPhones have heard of this bricking issue (i.e., one guy at a house party), Apple is still a cult. Apple users are still blinded sheep. The common teen or geek wannabe will still yearn for the iPhone. Besides, I'd venture that the overwhelming majority of iPhone users DIDN'T tinker with their phone and therefore won't be affected by the bricking issue. And, after shelling out $400 for a phone, they're psychologically locked into defending the product.
Also, iTunes and iPod, from their inception, have been what tech geeks call "anti-consumer." In other words, Apple kept firm control over the property and didn't open the doors wide so that any 15-year-old could upload his bootlegged and mislabeled tracks into the system. And it didn't hurt iTunes any.
Things like Dell Hell and Comcast Jihad because the average consumer feels the pain of a marketer promising one thing and then not delivering it. This Apple fiasco is unlikely to catch on because in the average consumer's mind -- even the average Apple consumer -- this seems like a small handful of people being punished for cracking open the phone and monkeying around with it. Like it or not -- and I don't like it -- a number of people probably see it as a case of hackers getting what they deserve. So, no, this isn't going to hurt Apple.