I’ve just been soaking in the details on the great iPhone 4 Caper of 2010. Latent in all of the hooplah is the simple, cynical question: Is this an intentional leak?

My guess is that no, it’s not. This type of leak – if it were one – is inherently cheap, and if there’s anything I learned while I worked for the Fruit, it’s that they don’t do anything public-facing that’s cheap.

I worked for an ad agency several lifetimes ago that was big on what they called “spherical branding.” They viewed a client as a sort of planet, or perhaps an onion, with each layer successively more exposed to the public but also successively more under the direction of the corporate brand. It’s hard to explain in type, but the end result is uniformity of message, uniformity of brand, and uniformity of customer experience. Great effort was made to ensure that all areas of the company behaved consistent to the overall brand.

Apple may not have been one of our clients, but Apple is a strong believer in spherical branding even if I never heard the term mentioned while I worked there. In fact, I’m not even sure if Apple was consciously on the wagon, as it seemed to be something more innate. Other companies had to work and strive to achieve uniformity, while Apple just is.

A stunt like this is anathema to everything that is the Apple brand identity. It just doesn’t fit. This alone is enough to convince me that the device truly was either lost or stolen, and this isn’t an Apple Marketing plant.