“The fact of the matter is: This wouldn't be a big deal if it was _Nokia's_ 4th gen phone, or a CD of Windows 2012 a Microsoft Employee left laying around.”

Really? You might believe that but calling it a “fact” seems a bit too much to me.

  Hell, without Gizmodo, Apple would have never gotten the
  phone back!

The guy who lost the phone called the bar several times to find out if anybode gave the phone back. If the guy who took the phone had done that he should—gave the device to bartender, the Apple would have the phone back easeily. Of course, there would be no story for Gizmodo in that case.

From the link Judson posted (not the text of a law, but some sort of legal advice link):

You can't be convicted of a California Penal Code 496 charge if you intended to return the property to its owner or the police when you bought or received the stolen property.14

However, this defense will not apply if you decided to return the property after you illegally received it. Similarly, it will not apply if you originally had the intent to return the property, but later decided to keep it instead.

If this is accurate, then I'd suspect they're fine, at least in regards to the receiving stolen property thing - they bought the stolen property with the intent to give it back to its owner, and did so in a reasonable time frame (whether or not they could have gotten it back earlier, they did get it to Apple within a couple days, which in most situations would be considered very reasonable). They almost certainly decided before buying it to give it back to Apple.

Whether or not they could be in trouble for trade secret violations or anything else like that, I have no idea.

If he claims having had the intent to return, the act of disassembling the phone will not have helped them.

I operated a bar once. I hated dealing with this sort of thing. It was annoying, frustrating, and dumb. People would leave crap, and they'd turn it over to the bartender. Then you'd have people coming in asking about it and wasting our time wondering if we had it. Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn't. Even if you had a "Lost and Found" box, as we did, they'd always ask for you to check here or check there.

This doesn't sound all to bad until you realize that people would come in all the time asking about a missing cell phone. The girl would pull one out of the box, and ask "Is this it?" "Yes!" And they'd take it, and be done with it. Only it wasn't their phone.

Now, we could have required them to tell us the phone number, and some girls did, but frankly, you do this during happy hour, and you're taking the girl away from the customers, and the customers aren't being served while you attempt to verify the story.

And yes, if you did end up giving the phone back to the wrong person, then you could get the police involved. Yes, this has happened. It's stupid, wastes time, and is a hassle.

If you don't want to lose something in the bar, don't get drunk, or leave it in the car out of sight. And if the phone was stolen, it wouldn't be difficult to discover. Bars have cameras. If they don't, they are asking for trouble.

If you looked at the California law regarding this, you'd notice that "Giving the found property to the bartender" isn't an option. And from experience, this isn't a sure fire way of getting the phone back to the person. It's report it to the police, or attempt to get it back to the owner.

The reason this continues to be a "big deal" is because people keep on talking about it. And the same arguments are repeated ad nauseum.