A 16-year-old boy and 21-year-old man are being held by police in connection with a raid on Apple's flagship London store in Covent Garden during the early hours of Monday morning.

It is believed that 14 people arrived at the store on mopeds and motorbikes at around 1am, before breaking into the shop and leaving with a number of iPads and other kit worth potentially thousands of pounds.

Members of the group are said to have worn crash helmets as they fled the scene.

The two were arrested at an address in Clerkenwell where one of the suspected mopeds was found, according to Crimestoppers.

"Although two men are in custody on suspicion of burglary, the inquiry continues and other persons are sought," said DS Nathan Tozer of Westminster CID said.

"It is essential that anyone who saw the smash-and-grab, or the suspects making off, contact us as soon as possible."

It is not known what other pieces of kit were stolen, although Apple stores worldwide will be preparing for the much-hyped launch of the iPhone 4S.

Police in China finally appear to be getting tough on counterfeit Apple goods, after news emerged that Shanghai officers busted an organised gang responsible for building and distributing hundreds of fake iPhones.

Shanghai Daily reported that five suspects have been arrested so far following the discovery of the gang's workshop in Zhabei, a part of Shanghai close to the city's largest mobile phone market.

The report said that around 200 fake iPhones were seized, along with over 5,000 components, worth an estimated ¥5m (£500,000).

These were pretty good forgeries, though, with some genuine components. They shared the same functionality as the real iPhone, but battery life was far inferior, the report claimed.

The news will be welcomed at Cupertino, which has been frustrated by a string of fake Apple stores springing up around Chinese cities, a staggering 22 in Kunming alone.

Apple has even sought to register a number of patents in China in an attempt to protect its intellectual property in the world's second largest economy.

Reports surfaced today that Apple will unveil the iPhone 5 at a special event on 4 October. But when exactly will the new iPhone reach consumers, and which carriers will offer it?

Two recent reports have shed some light on the matter, at least in the US. An AT&T support page discovered by GottaBeMobile indicates that the carrier could start offering discounts to customers due for an upgrade on 13 October, suggesting that this could be the release date for the iPhone 5.

Other carriers, however, may not be so quick to offer the new handset. Sprint, a relatively new iPhone carrier, will apparently not get the handset until next year. Reports indicate that the company is not counting on getting any additional sales from the iPhone in 2011.

Similarly, T-Mobile has indicated that it does not expect to bolster its 2011 sales numbers with an iPhone release, suggesting that new carriers will be shut out of the device at least until the end of 2011.

These reports, however, may ultimately end up meaning very little. Apple is notoriously hard to pin down for release dates, and we've already had false starts this year for the iPhone 5.

Apple has triumphed yet again in an annual customer satisfaction survey to find which PC brands are best regarded by their customers. HP, ironically, came second.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index reported Apple up a percentage point from last year at 87, having triumphed in this survey for a staggering eight years in a row.

Others in the index included Acer, Dell and, interestingly, HP, which is currently deciding on whether to ditch its PC business altogether.

The computing giant has already announced plans to offload its webOS division, despite having bought Palm only a year ago for a whopping $1.2bn, but managed to place second with 78 points.

Apple is, of course, famous for its loyal and dedicated, some might say fanatical, following, so it should probably come as no surprise that the company has dominated the rankings to such an extent.

Its performance since the index began has been pretty impressive, the only bum note coming in 1998, coincidentally the year Steve Jobs returned to the company he co-founded, when the firm hit an all-time low of 69.

Whether this index is worth taking seriously by Apple's competitors is another matter. It's unlikely HP will prick up its ears and reconsider selling its PC business on the back of its impressive performance here, although stranger things have happened.

There have been accusations for decades that Microsoft rips off Apple's ideas in its products. The latest reports out of Redmond may not kick off any lawsuits, but they do indicate that the rest of the market continues to follow Apple's lead.

Windows boss Steven Sinofsky announced via a blog posting yesterday that Metro, the version of Windows 8 designed for tablets, will not support plug-ins. The post hardly mentions any specific plug-ins, but it's pretty obvious that Adobe Flash played a large part in Microsoft's decision.

Perhaps Apple did as well. Early on, when the iPad maker vowed not to support Flash in iOS, Apple took all sorts of heat and many predicted that sales would suffer as a result.

As it turns out, people don't use Flash as much as they thought they would. Sites that rely on the technology are usually able to develop a workaround by creating special mobile and iPad versions of their sites with HTML5. Apple also avoids the security risks and performance worries that have dogged Flash in recent years.

Now that Microsoft has announced it will drop Flash support for its tablet OS, the reaction is very different. The move has drummed up some attention in the press, but it most certainly was not the firestorm the Apple's announcement caused, and there is little to no speculation that the move will have any substantial negative consequences for Microsoft.

Adobe, meanwhile, may need to pick up the pace on its corporate makeover. It looks like the market for Flash may be drying up faster than it thought.

Apple is reportedly looking to extend the retail reach of its iOS platform by offering iPhones, iPods and iPads through games retailer GameStop.

News blog 9to5Mac reports that the retailer will sell new devices and accept trade-ins and used sales.

The partnership will be good news for Apple buyers who don't live near an Apple store or official reseller. GameStop has around 6,500 outlets around the world, which will greatly extend the availability of iOS devices.

The deal also offers a way for customers to prepare for upcoming releases and upgrades by getting a bit of extra cash from their old models. Even if you don't need the extra coin, trading in hardware is a good way to make sure it's disposed of in a safe and environmentally responsible manner.

The move also makes an interesting point about iOS, and by extension Apple's place in the gaming world. Ten years ago the gaming crowd that frequented places like GameStop wouldn't be caught dead playing games on an Apple device. If you weren't a console owner, you played your games on a PC. Apple had no use for GameStop, and vice versa.

But along with the rise of iOS as a consumer platform has come the rise of Apple in the games world. What started as a niche market for casual games has become a serious platform with exclusive titles from some of the largest games studios in the world.

Suddenly iOS is a serious option for gamers, and everyone, including GameStop, is taking note.

There has been plenty of controversy surrounding Apple's App Store of late, the firm being accused of naked greed over new policies that require developers to hand over a 30 per cent cut of profits from digital content delivered via apps.

Now it seems that the company is also blocking applications that might offer competition for Apple's own products and services.

Hosting firm Strato, which launched a free version of its HiDrive cloud storage service on Thursday, told journalists that it has had an iPhone app to provide smartphone access for some time, but that Apple has so far refused to allow it onto the App Store.

"We expected to release the app at CeBit, but it still hasn't been certified by Apple," said chief executive Damian Schmidt.

When asked why, Schmidt said that Apple has "areas where they want to do things, and they don't want us doing the same thing", in an apparent reference to Apple's own iCloud service.

Schmidt claimed that Strato is in a difficult situation with respect to Apple's policies, as the HiDrive App is a free download, but customers pay a monthly subscription for the cloud storage service itself.

In other words, Strato may have unwittingly fallen foul of Apple's new rules regarding digital content because of this.

Schmidt explained that Strato is still negotiating with Apple over making the app available, but that it is not prepared to pay the Apple tax.

"We can't afford to give Apple 30 per cent of our revenue," he said.

There's an old saying that, if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Particularly when it's being offered out of the boot of a car by a man with a gold tooth.

A 22 year-old woman from South Carolina learned this lesson the hard way this week when she was duped into paying $180 for a fake iPad, and a remarkably bad fake at that.

It seems that the woman was coming out of a McDonald's restaurant in Spartansburg, South Carolina when she passed two enterprising gentlemen who were selling what they claimed were brand new iPads out of the back of a white Chevy Impala. Their story was that the iPads had been acquired in bulk, and they were selling them in order to turn a quick profit.

The men were asking $300 apiece for the tablets but, ever the expert negotiator, the woman was able to haggle them down to just $180 for an iPad sealed inside a FedEx shipping box. No doubt feeling like a savvy shopper, she went home to unbox her shiny new ... iPlank.

Yes, to almost nobody's surprise, the supposed iPad was in fact a fake. The men had simply painted a plank of wood black, and glued an Apple logo and a few pictures on either side.

Remarkably oblivious to the way the world works, the woman then went public, telling police that her grey-market electronics source was not behaving in an ethical manner. Presumably the police will look into the matter once they stop laughing and shaking their heads.

Two important lessons to take away from this story:

1. A plank of wood with an Apple logo stuck to the back still sells for nearly twice as much as a brand new HP TouchPad.

2. When you're buying hardware from a reseller (especially one operating out of the boot of a car) make sure you check the merchandise before you pay.