Slashdot Mirror
A123 Sues Apple For Poaching Employees
An anonymous reader writes "Electric-car battery maker A123 Systems is suing Apple in federal court for allegedly poaching five employees to help it develop a competing battery business. The suit accuses the workers, including A123's former chief technology officer, of breaking noncompete and nonsolicit agreements. "It appears that Apple, with the assistance of defendant Ijaz, is systematically hiring away A123’s high-tech PhD and engineering employees, thereby effectively shutting down various projects/programs at A123," according to the lawsuit. The news adds some credibility to rumors that Apple is getting into the automotive market. "
Making a battery for a car is way different from making a battery for a portable device. They have to have a completely different set of tolerances, and energy density in a car has to be far greater in a car than in a portable device. Apple is not very knowledgeable of innovative when it comes to battery technologies. When it comes their advances in battery longevity, this is almost exclusively done in software. Apple doesn't really invent hardware components. They're more like lego fans who arrange existing hardware in to their own configurations.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
A123 has had a number of problems, from their bankruptcy in 2012, their massive layoffs and executive bonuses, to later being purchased by a Chinese company and selling off their assets
Also, non-compete agreements are not valid in California. Even out-of-state NCAs are invalidated if the employee is to work at a CA company, (Exceptions if the employee is a stakeholder/partner/owner, which doesn't apply here).
A contract usually requires an exchange of consideration. If you're going to demand that one of the parties agree to terms beyond their agreed upon work duration, then you need to provide them with compensation beyond that duration.
And anyway, you can't sign away your civil rights. An employer can't make you sign a contract that says "...and I will be your slave forever and will never work for another company."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Our supreme court made a supremely wonderful decision on this very issue. Basically they said, that people in Canada have the right to work for anyone they want, where they want, and when they want. Also people are free to communicate thus can "poach" all they want and that any contract to the contrary would be a rights violation and thus those parts are null.
This particular decision actually even went further by saying that poaching clients was fine as well as long as the contact information was reasonably in someone's head.
The result would be that the only place that a non-compete could stand would be if there was another aspect such as the sale of a business. So if someone sold their business for $10,000,000 and then violated an agreed to non-compete there could be a lawsuit to recover some portion of the sale price. But they couldn't get any kind of injunction that would violate your constitutional rights only a monetary judgment.
So while our rights tend to be viewed as less black and white than the US constitution I was pretty much bouncing in my seat and clapping my hands when this decision came down the pipe as a serious blow against corporate tyranny.
No, the GP is correct. The requirements for vehicles are radically different for portable electronics, and this leads to very different design choices. Tell me when was the last time you saw an iPod with an air conditioner just to cool its battery pack (which sometimes runs even when the iPod isn't in use), or a heater for cold weather charging? When was the last time you saw a iPhone with a battery that was warrantied for as much as a decade? When was the last time you saw an iPad that was rated by the manufacturer to have no problems after sitting out every day every winter in temperatures of -20C, summer temperatures of +40C with no shade, etc? When was the last time you saw any sort of portable electronics that broke its batteries up into separately sealed canisters that prevent fire from propagating from one to the next, or that can withstand a highway-speed collision? Portable electronics generally don't even do any charge balancing, let alone the sort of "be able to handle the loss of entire clusters of batteries" sort of management that vehicle packs have to be able to do (eg, rather than single cell or a couple-cells-in-series like consumer electronics, the Roadster has 6831 cells clustered into "bricks" of 69 cells in parallel to minimize the effects of individual failures, 9 bricks series per sheet, and 11 sheets, with moderate monitoring and control at the brick level and heavy monitoring and control at the sheet level).
The requirements are not similar, and as a consequence, neither are the packs.
No, you are the one who is again wrong. EV battery packs are generally significantly lower energy density than portable electronics battery packs, AND they generally run at lower DOD ranges, not charging up to full and not being allowed to even near total discharge. Often a lower-density chemistry is used as well for the same longevity reasons, such as a phosphate or manganese spinel (although a couple manufacturers, Tesla being the most notable, currently use cobalt 18650s). This sort of careful charge maintenance and lower density chemistry election, plus charge balancing, temperature maintenance, and fault isolation and tolerance are necessary to meet the sort of longevity demands of vehicle consumers, which are very different from the longevity demands of users of portable electronics.
The two top demands of EV battery packs are longevity and cost, and these far outstretch the importance of energy density. People could give a rat's arse if their car is 50 kilos lighter if they can't afford to purchase it or have to swap out the pack after three years. Don't get me wrong, weight is an important issue (mainly in terms of ride quality, and to a smaller degree efficiency), but it's not on the same order of magnitude of effect in terms of marketability as longevity and cost.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.