Not only is the device described in the caption as Microsoft's ("This is a prototype of Microsoft's Portable Media Center device") but it has the Microsoft NAME on the top of it.
Looks like you just read the post and flamed on.
Any the post is not pointless, it points out that the MICROSOFT DEVICE is too small to be useful and too large to be convenient.
You need to go back to reading and leave the posting to the rest of us.
Just think of it this way, instead of an extra 5 GB, you got the product before Christmas. These will not even be available until February. That's WELL after Christmas, nearly a quarter of the year.
Perhaps you should have read some of the rumors and given Daddy Dearest an Apple Gift card.
Winnings caps will be on 3 million pepsi, Diet Pepsi, and Sierra Mist caps only. 1 in 3 is a winner of a $0.99 credit on iTMS for a song of your choice (you pay the tax and shipping).
How can you say the iPod Mini is "catching up" to the Nitrus. No doubt Rio's announcement TWO HOURS BEFORE MAC WORLD was timed to detract from the iPod Mini.
Further, the real issue is that the Nitrus is NOT compatible with the worlds most popular and largest on-line music store, that being iTunes Music Store with over 500,000 songs, exclusive audio books library, exceptional browsing capabilities, and..oh yeah..30 million songs sold to date.
I was looking at the Xserve and two things are really impressing me: 1 - the Xserve RAID works with other OSes, which means it could be deployed to another business unit down the road 2 - Apples OS X Server allows OS X to manage Windows Services, supporting Active Directory.
Usually I can barely eat my annual lunch as I watch Job's Keynote, but this year's keynote was so bad, scraping the cheese off the side of the bowl was more captivating.
DISCLAIMER: I am a switcher and huge Apple proponent in business and in my personal life.
That said, this Keynote was terrible.
WAY too much time spent focusing on iLife - which has some nice improvements but give it 20 minutes and move on. My lunch was more flavorful than the hour and a half of garage band and Office 2004. We get it - make your own music - cool. I buy music, I don't make it. Move on. MOVE ON!!!
I am baffled why they bumped the 10 GB to 15 GB at the same price. They would have preserved more of the differentiation of the product line and made the now infamous $50 void less enticing (only 150% more capacity instead of 11 GB more) and preserved the $100 gap between the now low end 15 GB and the 20 GB (that comes with a dock and case too).
The best news was in the server market. The G5 in 1U and the omni-OS RAID for $3 per GB and the latest networking capabilities has me taking a second look.
[amichalo] "a device that only works with their music store" [lxs] wrong: the ipod plays mp3's without problems, and itunes can rip audio cd's to both mp3 and AAC
I am speaking in the context of sub-$1 music store compatiblity. The iPod cannot play WMA music, which all the other copy-cats are using.
[amichalo] "a music store that only works with their device" [lxs] nearly correct. itunes lets you burn the music to audio cd, after that you can do with it what you like.
I stand by my assertion that the iTMS only works with iPods. I do not call burning a disc and re-ripping (which degrades quality as well as looses track info such as artist, title, and cover art) "working with" other devices. One might as well re-purchase or download from an illegal source the music, rather than re-enter the data.
In this situation, Apple has created a pretty self fullfilling market place: - a device that only works with their music store - a music store that only works with their device
In a situation where there is already a market leader, the above scenario doesn't fly because people have to replace both their digital device and their music store content.
However, Apple is #1 in digital music device sales and on-line music sales. So the following scenario holds true:
Person puchases an iPod and loves it, then buys Y songs from the iTMS at $1 each. When the iPod breaks or they want the cooler, newer digital device, they are gonna buy the one that their existing investment of Y x $1 songs can play. Vice Versa, if they have puchased a large library of songs from iTMS, then the only device they are interested in is one that plays their music, else they basically have lost their investment.
It is a nice little situation Jobs has created. For Rio or Dell or someone to sell a digital device, they hav eto overcome both the iPod AND the existing investment in AAC files. Likewise, for Wal-Mart music store or whoever to win, they must overcome both the iTMS library a user may have AND the exisitng iPod they own.
The hope for both WMA music sites and WMA digital devices is that the market is not saturated to the point that too many people own iPods. With Apple to announce within two hours their low-cost iPod, the game just went to level ten.
Where there is a possibility for improvement over the iPod is with a screen dedicated to sharing still images - a digital photo wallet if you will. But this could be done with a next generation iPod with color screen (also showing albumn art) and a longer life battery.
The device is HUGE - check out the article image - the screen is just small enough to be annoying to watch a video clip on and just big enough to be too bulky.
I am all for this type of device, but Microsoft is no innovator. They shoudl wiat for Apple to creat ethe device, then rip it off. What is Bill THINKING!?!?
Yahoo! could have created an "About" search - a flag that looks for sites indexed as research, not retail sites. Sites that inform, not sell. That would have been a way to differentiate, not throw in the towel.
I disagree that it is Marketing 101 to throw in the towel when you see your competition has a better product. To me, Marketing is about differentiation.
There are core features a product must have to be considered (like a car must be street legal), and the rest is what differentiates the product (like the size of the seets or the HP of the engine).
It's like Burgerking buying bugers from McDonalds
on
Yahoo to Dump Google
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I never really understood why Yahoo! switched to Google in the first place. The point is to differentiate. I stopped going to Yahoo! when I saw it was powered by Google - I just went to the "source". Same deal with MapQuest.
I guess I just don't find value in the portal service Yahoo offers. I also don't shop at Wal-Mart. I would rather use my bookmarks bar to go the site I like for Investment tools, another for maps, another for searching, and another for e-mail.
In December, I received two awards for classes I was a part of (and did not even know I was a part of). One was a check for $1.00 from a credit card I had many years ago that had apparently not properly disclosed all the fees. The other was a $5.00 discount on my next domain registration from Register.com for having the gaull to put a "website comming soon" default instead of giving visitors to my domain a 404 when there was no index.html to view.
The winners in both suits were the suits (pardon the pun).
If these consumers want to punish Apple with hundreds of thousands in legal fees and bad press then they are on the right track. If they want free batteries or better iBooks, then they should look elsewhere.
Look at three industries - Music, Movies, and Newsprint
People have been conditioned to pay for music and for movies, and stores iTunes Music Store have made a model for selling music and no doubt one day movies will be sold the same way.
If one could do the same for news content - actually make money off content, not advertising revenues, for print articles - a model where you may like a particular writer just like a singer or actress, and then buy their work - pay for reading their creative copy - it would be a break in the industry that people are trying to crack with micro payments, etc.
The difference with my idea and micropayments is that it is a more significant commitment - a few dollars, not fractions of a cent, and you own the articles they write for the period of time your payment covers. It isn't a subscription where you loose the right to access the info you used to have access to, and it isn't micropayments where you have to make a buying decision EVERY TIME you want to see content.
Anyway, that's the idea - pay for text copy content. Go figure it out and make a few bucks.
Ultimately what the Internet has provided us is communication beyond the wildest dreams of telephpony, wired or not.
A look at the big winners:
* e-Bay - Started as a way to buy and sell collectibles - now an aggregation of small vendors and casual shoppers selling 1.7 million items a DAY!
* Amazon - Started as an on-line book store with the content of your local shop - now an aggregation of just about any book in (and sometimes out of) print and available to you in a few days (or for pickup at Borders).
* Google - An index of all this Internet stuff - now an index with so much info that it has made itself a household word.
*/. - Started as News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters - even our beloved(hated)/. is an aggregation - a community for those who (sometimes) have no community. Without an aggregator like/. how would nerds from around the world find one another to discus important topics of the day?
* iTunes Music Store - the next great aggregator - they have found a way to BROWSE music and sell it legally. A creative mix of low-tech product, high-tech delivery, on-line shopping, and off-line use (iPod).
So yeah Dell can make a few bucks on a commodity product, but the real winners are the ones who make a new market space by putting people in touch with the products or information that is more valuebale to them than what's in their wallets.
I disagree with your assertion that if consumers stopped buying from spammer, then spammers would have no companies to sell to (recognizing there are three parties involved).
I disagree because companies (the customers of the spammers and the vendors to the spam-ies) are not out to spend money uselessly. Why should my company shell out money to a spammer unless people are responding to e-mail advertisements?
Its the same with the crap you get in the Credit Card Statements and the Sunday paper. I didn't think anyone ever bought that crap - until I met someone who does. Then I realized, If I kill them, there will be no one to advertise to and thus, that advertising medium will because ineffective and die.
Same goes for popup ads - DON'T BUY FROM POP-UP ADS and advertisers will stop using them. DON'T BUY FROM TELEMARKETERS and they will let you finish a hot meal in peace.
My point is that it if I am a business person and I know I have spam filters and delete any spam without reading it, what the hell would make me think I should shell out $600 for a CD of names to spam? Someone MUST be buying the fake PhD's and the Viagra and the kiddie porn and all the other shit I get e-mail for daily.
Good point - but Just as a p0rn video is for "educational purposes" so could such an e-mail aggregation be for "statistical analysis" of addresses per domain, etc.
I can't stand spam and won't use it in business practices, but I don't thin kit should be any more illegal to sell a CD with aggregated e-mail address than it should be to sell a phone book CD with telephone numbers. There is value added in the indexing and providing of tools to manage so many addresses.
What should be illegal is selling generated, known to be false, addresses. This is basically false advertising.
What should also be illegal is bulk mailing to people who do not subscribe to a service. We need better mail servers that optionally require a "key" to receive mail, otherwise it goes straight to "File 13".
Sadly, all this bulk mail, even if "bounced" back to the sender, uses tons of bandwidth and is ultimately a tremendous waste of everyones time.
Unfortunately, all this Spam would stop is people STOPPED BUYING FROM THE SPAMMERS, but even if 0.0001% of recipients say "yeah, I DO want a larger... organ" and patronize the spammer, then the spam will continue.
Checking the specifications, it ships with the lowest capacity battery out of their entire lineup, including the 12 inch Powerbook and iBook. See a problem with this? A bigger screen, faster processor, possibility for a second DIMM, and less battery power?
The "problem" is that it ships with the same battery, but uses more power because of the faster proc, large screen, etc.
Seems to me this is may be the sort of large enterprise lip-service support that comes with most software. Basically help with and install issue or maybe a bug, but if you want help with how to do something - you are still out of luck.
Better than offering support as described above (which should be free IMHO), would be to get O'Reilly et al to write looks about OO.o and the migration from office. Even specific edditions for Office 97/2000/XP would be applicable.
That would be better that someone helping me install the software.
I see two possible scenarios which make this an unrealistic solution:
(1) The receipt includes a voter ID and the results of their vote. This totally violates the anonymity of the voting process but does allow for counting.
(2) If the receipts include no voter ID but just some form of transaction ID, then why print them off at all? Just run some report at any point during the voting process to see the tally? Why not? If the voting system is compromised, then there is no way to ensure the paper votes with the transaction id, generated from the compromised system can be trusted either.
As I see it, this solution does not add value without removing rights.
Having lived through the teeth-grinding experience of the "buy a new one or upgrade" decision with several PCs over the years, I decided that my first mac desktop (have had a Powerbook G4 for two years) would be the iMac 17".
My reasoning was that while I have owned PCs and successfully "saved money" by upgrading a hard drive, ram, video card, etc. I was always longing for something that I couldn't "just add". Perhaps it was faster memory speed or a 32-bit processor but there was always something that made the "upgraded" computer never upgraded enough as a new one.
Living with an Apple laptop taught me that "Dang, a two year old laptop from Apple is still everybit as relevant as a brand new desktop". I attribute this feeling to the fact that Apple embraces new technology and makes it an integral part of their systems from the get-go. Cases in point: * First to offer (or make standard) "super drives" for CD/DVD R/W * Standard airport wireless antenas built into every laptop * iEEE on every device (now Firewire 800 standard across the product line) * Lots of USB 2.0 ports * Removal of the 3.5" years before Dell stopped making people pay extra (in $ , case space, and electricity)
So I found the iMac to be a great system that would last many years (actually a good value when depreciated over 5, not 3 years - that's 66% longer useful life). And the system is so compact because there isn't a huge case, it can sit in a closet, or by the TV as some network device drone or whatever I may want it to be in 2009...
...which is more than I can say for the P3 it replaced.
As I sit rewriting a contract with a vendor, I am reminded of the two purposes of contracts:
(1) To clearly outline the rights and responsibilities of all parties. By putting these things in writting, you force yourself to really analyse just what it is you are agreeing to.
(2) To establish a legally defensable position in court. Should the two parties have a disagreement about any of the conditions set forth in the contract, the contract is used to "remind" them of just what they agreed to.
So for all those who say Apple should leave him alone or should buy it from him or whatever, they are considerably late to the party. If in fact the employment contract stated the rules clearly, (no company time or equipment) and he wilfully violated that agreement, then the options become:
(1) Submit to Apple, or
(2) Find a providion of the contract which Apple violated, allowing room for a counter suit, negotiation of a new contract, or possibly having the contract thrown out.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously YOU didn't read the article.
Not only is the device described in the caption as Microsoft's ("This is a prototype of Microsoft's Portable Media Center device") but it has the Microsoft NAME on the top of it.
Looks like you just read the post and flamed on.
Any the post is not pointless, it points out that the MICROSOFT DEVICE is too small to be useful and too large to be convenient.
You need to go back to reading and leave the posting to the rest of us.
Just think of it this way, instead of an extra 5 GB, you got the product before Christmas. These will not even be available until February. That's WELL after Christmas, nearly a quarter of the year.
Perhaps you should have read some of the rumors and given Daddy Dearest an Apple Gift card.
Winnings caps will be on 3 million pepsi, Diet Pepsi, and Sierra Mist caps only. 1 in 3 is a winner of a $0.99 credit on iTMS for a song of your choice (you pay the tax and shipping).
Nice Troll.
How can you say the iPod Mini is "catching up" to the Nitrus. No doubt Rio's announcement TWO HOURS BEFORE MAC WORLD was timed to detract from the iPod Mini.
Further, the real issue is that the Nitrus is NOT compatible with the worlds most popular and largest on-line music store, that being iTunes Music Store with over 500,000 songs, exclusive audio books library, exceptional browsing capabilities, and..oh yeah..30 million songs sold to date.
I was looking at the Xserve and two things are really impressing me:
1 - the Xserve RAID works with other OSes, which means it could be deployed to another business unit down the road
2 - Apples OS X Server allows OS X to manage Windows Services, supporting Active Directory.
it's not flash - that is th edevice they are targeting. This device uses a small hard disk.
Usually I can barely eat my annual lunch as I watch Job's Keynote, but this year's keynote was so bad, scraping the cheese off the side of the bowl was more captivating.
DISCLAIMER: I am a switcher and huge Apple proponent in business and in my personal life.
That said, this Keynote was terrible.
WAY too much time spent focusing on iLife - which has some nice improvements but give it 20 minutes and move on. My lunch was more flavorful than the hour and a half of garage band and Office 2004. We get it - make your own music - cool. I buy music, I don't make it. Move on. MOVE ON!!!
I am baffled why they bumped the 10 GB to 15 GB at the same price. They would have preserved more of the differentiation of the product line and made the now infamous $50 void less enticing (only 150% more capacity instead of 11 GB more) and preserved the $100 gap between the now low end 15 GB and the 20 GB (that comes with a dock and case too).
The best news was in the server market. The G5 in 1U and the omni-OS RAID for $3 per GB and the latest networking capabilities has me taking a second look.
I can't wait for PC World Expo on February 30th.
I am speaking in the context of sub-$1 music store compatiblity. The iPod cannot play WMA music, which all the other copy-cats are using.
I stand by my assertion that the iTMS only works with iPods. I do not call burning a disc and re-ripping (which degrades quality as well as looses track info such as artist, title, and cover art) "working with" other devices. One might as well re-purchase or download from an illegal source the music, rather than re-enter the data.
Which is where your argument falls down.
In this situation, Apple has created a pretty self fullfilling market place:
- a device that only works with their music store
- a music store that only works with their device
In a situation where there is already a market leader, the above scenario doesn't fly because people have to replace both their digital device and their music store content.
However, Apple is #1 in digital music device sales and on-line music sales. So the following scenario holds true:
Person puchases an iPod and loves it, then buys Y songs from the iTMS at $1 each. When the iPod breaks or they want the cooler, newer digital device, they are gonna buy the one that their existing investment of Y x $1 songs can play. Vice Versa, if they have puchased a large library of songs from iTMS, then the only device they are interested in is one that plays their music, else they basically have lost their investment.
It is a nice little situation Jobs has created. For Rio or Dell or someone to sell a digital device, they hav eto overcome both the iPod AND the existing investment in AAC files. Likewise, for Wal-Mart music store or whoever to win, they must overcome both the iTMS library a user may have AND the exisitng iPod they own.
The hope for both WMA music sites and WMA digital devices is that the market is not saturated to the point that too many people own iPods. With Apple to announce within two hours their low-cost iPod, the game just went to level ten.
Well put, you sum up the situation nicely.
Where there is a possibility for improvement over the iPod is with a screen dedicated to sharing still images - a digital photo wallet if you will. But this could be done with a next generation iPod with color screen (also showing albumn art) and a longer life battery.
The device is HUGE - check out the article image - the screen is just small enough to be annoying to watch a video clip on and just big enough to be too bulky.
I am all for this type of device, but Microsoft is no innovator. They shoudl wiat for Apple to creat ethe device, then rip it off. What is Bill THINKING!?!?
Yahoo! could have created an "About" search - a flag that looks for sites indexed as research, not retail sites. Sites that inform, not sell. That would have been a way to differentiate, not throw in the towel.
I disagree that it is Marketing 101 to throw in the towel when you see your competition has a better product. To me, Marketing is about differentiation.
There are core features a product must have to be considered (like a car must be street legal), and the rest is what differentiates the product (like the size of the seets or the HP of the engine).
I never really understood why Yahoo! switched to Google in the first place. The point is to differentiate. I stopped going to Yahoo! when I saw it was powered by Google - I just went to the "source". Same deal with MapQuest.
I guess I just don't find value in the portal service Yahoo offers. I also don't shop at Wal-Mart. I would rather use my bookmarks bar to go the site I like for Investment tools, another for maps, another for searching, and another for e-mail.
....I have a Mac
In December, I received two awards for classes I was a part of (and did not even know I was a part of). One was a check for $1.00 from a credit card I had many years ago that had apparently not properly disclosed all the fees. The other was a $5.00 discount on my next domain registration from Register.com for having the gaull to put a "website comming soon" default instead of giving visitors to my domain a 404 when there was no index.html to view.
The winners in both suits were the suits (pardon the pun).
If these consumers want to punish Apple with hundreds of thousands in legal fees and bad press then they are on the right track. If they want free batteries or better iBooks, then they should look elsewhere.
Look at three industries - Music, Movies, and Newsprint
People have been conditioned to pay for music and for movies, and stores iTunes Music Store have made a model for selling music and no doubt one day movies will be sold the same way.
If one could do the same for news content - actually make money off content, not advertising revenues, for print articles - a model where you may like a particular writer just like a singer or actress, and then buy their work - pay for reading their creative copy - it would be a break in the industry that people are trying to crack with micro payments, etc.
The difference with my idea and micropayments is that it is a more significant commitment - a few dollars, not fractions of a cent, and you own the articles they write for the period of time your payment covers. It isn't a subscription where you loose the right to access the info you used to have access to, and it isn't micropayments where you have to make a buying decision EVERY TIME you want to see content.
Anyway, that's the idea - pay for text copy content. Go figure it out and make a few bucks.
Ultimately what the Internet has provided us is communication beyond the wildest dreams of telephpony, wired or not.
/. - Started as News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters - even our beloved(hated) /. is an aggregation - a community for those who (sometimes) have no community. Without an aggregator like /. how would nerds from around the world find one another to discus important topics of the day?
A look at the big winners:
* e-Bay - Started as a way to buy and sell collectibles - now an aggregation of small vendors and casual shoppers selling 1.7 million items a DAY!
* Amazon - Started as an on-line book store with the content of your local shop - now an aggregation of just about any book in (and sometimes out of) print and available to you in a few days (or for pickup at Borders).
* Google - An index of all this Internet stuff - now an index with so much info that it has made itself a household word.
*
* iTunes Music Store - the next great aggregator - they have found a way to BROWSE music and sell it legally. A creative mix of low-tech product, high-tech delivery, on-line shopping, and off-line use (iPod).
So yeah Dell can make a few bucks on a commodity product, but the real winners are the ones who make a new market space by putting people in touch with the products or information that is more valuebale to them than what's in their wallets.
I disagree with your assertion that if consumers stopped buying from spammer, then spammers would have no companies to sell to (recognizing there are three parties involved).
I disagree because companies (the customers of the spammers and the vendors to the spam-ies) are not out to spend money uselessly. Why should my company shell out money to a spammer unless people are responding to e-mail advertisements?
Its the same with the crap you get in the Credit Card Statements and the Sunday paper. I didn't think anyone ever bought that crap - until I met someone who does. Then I realized, If I kill them, there will be no one to advertise to and thus, that advertising medium will because ineffective and die.
Same goes for popup ads - DON'T BUY FROM POP-UP ADS and advertisers will stop using them. DON'T BUY FROM TELEMARKETERS and they will let you finish a hot meal in peace.
My point is that it if I am a business person and I know I have spam filters and delete any spam without reading it, what the hell would make me think I should shell out $600 for a CD of names to spam? Someone MUST be buying the fake PhD's and the Viagra and the kiddie porn and all the other shit I get e-mail for daily.
Good point - but Just as a p0rn video is for "educational purposes" so could such an e-mail aggregation be for "statistical analysis" of addresses per domain, etc.
I can't stand spam and won't use it in business practices, but I don't thin kit should be any more illegal to sell a CD with aggregated e-mail address than it should be to sell a phone book CD with telephone numbers. There is value added in the indexing and providing of tools to manage so many addresses.
... organ" and patronize the spammer, then the spam will continue.
What should be illegal is selling generated, known to be false, addresses. This is basically false advertising.
What should also be illegal is bulk mailing to people who do not subscribe to a service. We need better mail servers that optionally require a "key" to receive mail, otherwise it goes straight to "File 13".
Sadly, all this bulk mail, even if "bounced" back to the sender, uses tons of bandwidth and is ultimately a tremendous waste of everyones time.
Unfortunately, all this Spam would stop is people STOPPED BUYING FROM THE SPAMMERS, but even if 0.0001% of recipients say "yeah, I DO want a larger
Checking the specifications, it ships with the lowest capacity battery out of their entire lineup, including the 12 inch Powerbook and iBook. See a problem with this? A bigger screen, faster processor, possibility for a second DIMM, and less battery power?
The "problem" is that it ships with the same battery, but uses more power because of the faster proc, large screen, etc.
I guess common sense isn't so common.
Seems to me this is may be the sort of large enterprise lip-service support that comes with most software. Basically help with and install issue or maybe a bug, but if you want help with how to do something - you are still out of luck.
Better than offering support as described above (which should be free IMHO), would be to get O'Reilly et al to write looks about OO.o and the migration from office. Even specific edditions for Office 97/2000/XP would be applicable.
That would be better that someone helping me install the software.
I see two possible scenarios which make this an unrealistic solution:
(1) The receipt includes a voter ID and the results of their vote. This totally violates the anonymity of the voting process but does allow for counting.
(2) If the receipts include no voter ID but just some form of transaction ID, then why print them off at all? Just run some report at any point during the voting process to see the tally? Why not? If the voting system is compromised, then there is no way to ensure the paper votes with the transaction id, generated from the compromised system can be trusted either.
As I see it, this solution does not add value without removing rights.
Having lived through the teeth-grinding experience of the "buy a new one or upgrade" decision with several PCs over the years, I decided that my first mac desktop (have had a Powerbook G4 for two years) would be the iMac 17".
...which is more than I can say for the P3 it replaced.
My reasoning was that while I have owned PCs and successfully "saved money" by upgrading a hard drive, ram, video card, etc. I was always longing for something that I couldn't "just add". Perhaps it was faster memory speed or a 32-bit processor but there was always something that made the "upgraded" computer never upgraded enough as a new one.
Living with an Apple laptop taught me that "Dang, a two year old laptop from Apple is still everybit as relevant as a brand new desktop". I attribute this feeling to the fact that Apple embraces new technology and makes it an integral part of their systems from the get-go. Cases in point:
* First to offer (or make standard) "super drives" for CD/DVD R/W
* Standard airport wireless antenas built into every laptop
* iEEE on every device (now Firewire 800 standard across the product line)
* Lots of USB 2.0 ports
* Removal of the 3.5" years before Dell stopped making people pay extra (in $ , case space, and electricity)
So I found the iMac to be a great system that would last many years (actually a good value when depreciated over 5, not 3 years - that's 66% longer useful life). And the system is so compact because there isn't a huge case, it can sit in a closet, or by the TV as some network device drone or whatever I may want it to be in 2009...
As I sit rewriting a contract with a vendor, I am reminded of the two purposes of contracts:
(1) To clearly outline the rights and responsibilities of all parties. By putting these things in writting, you force yourself to really analyse just what it is you are agreeing to.
(2) To establish a legally defensable position in court. Should the two parties have a disagreement about any of the conditions set forth in the contract, the contract is used to "remind" them of just what they agreed to.
So for all those who say Apple should leave him alone or should buy it from him or whatever, they are considerably late to the party. If in fact the employment contract stated the rules clearly, (no company time or equipment) and he wilfully violated that agreement, then the options become:
(1) Submit to Apple, or
(2) Find a providion of the contract which Apple violated, allowing room for a counter suit, negotiation of a new contract, or possibly having the contract thrown out.
IANAL