Not quite true - you can still serve up your own ads in your app if you like, Apple just offered a new way to do it with a ready-sourced stream and easy way to integrate it if you don;t want to roll your own. Releasing this new feature does not prevent you from doing it yourself - you're not forced to use Apple's new method.
That "trapped" music can be burned to Audio CD by iTunes and reripped as lossless. While you may lose a little in the conversion from aac to cd audio, and certainly will if you then rerip it into a lossy format, it's not like you have totally useless files that you can't convert. iTunes itself offers (and has always offered) a way to remove the DRM totally legally (if not perfect technically due to format shift).
What closed standards are Apple pushing, btw?
H.264, AAC, TCP/IP,.mbox for mail, human readable pref files, concurrent copy of iTunes library in documented xml format, major support and progress for Webkit and Nitro (which is also open source), iWork files saving to documented xml formats, PDF supported extensively throughout the OS (since Quartz is based on it), open source core (with components and code still being released to the community, despite the fact that there's no legal obligation due to BSD licence, including new stuff they have written themselves like libdispatch being released as open source), GCC included and supported heavily in Xcode...
So, how are they the biggest pusher of closed standards on the planet? Because they have a phone and app store with a walled garden?
Is AFP closed? Even if it is you can use NFS, which OS X supports out of the box. I guess HFS+ is closed, but good luck getting them to abandon that one for ext3.
Oh and I forgot to add - a portion of the price of gasoline is tax (78% of the cost in the UK is tax in fact, less in the US it's clearly different), and that removing that tax revenue source will necessitate plugging that hole, presumably by taxing the electricity used to charge the car, or via other means).
That is an excellent method, especially with the hydrogen byproduct. It still faces the problem of high energy cost (and typically, any process you undertake to create something that you want to store and use later for energy production is hard to do, merely due to "going the wrong way on the escalator" - you want energy out, you need to put it in first).
3700 degrees is certainly a lot of energy, even with the innovative solar pumped laser - it's a different method to the same result though - trying to reduce the energy cost of extracting useful substances from other things. The more of these pathways we can come up with, the better.
There are all sorts of exotic elements in seawater - getting them out is the hard part!
I should have elaborated that it's not just the cost of the electricity, but the nature of the grid - you need one that can quickly respond to peaks and troughs. If everyone swapped to electric cars right now, the grid as it stands would have trouble coping with the changes in demand. Projects like this are part of that. The more quick response capacity you can get "for free", even if it is slightly variable, the better your system is. With these turbines freewheeling in the wind (well, perhaps not freewheeling, but loaded to prevent them going too quickly), responding to a peak would be a case of engaging the clutch and closing a relay or two, compared to having a backup powerplant that needs to warm up, or be kept hot but at low capacity.
Any why not? Water is a very useful working fluid - relatively high SHC, liquid at standard pressure and temperature, non-toxic, non-corrosive, plentiful, cheap.
Using it to generate electricity from heat and expansion is effective and well understood. Just because we've been doing it since the early days of industrialisation doesn't mean we have to abandon it just because it "feels a little old". It's not like a pentium 2 with a 16Mb graphics card.
Steam is not a fuel, but you can use it to power things after you heat water to make it - which you can use coal, gasoline etc to do.
There's plenty of hydrogen around, but getting at the most abundant source requires splitting off the pesky oxygen atom. If you can do that, you have a near infinite source of hydrogen for powering cars.
To break apart water you need... survey says, electricity. And lots of it.
My point wasn't that electric cars will solve everything, I was questioning the GP's assertion that being able to generate lots of power cheaply (assuming a balanced network that this build would be a part of) can lead to results that don't always appear to be immediately linked.
He dismissed the "reduce dependence on oil" argument by saying that only a small percentage of power is generated by burning oil.
My point is that access to cheap energy can help remove one of the barriers to electric cars, which would reduce dependence on oil. Not all the barriers - you still need to make them cheaper, improve batteries, practicalities etc, but that's the second issue - these things will all improve anyway as time goes on. You can't state "why provide cheap energy, that's not what's holding back electric cars" and call it done. It's one of the factors to be overcome, but once it's solved doesn't mean the other factors weren't also being addressed.
Creating a solid, reliable power grid with effective generating systems will help to provide cheaper, cleaner electricity. This will have a knock on effect along the line - electric cars, cheaper manufacturing etc.
It was all about options and possibilities. If electricity comes down enough in price, perhaps a commercial building heated in the winter by kerosene could be heated electrically.
Cheaper electricity can bring down the price of aluminium and make it cheaper to make double glazed window frames, making them closer to the cost of UPVC ones, reducing the need for oil.
Energy is a huge part of everything. Anything that makes generating easier, more efficient or cheaper has a huge impact.
You stated that he was "silly" for positing that increased generating capacity would reduce need for foreign oil.
1.Of course it's not merely generating capacity that is limiting the availability of electric cars, but that's a straw man - the barriers to electric cars (cost, battery issues, practicality etc) continue to be eroded as time passes, making them more and more viable as options for new vehicles.
2. small steps. No one is suggesting that one small wind farm is going to solve the US' energy needs, but this is the first offshore windfarm. A good place to cut your teeth on potential issues, learn how to do it effectively, make it easier to roll out other sites. There is a *lot* of coastline along the US with many sites suitable for use as generating sites.
3. Less oil is still less. The smaller the hit on your economy as a whole from external oil, the better. The less of it you need to buy, the less sweeping econonic-impact changes have on your country (for example, price fluctuations and availability).
4. Now you're just going for the ad hominem because you're refusing to think outside the box a little.
Let's also consider the possibility of replacing plastics (made from oil) with more aluminium in consumer goods. Things like kitchenware or window frames, or anywhere ABS and UPVC is widespread. It's expensive to extract aluminium, and the bulk of it used in new products is recycled stuff. Access to cheaper electricity lowers the cost of aluminium, since the major cost of extracting it is the energy requirement, so it becomes more viable to use aluminium, especially if your oil source is very expensive.
Again, it's merely a possibility that illustrates knock on effects, and that complex systems are frequently interconnected.
Apple didn't want to kill USB in favour of firewire - they wanted both to thrive. USB was designed for low speed, low bandwidth devices like mice, keyboards, printers etc and it excelled at that task. Apple were the first (or one of the first) of the manufacturers to ship computers and peripherals with USB ports so that third party devices could start to appear (someone's got to start!)
Firewire was designed from the outset to be used in high capacity situations - hard drives, video etc, and not for the low speed stuff. There's no need to run your keyboard, bluetooth and mouse on a FW bus - you have USB for that.
Where things got sticky was the extension of USB to become something it was never really designed for so it could compete in speed terms with firewire, and this shows in all the overhead in the USB protocol that hobbles it when used with hard drives and so on - it works well enough, but a firewire connection would have cost less cpu overhead for the same or better transfer rates.
If Apple had killed off USB on their machines then they'd have no way to run the bluetooth, wired keyboards and mice and so on - Firewire is just massively overkill for that, but USB is ideal.
I have 3 iPods, an iPhone and a standalone dock. Other than the iPhone not really fitting neatly into the dock (it is too slim and I don't have an adapter), they all interconnect just fine, even with each other's dock connector leads.
The dock connector's electrical pinout has not changed since it was released, and apart from the first gen iPod that has an actual 6 pin firewire port, it is compatible with all iPods and iPhones (possibly not shuffle). It is wired for USB and Firewire at the connector end (different pins for FW data, power and USB data/power), with the appropriate standard plug on the other end. Later iPods and iPhone don't have a FW chip, but this is hardware, not the dock connector - the connector has not changed.
So, other than the removal of the FW chipset from iPods to save costs, how is the dock connector "broken across generations"? (other than the first iPod having a firewire port, it has been standard since then onwards). What has broken?
The sync APIs are publicly documented in OS X - if they remove them then there's no syncing at all.
You're making inferences that Apple will remove a core set of frameworks from OS X with nothing more than "I believe they are evil and will do it". It would be good to see some proof or some precedent that they removed major functionality without replacing it with a better system or provided a very good reason. "breaking sync for third party apps" is not a good reason.
For example, they removed AppleTalk about 10 years after the last AppleTalk printer was sold. Better protocols exist. Tough luck for those who are still using an AppleTalk printer, but seriously, it went out with the Ark - people complained when we switched from gas lighting to electric.
Like change what? The third party apps use the published, documented sync APIs - if they are going to change something, it is documented and may require an update.
If they change something internal that iTunes is based on, then they also need to update the software. These changes do not affect the function of the documented sync APIs that the third party apps are based on. They may break hacks like Palm's spoofing USB vendor ID etc, but the proper apps like Missing Sync work just fine.
He claims (or rather Gizmodo claimed) that he called Apple's tech support line, which is staffed by people who don't work for Apple directly, and in call centres nowhere near the headquarters. They're not going to know about a prototype, and would either assume it was a prank call, or say they cannot help him, but to call Apple directly.
Apple's PR number is listed on their site right next to the tech support one, and that one actually *is* staffed by Apple employees in the HQ in California.
Either way, his next step should have been handing it to the police and signing an affidavit stating when and where he found the property (California law) if he didn't know who to return it to (and seriously, come on - do you buy the idea that he would believe Apple wouldn't want their prototype back if he had bothered to try to get through to someone actually at Apple HQ, for example, their PR department rather than their tech support). If no one claims it after a certain time, he can then keep it (and sell it on).
He could also have walked around the corner to Apple's HQ and said "hey guys, is this your lost iPhone prototype?"
This PDF http://www.sbs-forum.org/specs/sbc110.pdf from the smart battery system group (which defines the standard for charger battery interaction for things like lithium batteries features a few sections on the way the chargers work, including mentioning that the battery itself can tell the charger when it is full, among many other things it can report, and in the case of some chargers, this control is independent of the battery and requires syncing with the controller.
The data reported by the battery (or assumed by the controller based on past history) is what starts, stops and varies the charge cycles, and each new battery hooked up needs to calibrate. It's not solely for a cosmetic display of power remaining.
It would be good customer service to provide him with options - and if he says "I have an iPhone prototype, how do I return it" then the logical reply would be "I have no idea, but you can contact Apple HQ directly..." rather than giving him no options at all.
No one knows, it is speculation, of course. My issue is, given the details provided by Gizmodo about what they said he did, it;s just not enough effort on his part, knowing what he had in his possession. It smacks of him looking to do the minimum to ensure he can sell it on for a quick buck. Proving that may be more tricky though.
The last point is written down in California law - you have to turn it into the cops and sign an affidavit stating where you found the device.
Well, he claimed to call AppleCare, which means he talked to a non-Apple employee.
Thus, The "person" of Apple's buddy, who he left in charge of the answering machine, didn't tell him.
The guy knew very well that calling Apple direct, that he could very easily have done (and that AppleCare techs would have assuredly told him was the best recourse for his issue), but he chose not to.
Even after that, he has to give it to the police before he has the ability to sell it on.
This is a police issue, not an Apple one. With all the coverage from Giz and the information they have released on how they came by the phone it's a pretty clear case of theft/receiving stolen goods.
Apple hasn't filed any civil case here - this is about the PD going after the theft angle. With all the documented stuff in the articles it should be easy to get a closed case - good for the stats.
Assuming the "tried to phone Apple" bit is even true, his next step should have been "giving it to the police" - as it very clearly states in the relevant piece of California law. By definition, the phone was stolen when he did not do this before selling it on to a third party.
The law also requires you to make reasonable attempts to return it to the owner - calling tech support (staffed by non-Apple employees) is hardly reasonable when you know Apple's HQ is right around the corner from the bar you "found" the phone in, and their PR number is listed right on their website underneath the AppleCare one (which he allegedly called).
He called AppleCare, and they are not Apple employees - they work for another company on behalf of Apple but are not directly employed by Apple.
Also calling a tech support line (allegedly - it was Gizmodo who said he did - he may not have even done that) instead of Apple's publicly available PR number does not strike me as "reasonable attempts", especially since he could also have walked to Apple's HQ and made an attempt to return it that way, since it was just around the corner. Or he could have mailed it to their HQ, using the address on Apple's website.
"Reasonable attempt" - hardly. Even if that is true - we have no proof he even called the tech support line.
3 and 4 on your list should be "allegedly", and even then, Gizmodo says the guy called AppleCare, which is staffed by people who do not work directly for Apple. He could have called Apple's PR number, that connects directly to the Apple HQ and returned it that way - I guarantee they would have taken it seriously had he done so. Apple's tech support aren;t going to know anything about a prototype, and assuming they didn't think he was pranking they would likely tell him to contact Apple directly - via the PR number on the Apple website.
He did not do that, but instead sold a phone he did not own to a third party after allegedly making a feeble attempt to return it to the owner. Under California law this is theft - someone has posted the relevant section further up the thread. A better move would have been to hand it in to the police if he couldn't get in touch with Apple. It's not like he didn't know exactly what it was he had there - hence selling it for $5000.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite true - you can still serve up your own ads in your app if you like, Apple just offered a new way to do it with a ready-sourced stream and easy way to integrate it if you don;t want to roll your own. Releasing this new feature does not prevent you from doing it yourself - you're not forced to use Apple's new method.
That "trapped" music can be burned to Audio CD by iTunes and reripped as lossless. While you may lose a little in the conversion from aac to cd audio, and certainly will if you then rerip it into a lossy format, it's not like you have totally useless files that you can't convert. iTunes itself offers (and has always offered) a way to remove the DRM totally legally (if not perfect technically due to format shift).
What closed standards are Apple pushing, btw?
H.264, AAC, TCP/IP, .mbox for mail, human readable pref files, concurrent copy of iTunes library in documented xml format, major support and progress for Webkit and Nitro (which is also open source), iWork files saving to documented xml formats, PDF supported extensively throughout the OS (since Quartz is based on it), open source core (with components and code still being released to the community, despite the fact that there's no legal obligation due to BSD licence, including new stuff they have written themselves like libdispatch being released as open source), GCC included and supported heavily in Xcode...
So, how are they the biggest pusher of closed standards on the planet? Because they have a phone and app store with a walled garden?
Is AFP closed? Even if it is you can use NFS, which OS X supports out of the box. I guess HFS+ is closed, but good luck getting them to abandon that one for ext3.
Oh and I forgot to add - a portion of the price of gasoline is tax (78% of the cost in the UK is tax in fact, less in the US it's clearly different), and that removing that tax revenue source will necessitate plugging that hole, presumably by taxing the electricity used to charge the car, or via other means).
That is an excellent method, especially with the hydrogen byproduct. It still faces the problem of high energy cost (and typically, any process you undertake to create something that you want to store and use later for energy production is hard to do, merely due to "going the wrong way on the escalator" - you want energy out, you need to put it in first).
3700 degrees is certainly a lot of energy, even with the innovative solar pumped laser - it's a different method to the same result though - trying to reduce the energy cost of extracting useful substances from other things. The more of these pathways we can come up with, the better.
There are all sorts of exotic elements in seawater - getting them out is the hard part!
I should have elaborated that it's not just the cost of the electricity, but the nature of the grid - you need one that can quickly respond to peaks and troughs. If everyone swapped to electric cars right now, the grid as it stands would have trouble coping with the changes in demand. Projects like this are part of that. The more quick response capacity you can get "for free", even if it is slightly variable, the better your system is. With these turbines freewheeling in the wind (well, perhaps not freewheeling, but loaded to prevent them going too quickly), responding to a peak would be a case of engaging the clutch and closing a relay or two, compared to having a backup powerplant that needs to warm up, or be kept hot but at low capacity.
Any why not? Water is a very useful working fluid - relatively high SHC, liquid at standard pressure and temperature, non-toxic, non-corrosive, plentiful, cheap.
Using it to generate electricity from heat and expansion is effective and well understood. Just because we've been doing it since the early days of industrialisation doesn't mean we have to abandon it just because it "feels a little old". It's not like a pentium 2 with a 16Mb graphics card.
Steam is not a fuel, but you can use it to power things after you heat water to make it - which you can use coal, gasoline etc to do.
There's plenty of hydrogen around, but getting at the most abundant source requires splitting off the pesky oxygen atom. If you can do that, you have a near infinite source of hydrogen for powering cars.
To break apart water you need... survey says, electricity. And lots of it.
For the record, I'm a chemist, I am well aware of what oil is used for. :)
My point wasn't that electric cars will solve everything, I was questioning the GP's assertion that being able to generate lots of power cheaply (assuming a balanced network that this build would be a part of) can lead to results that don't always appear to be immediately linked.
He dismissed the "reduce dependence on oil" argument by saying that only a small percentage of power is generated by burning oil.
My point is that access to cheap energy can help remove one of the barriers to electric cars, which would reduce dependence on oil. Not all the barriers - you still need to make them cheaper, improve batteries, practicalities etc, but that's the second issue - these things will all improve anyway as time goes on. You can't state "why provide cheap energy, that's not what's holding back electric cars" and call it done. It's one of the factors to be overcome, but once it's solved doesn't mean the other factors weren't also being addressed.
Creating a solid, reliable power grid with effective generating systems will help to provide cheaper, cleaner electricity. This will have a knock on effect along the line - electric cars, cheaper manufacturing etc.
It was all about options and possibilities. If electricity comes down enough in price, perhaps a commercial building heated in the winter by kerosene could be heated electrically.
Cheaper electricity can bring down the price of aluminium and make it cheaper to make double glazed window frames, making them closer to the cost of UPVC ones, reducing the need for oil.
Energy is a huge part of everything. Anything that makes generating easier, more efficient or cheaper has a huge impact.
My chain of reasoning is a possible chain.
You stated that he was "silly" for positing that increased generating capacity would reduce need for foreign oil.
1.Of course it's not merely generating capacity that is limiting the availability of electric cars, but that's a straw man - the barriers to electric cars (cost, battery issues, practicality etc) continue to be eroded as time passes, making them more and more viable as options for new vehicles.
2. small steps. No one is suggesting that one small wind farm is going to solve the US' energy needs, but this is the first offshore windfarm. A good place to cut your teeth on potential issues, learn how to do it effectively, make it easier to roll out other sites. There is a *lot* of coastline along the US with many sites suitable for use as generating sites.
3. Less oil is still less. The smaller the hit on your economy as a whole from external oil, the better. The less of it you need to buy, the less sweeping econonic-impact changes have on your country (for example, price fluctuations and availability).
4. Now you're just going for the ad hominem because you're refusing to think outside the box a little.
Let's also consider the possibility of replacing plastics (made from oil) with more aluminium in consumer goods. Things like kitchenware or window frames, or anywhere ABS and UPVC is widespread. It's expensive to extract aluminium, and the bulk of it used in new products is recycled stuff. Access to cheaper electricity lowers the cost of aluminium, since the major cost of extracting it is the energy requirement, so it becomes more viable to use aluminium, especially if your oil source is very expensive.
Again, it's merely a possibility that illustrates knock on effects, and that complex systems are frequently interconnected.
Electricity can be used to power electric cars.
To support a large number of electric cars you need a decent generating capacity and a good network.
If people have electric cars they don't need cars that run on petrol.
Petrol comes from oil.
More electric cars means less oil needed since there are fewer petrol cars.
Less oil needed means less dependence on foreign oil.
Stupid narrow-minded thinker!
Apple didn't want to kill USB in favour of firewire - they wanted both to thrive. USB was designed for low speed, low bandwidth devices like mice, keyboards, printers etc and it excelled at that task. Apple were the first (or one of the first) of the manufacturers to ship computers and peripherals with USB ports so that third party devices could start to appear (someone's got to start!)
Firewire was designed from the outset to be used in high capacity situations - hard drives, video etc, and not for the low speed stuff. There's no need to run your keyboard, bluetooth and mouse on a FW bus - you have USB for that.
Where things got sticky was the extension of USB to become something it was never really designed for so it could compete in speed terms with firewire, and this shows in all the overhead in the USB protocol that hobbles it when used with hard drives and so on - it works well enough, but a firewire connection would have cost less cpu overhead for the same or better transfer rates.
If Apple had killed off USB on their machines then they'd have no way to run the bluetooth, wired keyboards and mice and so on - Firewire is just massively overkill for that, but USB is ideal.
Broken across generations? What do you mean?
I have 3 iPods, an iPhone and a standalone dock. Other than the iPhone not really fitting neatly into the dock (it is too slim and I don't have an adapter), they all interconnect just fine, even with each other's dock connector leads.
The dock connector's electrical pinout has not changed since it was released, and apart from the first gen iPod that has an actual 6 pin firewire port, it is compatible with all iPods and iPhones (possibly not shuffle). It is wired for USB and Firewire at the connector end (different pins for FW data, power and USB data/power), with the appropriate standard plug on the other end. Later iPods and iPhone don't have a FW chip, but this is hardware, not the dock connector - the connector has not changed.
So, other than the removal of the FW chipset from iPods to save costs, how is the dock connector "broken across generations"? (other than the first iPod having a firewire port, it has been standard since then onwards). What has broken?
The sync APIs are publicly documented in OS X - if they remove them then there's no syncing at all.
You're making inferences that Apple will remove a core set of frameworks from OS X with nothing more than "I believe they are evil and will do it". It would be good to see some proof or some precedent that they removed major functionality without replacing it with a better system or provided a very good reason. "breaking sync for third party apps" is not a good reason.
For example, they removed AppleTalk about 10 years after the last AppleTalk printer was sold. Better protocols exist. Tough luck for those who are still using an AppleTalk printer, but seriously, it went out with the Ark - people complained when we switched from gas lighting to electric.
Like change what? The third party apps use the published, documented sync APIs - if they are going to change something, it is documented and may require an update.
If they change something internal that iTunes is based on, then they also need to update the software. These changes do not affect the function of the documented sync APIs that the third party apps are based on. They may break hacks like Palm's spoofing USB vendor ID etc, but the proper apps like Missing Sync work just fine.
Please no Finder on iPhone! My god, you guys on slashdot complain about its shoddy software already. It doesn't need the added burden of the Finder!
(also, Apple, please rewrite Finder - it's a pain in the ass)
Mmmhmm, because OS X is literally byte for byte identical to NextStep.
No sir, no work done on that.
You'll also note that there are a fair few Next employees at Apple at the moment, including the CEO - maybe you've heard of him?
He claims (or rather Gizmodo claimed) that he called Apple's tech support line, which is staffed by people who don't work for Apple directly, and in call centres nowhere near the headquarters. They're not going to know about a prototype, and would either assume it was a prank call, or say they cannot help him, but to call Apple directly.
Apple's PR number is listed on their site right next to the tech support one, and that one actually *is* staffed by Apple employees in the HQ in California.
Either way, his next step should have been handing it to the police and signing an affidavit stating when and where he found the property (California law) if he didn't know who to return it to (and seriously, come on - do you buy the idea that he would believe Apple wouldn't want their prototype back if he had bothered to try to get through to someone actually at Apple HQ, for example, their PR department rather than their tech support). If no one claims it after a certain time, he can then keep it (and sell it on).
He could also have walked around the corner to Apple's HQ and said "hey guys, is this your lost iPhone prototype?"
This PDF http://www.sbs-forum.org/specs/sbc110.pdf from the smart battery system group (which defines the standard for charger battery interaction for things like lithium batteries features a few sections on the way the chargers work, including mentioning that the battery itself can tell the charger when it is full, among many other things it can report, and in the case of some chargers, this control is independent of the battery and requires syncing with the controller.
The data reported by the battery (or assumed by the controller based on past history) is what starts, stops and varies the charge cycles, and each new battery hooked up needs to calibrate. It's not solely for a cosmetic display of power remaining.
It would be good customer service to provide him with options - and if he says "I have an iPhone prototype, how do I return it" then the logical reply would be "I have no idea, but you can contact Apple HQ directly..." rather than giving him no options at all.
No one knows, it is speculation, of course. My issue is, given the details provided by Gizmodo about what they said he did, it;s just not enough effort on his part, knowing what he had in his possession. It smacks of him looking to do the minimum to ensure he can sell it on for a quick buck. Proving that may be more tricky though.
The last point is written down in California law - you have to turn it into the cops and sign an affidavit stating where you found the device.
Well, he claimed to call AppleCare, which means he talked to a non-Apple employee.
Thus, The "person" of Apple's buddy, who he left in charge of the answering machine, didn't tell him.
The guy knew very well that calling Apple direct, that he could very easily have done (and that AppleCare techs would have assuredly told him was the best recourse for his issue), but he chose not to.
Even after that, he has to give it to the police before he has the ability to sell it on.
This is a police issue, not an Apple one. With all the coverage from Giz and the information they have released on how they came by the phone it's a pretty clear case of theft/receiving stolen goods.
Apple hasn't filed any civil case here - this is about the PD going after the theft angle. With all the documented stuff in the articles it should be easy to get a closed case - good for the stats.
Well, the part about this being a criminal issue, and thus the police being the "bad guys" here.
Apple hasn't filed any civil charges relating to this case (yet), although I suspect it might depending on the outcome of the criminal case.
Assuming the "tried to phone Apple" bit is even true, his next step should have been "giving it to the police" - as it very clearly states in the relevant piece of California law. By definition, the phone was stolen when he did not do this before selling it on to a third party.
The law also requires you to make reasonable attempts to return it to the owner - calling tech support (staffed by non-Apple employees) is hardly reasonable when you know Apple's HQ is right around the corner from the bar you "found" the phone in, and their PR number is listed right on their website underneath the AppleCare one (which he allegedly called).
He called AppleCare, and they are not Apple employees - they work for another company on behalf of Apple but are not directly employed by Apple.
Also calling a tech support line (allegedly - it was Gizmodo who said he did - he may not have even done that) instead of Apple's publicly available PR number does not strike me as "reasonable attempts", especially since he could also have walked to Apple's HQ and made an attempt to return it that way, since it was just around the corner. Or he could have mailed it to their HQ, using the address on Apple's website.
"Reasonable attempt" - hardly. Even if that is true - we have no proof he even called the tech support line.
3 and 4 on your list should be "allegedly", and even then, Gizmodo says the guy called AppleCare, which is staffed by people who do not work directly for Apple. He could have called Apple's PR number, that connects directly to the Apple HQ and returned it that way - I guarantee they would have taken it seriously had he done so. Apple's tech support aren;t going to know anything about a prototype, and assuming they didn't think he was pranking they would likely tell him to contact Apple directly - via the PR number on the Apple website.
He did not do that, but instead sold a phone he did not own to a third party after allegedly making a feeble attempt to return it to the owner. Under California law this is theft - someone has posted the relevant section further up the thread. A better move would have been to hand it in to the police if he couldn't get in touch with Apple. It's not like he didn't know exactly what it was he had there - hence selling it for $5000.