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you have to be seriusly mentally deficient not to know all you do on company devices is being monitored and retained, exactly for the purpose of scenarios such as this one, and especially for company being know to be secretive and having a truckload of intelectual propety to protect
 
I don't understand how otherwise really smart people do these apparently dumb things.

I mean you have a good, respected job, you are paid well, this would be the possibly the dumbest way to destroy your career and potentially life.

Sure they might have gotten a better offer in some aspect, but was it worth it? Time will show.
Beyond the other reasons given . . . including possible governmental pressure, hubris, the fact that in general in Chinese society stealing trade secrets is considered a much less serious issue than in parts of the West (similar to how things were in the late 1800s and early 1900s in the US) . . . don't forget the universal and enduring reason. Greed. Simple greed is enough to explain this. The payoff for a successful competitor could be in the billions of dollars over time. Even a small slice of that is still a tremendous amount of money.
 
This is making news because it's Apple, but this kind of stuff literally happens everywhere. It's not even limited to tech or big corps. I have even seen local restaurants suing former employees that stole recipes and opened their own near-identical restaurant.
Recipes aren't patentable, in part because products aren't patentable. Only processes are. E.g. you can't patent scrambled eggs, you can't patent a recipe for a scrambled egg -- but if you were to devise a novel scrambling technique, THAT you could patent.

Patents are critical to how American technology companies have been able to justify spending billions on R&D, and by extension why engineers are so highly paid.

That isn't true of China. China is, in effect, the reverse: gaining knowledge wherever possible through poaching, deceit, reverse engineering or aggressive licensing agreements. China's tech companies still see themselves as catching up, even when they're directly competing.

In both cases it's how the respective countries have achieved the technological advancements they have, and these two philosophies are at odds with each other. That's why this is news.
 
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It is hilarious to watch Apple complain about losing Tech to China when they have trained Chinese workers in tech since 2015 to twice the inflation corrected value of the Marshall Plan for all of Europe. Sorry, you did all of this to yourselves.
There is a big difference between training former farmworkers how to install specific tiny circuitboards with specific tiny screws on an assembly line (which is what that number you're quoting represents), and employing an individual expert to perform cutting edge research in the US under NDA.

China's home-grown tech product economy has a lot more to do with the millions of Chinese students who got their degree from a top school in the US and then couldn't emigrate here.
 
This is making news because it's Apple, but this kind of stuff literally happens everywhere. It's not even limited to tech or big corps. I have even seen local restaurants suing former employees that stole recipes and opened their own near-identical restaurant.
This is a Apple News story site.
 
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What good does suing him do? He's in China, will never return, and China will never pursue him there (he likely got highly rewarded, both at Oppo and within the CCP).

The CCP holds leverage over its citizens by threatening to seriously degrade a person's family's quality of life unless they do something (or stop doing something). He was likely coerced for the sake of his family.

Cultures have different beliefs on intellectual property rights and it's something to consider when hiring people.

Hire American. Hire American. Thats all ill say.

That isn't true of China. China is, in effect, the reverse: gaining knowledge wherever possible through poaching, deceit, reverse engineering or aggressive licensing agreements. China's tech companies still see themselves as catching up, even when they're directly competing.

In both cases it's how the respective countries have achieved the technological advancements they have, and these two philosophies are at odds with each other. That's why this is news.
Casual racism? On my MacRumors comments section?
 
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There is a big difference between training former farmworkers how to install specific tiny circuitboards with specific tiny screws on an assembly line (which is what that number you're quoting represents), and employing an individual expert to perform cutting edge research in the US under NDA.

China's home-grown tech product economy has a lot more to do with the millions of Chinese students who got their degree from a top school in the US and then couldn't emigrate here.
The author of the book 'Apple in China' would disagree. In 2015, Apple increased their investments in China by five fold to avoid being frozen out by the CCP. In the process, they have effectively subsidized the increase in technological skills across the board in China. This long ago moved beyond just simple assembly. It is hard to watch his interview on Unherd and not to come to the same conclusion.

How Tim Cook sold out Apple to China: UnHerd

A few numbers out of that talk is that since 2008 Apple has trained 28 million Chinese in their supply chain and they investing $55 billion/yr from 2015 which is four times Biden's Chips Act.
 
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I don't understand how otherwise really smart people do these apparently dumb things.

I mean you have a good, respected job, you are paid well, this would be the possibly the dumbest way to destroy your career and potentially life.

Sure they might have gotten a better offer in some aspect, but was it worth it? Time will show.
As someone else pointed out. He’s gone back to China. Where nothing will happen to him. He probably was well paid for his efforts.
 
Casual racism? On my MacRumors comments section?
Things really haven't changed since I did undergraduate NSF research at Bucknell in 1981. The Chemistry department had a graduate student from China who was notorious for not being interested in his advisor's research but only would talk about the chemistry of concrete. The CCP had tasked him with finding out everything he could about the US concrete technology.
 
The author of the book 'Apple in China' would disagree. In 2015, Apple increased their investments in China by five fold to avoid being frozen out by the CCP. In the process, they have effectively subsidized the increase in technological skills across the board in China. This long ago moved beyond just simple assembly. It is hard to watch his interview on Unherd and not to come to the same conclusion.

How Tim Cook sold out Apple to China: UnHerd
Yes, I've read the book, and I've reviewed the techniques he used to extract this data. Using his technique it is not possible to differentiate dollars spent training how to put on protective gear from dollars spent on chip fab post-docs -- except that if you divide the dollars spent by 2-5 million manufacturing employees, you don't get a number that looks like a massive amount of post docs (cost: ~100-500k per individual). You get a number that looks like training budgets, maybe with a few thousand post docs included in that mix.

Still trivial compared to the ~$100B Apple has spent on just US non-retail employee salaries over the past decade.

The reason it's hard not to agree with his conclusion is you're not actually executing any critical thinking. You're accepting his premise, numbers and explanation at face value.
 
Yes, I've read the book, and I've reviewed the techniques he used to extract this data. Using his technique it is not possible to differentiate dollars spent training how to put on protective gear from dollars spent on chip fab post-docs -- except that if you divide the dollars spent by 2-5 million manufacturing employees, you don't get a number that looks like a massive amount of post docs (cost: ~100-500k per individual). You get a number that looks like training budgets, maybe with a few thousand post docs included in that mix.

Still trivial compared to the ~$100B Apple has spent on just US non-retail employee salaries over the past decade.

The reason it's hard not to agree with his conclusion is you're not actually executing any critical thinking. You're accepting his premise, numbers and explanation at face value.
An interesting analogy that I ran across the other day was Japan's attempt to reverse engineer a strategic four engine bomber in 1940 from a rejected Douglas DC-4E prototype that they purchased under a shell company. In Japan's case, they didn't have the manufacturing tech to do the aluminum alloy skin, the high pressure hydraulic lines or the high performance radial engines with temperature resistant alloys. It was a disaster. Compare that with China where Apple has effectively subsidized the transfer of manufacturing technology. The window to prevent China from reverse engineering is much narrower now due to that. Apple has basically created the dragon that will eventually consume them. Meanwhile, Apple's idea of innovation has degraded to rounding windows so they can display far less content. They really are regressing back to the HyperCard level of marketable products.
 
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you have to be seriusly mentally deficient not to know all you do on company devices is being monitored and retained, exactly for the purpose of scenarios such as this one, and especially for company being know to be secretive and having a truckload of intelectual propety to protect
And yet this guy got away with it and is banking $$$...
 
Just quit hiring those who present a larger threat than other potential employees. There’s a reason very, very few Canadians and Americans are hired by huawei, Xiaomi, bytedance, etc. Until Apple makes the changes, they can’t complain.
 
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