woodsey said:
I think this could be particularly applicable to the rumors regarding a flash based iPod, because if people become aware of a cheaper iPod, it could realy hurt the more expensive iPod's pre-christmas sales.
Yeah, it's not like there were loads of
news stories about iPod shortages this Christmas season, and experts are estimating they could sell something like 4 million iPods this quarter. No, wait, they are.
Even Apple is only saying that they're worried about competitors getting advanced notice of what to copy, not that the foreknowledge is going to hurt sales of existing products, and I'd tend to believe that.
Though Apple obviously would rather you happily went out and bought a PowerBook now rather than waiting for January, rumored specs of a PowerBook upgrade are not the same as industrial espionage.
I like bignumbers' media center theory, since the other options don't seem to line up with the lawsuit:
The Motorola-Apple iPhone thing has been in the works for a while including public announcement of some sort of partnership, and the only information I've seen has come directly from Apple officials. Besides, there hasn't been anything at all specific making the rumor rounds.
The flash iPod thing also seems suspect, since there have been rumors floating around for months, and aren't exactly easily tracible back to a single source. Info has also come from Toshiba and been published in major news outlets. Unless those interface-less renderings based on "leaked" descriptions few days ago prove to be correct, though even then I'm not sure Apple would bother with that big of a deal about it since it's been talked about so much.
The media thing, though, was low-profile and a big enough leap in product strategy that Apple might well get angry about it leaking, particularly if they've been keeping the research tightly under wraps (compared to a Flash iPod, which is supposed to already be in production and a pretty obvious product expansion into an existing marketspace).
