by Jason Snell
Inside Apple’s anti-leak fight
William Turton of The Outline has, ironically, a leak from inside Apple about Apple’s war on leakers, namely a recording of an Apple employee session about fighting disclosures of future product information. It’s an interesting read, showing how Apple views its supply-chain leaks and the leaks from Cupertino itself. Also, this bit made me laugh:
Later, during the employee Q&A, Rice gleefully recounts a blog post written by longtime Apple watcher John Gruber, in which Gruber criticized Apple scoop machine Mark Gurman, who now works at Bloomberg, for not having juicy details on Apple’s new HomePod speaker before it was released. “Even [Gruber] was like ‘Yeah, you got nothing.’ So he was actually throwing some shade out, which, like, ‘all riiight,'” Rice says, to the laughter of employees.
The story mentions a couple of Apple people being fired, presumably for leaking, and I’ve heard similar stories. I’ve even heard of people being very visibly dismissed, rather than the usual invisible corporate disappearing act, in order to make everyone else understand the penalties for leaking. I’ve also heard, separately, that Apple’s been working hard to clean up some of its digital paths for leakage, including company communication tools that were sending too much information to too many people who didn’t need to know.
I doubt Apple’s going to ever stop the flow of leaked information, but it’s certainly done a much better job lately in reducing it to more of a trickle.