Apple's Double Standards

The Woz wants to knows, "What am I missing here?"

The co-founder of Apple is talking about the iPhone engineer that got reprimanded for losing the iPhone prototype, and the iPad enginieer who was fired for showing Woz an iPad minutes after the product launched.

Here is how it played out.

By now, we all know 27-year-old Gray Powell, the iPhone enginner who took the prototype with him to a local bar as he celebrated his birthday.  He left it on a bar stool.  The phone was found and exposed on Gizmodo.com.

Powell was not fired. Instead, he was reprimanded.

Now, case No. 2.  Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, in an email to Gizmodo.com, talked about the iPad engineer who took the iPad out of a secured area at midnight, the morning of the launch.

Wozniak said the engineer showed the iPad to him. Wozniak played with it for a couple of minutes and handed it back.

The engineer thought he had permission to show the iPad after the midnight mark.  Apparently, the enginner was not suppose to show the 3G version.  Apple human resources fired the engineer.

Wozniak, in the email, wrote: "I'm sure that Apple HR told the engineer that it was because everyone in that same situation gets fired. Does that jive with this iPhone situation? What am I missing here? Product secrecy is good for Apple and should be strictly enforced, but maybe 10 percent of niceness and 90 percent of strictness is OK, too."

Wozniak apparently thinks the iPad enginner got the raw end of the deal.

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