Charge: Ex-Apple employee Stahl supposedly vision-pro operating secrets

An earlier Apple design engineer is said to have stolen operational secrets around the vision per to a significant extent. Apple is currently in court against the former employee in high position, reports the local news page siliconvalley.com. According to the report, the man is said to have quickly invited files in his private cloud memory a few days before the change to a competitor in the Valley.

The man is said to have worked at Apple for seven years and, according to the indictment, was last involved in the development of the Vision Pro as a senior product design engineer. According to the statements of the Apple lawyers, he terminated and stated that he wanted to spend more time with his family. However, he kept secret from his employer that he had already accepted a job at SNAP. Since SNAP publishes a product with the Spectacles that is technically located in a similar genre like the Vision Pro, this would have been reportable to Apple from the perspective. However, SNAP is not considered a defendant and is said to have played no role in the theft, according to the report of the report.

Copied thousands of documents

Three days before he left, the design engineer downloaded thousands of Apple documents with company secrets and transferred them to his personal cloud memory. These documents contained information on product development, quality control, costs and supply chains strategies. He then deleted files on his company notebook to blur traces, Apple accuses the former employee. The company requires the return of the stolen data, access to the electronic devices of the accused and compensation in an unknown amount.

For Apple, it is not the first time that the iPhone manufacturer has to deal with former employees who allegedly or actually want to make capital from the secrets of their previous employer. In 2024, a former engineer was sentenced to a four-month prison sentence who wanted to smuggle business secrets from the company before the change to a Chinese start-up. A former software developer was charged a year earlier – but he was able to settle in China. An arrest warrant cannot be enforced because China has no corresponding delivery agreement with the USA.

Although Apple’s internal safety precautions are strict and led to convicts in these and other cases, company secrets are repeatedly theft. From the perspective of Apple’s perspective, the chattering of secrets towards leakers and reporters also remains an ongoing annoyance.