Hacker News Reader

It's a trade secret until Apple announces it. Obviously business plans become public eventually, the secret portion is before it becomes public.

Because in hardware IP travels with the machine. Opening one, potentially reverse-engineering it, or even just looking at it revealed quite a bit of information (for exemple the famous forward-facing camera, that we were waiting for on the 3GS last year), which were trade secrets of Apple until they were publicly revealed by Gizmodo. That's clearly against the law.

I kind of agree. The trade secrets would be, (maybe) the design (which was leaked by Engadget a day earlier), and the added features (a front facing camera??).

Maybe the California DA didn't know the next iPhone had a front-facing camera, but anyone who would have read the Gizmodo story probably did.

Plus, Gruber told us: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/29/wsj