It's also great self-marketing.

I think they might be suggesting that Scott may have specific exemption from Apple's PR policy (summary: "say nothing to anyone") to be allowed an independent public voice - particularly on a technical/engineering topic. Apple is not, so far as we know, currently developing orbital-class rocketry, but there's genuine potential for product topic overlap in Project Titan vs Tesla and perhaps more besides.

I would not be at all surprised if there's a List Of Things Apple PR Hereby Politely Requests That Scott Doesn't Mention.

When I was at AWS I was similarly forbidden from mentioning anything to do with video games to just about anybody, despite not having anything to do with video games myself, and many other topics besides the obvious (e.g. "don't disclose EC2/S3 capacity numbers"[1], "don't reveal how Glacier works"[2]), and in fact there was a whole programme of PR training and tiered permission to speak at conferences or to the press/analysts that boiled down, mostly, to knowing what you could and couldn't say, and how diplomatically you parried questions on the latter.

Either that or Terry Pratchett's law of rewritten rules applies.

[1] no-one would believe me anyway

[2] it's a massively redundant array of vinyl records

Nope, same guy. Scott Manley has a degree in astrophysics (I think) and worked as an astronomer for a while, then got a job coding at Apple. He's a smart guy