It seems to me that he's fine with what Apple's doing, he just objects to "bad cop, bad cop" as a court strategy lest a judge interpret that as intentionally anti-competitive.

His writing has never been objective. I’m not sure we should assume it is now.

Seriously!

I still remember his early fanboy/apologist days and whenever I read him writing (actually "link quoting" because, well, that's what he does) anything even seemingly or notionally "against" Apple, my first suspicion is whether he has seen a drop in his readership and is just working to pull some page views from the other side? There was another one in those days - someone probably working at TechCrunch (I am forgetting his name) among many; Sig.. someone.