The past week has been very busy inside of Apple. VPs leaving Apple to take care of family, Jobs gets a new advisor, and Apple appoints Mark Papermaster, former VP of blade server development at IBM. Papermaster will take over Tony Fadell’s job as head otheir iPod/iPhone division. Another leg of this story, is back in April, Apple purchased Semi PA, a chip designing company for an outright $278 million in cash. 

The Papermaster story
Bill Papermaster, part of IBM’s elite Integration & Values team, signed a noncompete contract that forbids him from joining a rival tech vendor within a year of ceasing employment at IBM. Papermaster quit IBM on the 21st of October, and even though they offered him a full year’s salary for refraining from joining Apple, he plans on starting in November. This cause IBM to file a lawsuit against him. And in that lawsuit, lie a few clues that Apple is indeed planning on making their own chips for the iPhone.

Is Apple going to make their own chips?
“Apple lured Papermaster from IBM because the company intends to design microprocessors for incorporation in a variety of electronic devices, including handheld devices,” IBM stated in its legal complaint, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. 

Why would Apple want their own chips?
Apple is doing fairly well with their current chip design, which is currently sourced from rival Samsung.. Selling 6.9 million iPhones in the last quarter, they’ve already outsold RIM. But, technology is always evolving, and the iPhone needs to keep up ahead of the competition not only in software, but also hardware.

Making their own chips would allow them to customise the current ARM chips (the designs of which can be licensed) to better integrate it with the iPhone/iPod platform. It would allow the iPhone to have a separate chip design from the rest of the handheld makers. Or, this may just be a necessity of control-freak Steve Jobs, who doesn’t like to play together with all the kids in the pen.

Here are a bunch of articles on this issue should you want to dig in further.

• Marketwatch: Is Apple getting into the chip business?
• InformationWeek: Apple, IBM Dispute Reveals New iPhone Chips 
• Forbes: Why Apple Could Make iPhone Chips
• Seeking Alpha: Is Apple Set to Make Its Own ARM Chips for the iPhone?

Apple announced that it is publicly opposing the Proposition 8 campaign, and making a contributing of $100,000 to the “No on 8” campaign. 

Proposition 8 is an initiative measure on the 2008 California General Election ballot titled Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry. If passed, the proposition would “change the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.” A new section would be added stating “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” - Wikipedia.

The official statement from Apple, as posted on Apple Hot News. 

Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8. - Apple.

Google has also posted a note on The Google Blog, also opposing the Prop 8. 

We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love. - Sergey Brin.

Personally, I applaud Apple and Google, two of the biggest tech companies, for having such an open-minded view on the issue. In the mean time, here’s one of Apple’s best commercials ever, that might provide an insight into Apple’s philosophy.

(The Think Different Campaign, 1997)

Looks like we’re not done with the whole Psystar hackint0sh business. Here’s some very brief history to jog your memory:

Back in April, a very ambitious little company, Psystar, promised a cheap headless Mac tower called OpenMac, quickly followed by a more powerful Mac Pro competitor, OpenPro. Apple didn’t respond and Psystar was shipping these cheap PCs with Leopard preloaded on them. Then in July, Apple got their act together and filed a lawsuit against Psystar and the whole thing then went into motion. Psystar, however, continued to ship the Mac clones and provide updates to its customers (yes, they exist—I was as surprised as you are), including the 10.5.4 update to Mac OS X. 

Now, in a surprising turn of events, Psystar has filed a countersuit against Apple, claiming that the EULA itself is in violation of antitrust laws. The suit claims that Apple inflates the prices for its hardware and the end user license agreement unfairly prevents other companies from competing with alternative systems. 

The law firm representing Psystar, Carr and Ferrel, LLP, had successfully sued Apple in 2006 for patent infringement, which lead to a $10 million out of court settlement. If they keep up to their game and win this one, it would lead a deathly blow to Apple—and a much more severe one than Psystar could ever have done individually. A lot of established companies have eyed the Mac market but have stayed away due to legal reasons. Losing this case would throw the doors wide open.

After a pro-Tibet album was hosted on iTunes, the Chinese government decided to block access to the entire iTunes store. 

Customers in China of Apple Inc.’s iTunes online music store were unable to download songs this week, and an activist group said Beijing was trying to block access to a new Tibet-themed album. - Reuters

Then word was out that Apple was on the move, investigating the block on the store. 

“We’ve noticed the problem. It’s true that users may fail to log in to iTunes store right now,” said the Beijing-based Apple spokeswoman. “We are still investigating.” 

Now reports are coming in that the problem has been rectified and the iTunes store is accessible in several places across China. A slight change, however, is that the album has been moved from the prominent “New Releases” list to somewhere deep within the bowels of the store. 

A point to note is that China, like India, doesn’t have an iTunes music store, and users have to log into the stores of one of the 22 countries where it is available. 

[Via Music Blog 2.0]

Who knew that all that was needed to sell Mac OS X on a PC was the installation disc? For the past several months, Psystar has been shipping the Open Computer and Open Pro and yet, Apple has not even made a statement about this. With the introduction of the OpenServ 1100 and OpenServ 2400, they’re now confidently building upon the foundation they so tentatively laid out for themselves. Both of the above are cheap server solutions which can not only run Windows and Linux servers but also, and most importantly, Leopard Server.

They have already provided the 10.5.3 update to their users (although it requires a lot of caution and effort to complete the update) and are merrily running their business as if Apple’s EULA doesn’t even exist. And let’s not forget the EFiX USB dongle that is supposed to allow any PC to install Leopard using the original Leopard disc.

So what does this mean for Mac OS X? I suppose if this goes on for some more time, Dell and HP might jump into the fray, providing Leopard as an optional install on their machines as well. Dell has already expressed its views on wanting to license Mac OS X. Could it be that Apple is happy about selling a few extra copies of Leopard while not having to provide any support? Or is this just going to create more switchers?

We have yet to see any conclusive results of this “experiment” but one this is for sure—Mac OS X is less than half as spectacular on a PC as on a real Mac. Let’s just hope that is the way it stays.