Former Employee Says Apple Wants to “Suffocate” Innovation

A former Apple employee is accusing the company of trying to “suffocate” innovation, according to a new report, all as part of a lawsuit that started back in 2019.

Gerard Williams III left Apple in February 2019 to found his own company called Nuvia and specifically supposed to develop a chip to power cloud servers which he says Steve Jobs himself rejected a long time ago.

Apple, however, sued Williams in mid-2019, accusing him of “using company resources to create an idea for Nuvia in violation of a contract,” as per a report from Bloomberg, and now the former employees tries to fight back with a series of claims of his own.

Williams says what the Cupertino-based tech giant is trying to do is “suffocate the creation of new technologies and solutions by a new business, and to diminish the freedom of entrepreneurs to seek out more fulfilling work,” according to the report citing from a recent filing.

“Violations of the most basic duties”

Furthermore, the former Apple employee says the tech giant is trying anything that’s possible to block his idea. Williams says that his conversations with Apple employees were monitored, and the company even tried to block company workers from talking to him.

Apple originally accused Williams of creating a competitive company after previously being exposed to very sensitive and proprietary technology.

“This case involves a worst-case scenario for an innovative company like Apple: a trusted senior director with years of experience, and years of access to Apple’s most valuable information, secretly starts a competing company leveraging the very technology the director was working on, and the same teams he was working with, while still employed by Apple. These are violations of the most basic duties owed by an employee, and in extreme cases like this one, Apple must take action to protect its business,” Apple said in the filing.

The court has already dismissed Apple’s claim for punitive damages, as the judge says the company failed to demonstrate how Williams attempted to harm the company by founding his own company.