sorry about this bombardment of questions, but i'm working on a project under serious crunch time and i've just gotten so much help from the replies to my earlier post that i had to try my luck again.
1. Does Apple still require any financial aid for R&D or things like that? Who do they get their aid from if so? Are they currently in any talks for special so-called deals with financial firms?
2. 'Product safety/truth in advertisement'. How has Apple done in that respect so far? Have they ever run into any trouble with the law, unintentionally or otherwise? Or is their track record a perfectly clean slate?
4. Have Apple ever been in a confrontation with consumer organizations/environmental groups/mental groups/minority groups?
5. How does Apple keep the morale of its workers boosted? Company newsletters? Bonuses?
any help would be greatly appreciated. once again, thank you so much, in advance.
all i can say is thank you. again and again and again. thank you so much.
Well, both of these were civil suits, not criminal matters, and both were settled out of court to the best of my knowledge. But Apple has been sued by customer groups twice that I know of - once for some of the internal hardware of the beige series G3s (PowerMac G3 Desktop, Tower and All-In-One) not working under OS X, despite promising full support for those machines, and once for allegedly poor iPod battery longevity.
They were also ordered by the courts in a European country, England I believe, to stop claiming that one of their machines was the fastest computer in the world. I forget which machine, perhaps the first G5 tower?
There's also the long-running legal battle over their name between them and Apple, the Beatle's record label. This has also been settled recently. Before that there were some restrictions on Apple (the computer company) doing things involving music. Obviously they needed to sort that one out
Totally unrelated to products, and I believe still before the courts, is a recent employee discimination case. You should be able to find that on theregister.co.uk.
Sorry about the vagueness of some of the details, but it should be enough to get you started on tracking down the facts.
That's about as "clean" a slate as a large, 30 year old company could wish for.