Week-in-Review: Apple Addicts Get Their Fix

Apple drama hit a crescendo this week, highlighted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs bashing Adobe Flash, followed by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen’s rebuttal. And then there was the outing of the guy who lifted and sold an iPhone prototype to Gizmodo.

For more on these tales, read on:

Can’t get enough Apple news? Do you hang on every Apple rumor? Maybe you’re an Apple addict. Here are eight signs you might have an unhealthy attachment to everything Apple.

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Jobs claims Flash’s technical shortcomings weigh down iPhone performance. But the central argument is an old tech battleground: open vs. proprietary.

Apple says Flash is proprietary technology and that the mobile world would be better served by HTML 5, an open standard. Adobe counters that Flash is a multi-platform de facto standard and that Apple is being proprietary by not allowing Flash on the iPad and iPhone. Who’s right?

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An Apple engineer loses an iPhone prototype at a bar. Some guy finds it. What should he do?

A. Turn it in to the bartender (or at least give the bartender his contact information).

B. Find the true owner from information on the iPhone, and then try to return it to him.

C. Go to an Apple Store and turn it in.

D. Shop it around to media outlets, scoring $5,000 from Gizmodo by selling lost/stolen property.

After picking D, the guy now needs a lawyer. Gizmodo has landed in the legal spotlight, too, its editor’s home searched and computers seized by local law enforcement. Gizmodo hopes to hide behind journalist shield laws despite the fact it traded in stolen/lost property.

Will Gizmodo do the perp walk?

Tom Kaneshige is a senior writer for CIO.com in Silicon Valley. Send him an email at tkaneshige@cio.com. Or follow him on Twitter @kaneshige. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline.