By SAMUEL LOPEZ
USA HERALD (August 23, 2025)
The Smoking Gun in Silicon Valley
SAN JOSE, CA – In the cutthroat world of wearable technology, Apple just fired its biggest legal salvo yet against Chinese competition—and the ammunition is explosive. Court documents filed this week in Northern California federal court reveal what Apple claims is a methodical corporate espionage operation, complete with midnight file downloads, encrypted messages in Mandarin, and a former Apple Watch engineer who allegedly sold out his employer’s crown jewels.
The target: Dr. Chen Shi, a highly compensated Sensor System Architect who spent five and a half years inside Apple’s most sensitive Apple Watch development programs. The prize: trade secrets worth potentially billions, covering everything from unreleased health sensors to internal product roadmaps that could give competitors a massive head start.
But this isn’t just another disgruntled employee case. According to Apple’s 30-page federal complaint, this was a premeditated heist orchestrated at the highest levels of Guangdong OPPO Mobile Telecommunications Corp. and its U.S. subsidiary InnoPeak Technology—companies that have built their smartwatch business by, in Apple’s words, creating products that look “exactly like an Apple Watch.”
