Apple is an extremely successful company, and one of the things that makes it iconic is its ability to introduce highly unusual and valuable products. They would be quite stupid not to have high security at the very least.
These rules may not be completely reasonable, and they may not be how I'd run a company. However, they are absolutely simple to obey. It is like speeding: it is extremely easy to not get tickets, you just have to follow the rules. You can't whine about getting a ticket, because it's not like there wasn't a perfectly good way to avoid it. Same with Apple employees caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
Woz: "I myself never prod Apple friends into saying things about unreleased Apple products. I'm not in the group where early knowledge equates to value. I don't play the rumor mill game. So I had little interest in seeing this iPad beyond a couple of minutes.
In my opinion, Apple was not hurt by my being shown this iPad. And if the employee who showed it to me believed that he could show it after April 3, then that's another factor.
I did describe this to Steve Jobs the night of the iPad introduction and he said "so it's no big deal." We talked about family things after that for a short while. But that engineer did get fired."
Break rules, suffer consequences. Consistent enforcement of rules emphasizes how seriously they should be taken, even if the rule itself is unkind for these sorts of edge cases.
These rules may not be completely reasonable, and they may not be how I'd run a company. However, they are absolutely simple to obey. It is like speeding: it is extremely easy to not get tickets, you just have to follow the rules. You can't whine about getting a ticket, because it's not like there wasn't a perfectly good way to avoid it. Same with Apple employees caught with their hands in the cookie jar.