Well, two things. First, this was summary judgment in favor of Apple, not the CTO. Summary judgment was not granted in the case against him, although since it has been 6 years and Hooked is defunct, I’m going to assume that was settled in some way. Regardless, this case was about Hooked’s claims against Apple, not the CTO.
Second, from reading some more of the filings, there appears to be legitimate disputes about whether or what kind of material information the CTO had on his personal laptop. Apple cooperated and did a forensics data retrieval of the CTOs laptop (and spent $92,000 to do so from a vendor and then charged the plaintiff for that, which the appellate court admitted was probably too high but was also out of scope for them to judge) and then the lawyers stopped sifting through that data when it came across some communications that were protected by attorney-client privilege. Apple wouldn’t globally waive privilege in the case, but said it would do it on a document by document basis, but the lawyer’s for Hooked claimed it didn’t want access to anything privileged. The appellate court ruled that there was no proof or argument that had the lower court ruled another way regarding some of the access to those privileged materials (that the plaintiff said it didn’t want anyway), that the decision would have been any different.
That’s pretty different from the Waymo situation, where the evidence suggested that significant effort was taken to backup proprietary data surreptitiously.
The other thing is that as far as I can gather, the laptop of the CTO was always his personal laptop. It didn’t belong to the company and there wasn’t any MDM solution or other provisions to protect/separate his personal data from the business data. Now, obviously this is incredibly common in startups, but it does make the burden or proving that proprietary data was “stolen,” let alone taken and used at Apple, much higher.
Levandowski’s high pay at Google might also change things because there might have been much more explicit provisions in his employment contract. I just don’t know. There’s also the whole thing about how he lied to his lawyers, wouldn’t cooperate, and that Uber fired him.