Unlike Siegler, I think the large number of recent Apple employees now working at Palm on the Pre suggests that the relationship between the two companies is cold — ice cold. What I heard last month at Macworld Expo is that Palm has a standing offer for engineers at Apple to jump ship, with a starting salary of 1.5 times their current Apple salary. More obviously, Palm’s core business — selling handheld computing hardware — is directly competitive to one of Apple’s core businesses.

Daring Fireball: Apple, Google, and Palm