I will not claim to know the details of this particular story. But I do want to point out that, when I joined Apple, stock options were part of their bonuses. We were told whether or not we would get stock options, and when, during our annual one-one meetings with our managers. These meetings were held across the company over a period of a few weeks. We were told that the price of the option would be the minimum price over some period of days up to the time the board approved the employee options for everyone who was given them. So if employee a was told their award at the beginning of the month, and employee b told three weeks later, they would be given the option at the same price. This applied in my case, and seemed completely fair to me. I was a lowly engineer with no special value to the US economy, the shareholders etc. It was a sensible and rational way to award stock options. Apple switched to a new scheme, probably to avoid the appearance of something untoward, namely RSU: actual stock awards rather than options, but with restrictions on when we got them.

Backdated stock options is just not comparable to insider trading.