This is regulated differently in the different countries. It is common that the intellectual property you create in the course of your employment automatically belongs to your employer. But of course, it is not your employer's business what you do in your spare time (as long as you do not use infrastructure or intellectual property of your employer for this purpose).
See e.g. http://www.iprhelpdesk.eu/sites/default/files/newsdocuments/...
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Apple is a software company which produces operating systems, programming languages and applications. How are you supposed to prove that you aren’t using knowledge gleaned from Apple in your OSS side hustle? Given the breadth of Apples offerings, how could you possibly have a software project which doesn’t overlap with one of their businesses?
Knowledge by itself is no issue and not subject to copyright. But you have an issue if you use code or libraries (i.e. everything which qualifies as a "work") or patents of which you're not the IP owner. I don't know US law, but here in Europe workers' rights are well protected. Of course, if you do work in competition with your employer in your free time, this can be a problem. But the courts will only agree with the employer if there is significant damage or risk of damage.
I’m guessing things aren’t quite so clear cut as you think they are. Trivially, Apple has an engineering presence in various European countries, it wouldn’t make sense to have this clause in their employment contract if it wasn’t applicable everywhere.
> Trivially, Apple has an engineering presence in various European countries, it wouldn’t make sense to have this clause in their employment contract if it wasn’t applicable everywhere
Usually, multinational employers have a seperate standard employment contract for each country they operate in, written with input from local lawyers. So I wouldn’t assume the IP provisions in Apple’s employment contracts are exactly the same in every country, although they would all be attempting to implement Apple’s global policies to the extent that each country’s legal system allows it.
(I have never seen an Apple employment contract, so this is informed speculation.)
As I said, I don't know US law. But I studied Swiss law which is quite similar to the law of other European countries. Even though Apple is a large company and sometimes behaves as if they are above the law, their subsidiaries are still subject to the laws of their respective countries. The clauses in their contracts that violate applicable national law are invalid.
Would such a clause be legally permitted in Switzerland?
You can write in a contract whatever you want; it's permitted to sign invalid contracts; but it's the court which decides on the nature of the contract and interprets the will of the parties; the court will disable illegal clauses and replace them by default law.
Practically, you can’t. Not only is the breadth of the things they work on staggering, there’s a number of secret projects that you might be falling afoul of as well.