At the start of 2001, Apple was (still) in terrible financial shape. Revenue had cratered to the lowest level since the late 1980s. For years they had been selling off assets—such as ARM Holdings—just so they could continue to tread water.
In February, my coworkers and I gathered in a …
I always joked that I didn’t work with Steve; I worked near him. This anecdote falls into that category. In the early days of Mac OS X (now macOS), Mail was prominently featured in keynote addresses because it was a good showcase of the new operating system. The week before …
When I worked on the Mail team, everyone in Software Engineering was “compelled” to use Mail as a way to help work out bugs in the early days of Mac OS X (now macOS). Some of the higher-ups in other organizations also were also using it.
Part of …
The typical timeline of interviews at Apple was: (1) a candidate was interviewed by one or two employees at a time, and (2) feedback was discussed afterwards in a conference room or sent to manager and/or recruiter via email. Each approach has its own benefits and drawbacks.
In …
Interviewing people at Apple was something I always enjoyed. It was a way to have a small, but important part of building the company.
I had a number of interview topics I liked to deploy. One of the most important to me was learning what software projects the candidate had …
I interviewed over 200 people at Apple. I pretty much had a stock set of interview questions that I rotated around. Since I’m gone now, I can tell you what they were. Most commonly, people gave very technical interviews, so I tried to focus more on who the person was …
I’m one of the few people that don’t believe in the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. While I believe there is some magic involved, there are three factors at play:
In a normal company, milestones have dates assigned to them and ship dates are public knowledge, at least internally.
Not so at Apple. We can guess the ship date based on when our planned completion date is. But this is software. It’s perennially late, so you just never know.
One …
One day, around 2005, I got a phone call from a friend and colleague, excitedly telling me: “Come to my office! You’ll never believe what I’m doing!”
His office was dark and the shades drawn. I knocked and he opened the door slowly, motioning me in. He was the type …
iOS 14 has a new feature called App Library and it looks like this:
You might be wondering whether this feature is for you. I’m here to help you figure out if you’re in the target market. If you answer yes to any of these, this feature might be for …